NASA SBIR 02-1 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
mobileFOUNDATIONS, Inc.
103 W. Broad Street, Suite 600
Falls Church , VA   22046 - 4237
(703 ) 532 - 9615

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Neil Baitinger
mick@mobilefoundations.com
103 W. Broad Street, Suite 600
Falls Church , VA   22046 - 4237
(703 ) 532 - 9615

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (LIMIT 200 WORDS)
Mission operations for the International Space Station are based on the traditional concept of a primary fixed facility where most of the mission operations tasks are performed, supported by backroom staff of hundreds of engineers. This approach is resource intensive and expensive. The goal of this SBIR is to develop and deploy the technologies necessary to enable on-demand mission operations support. Our approach involves two key components: 1) creating advanced automation that will autonomously monitor the ground system for critical events and wirelessly alert on-call personnel when necessary and 2) developing and integrating the software and hardware to provide wireless access to necessary data, tools, and people (i.e., through videoconferencing) to immediately start resolving the event. Since automation must not significantly increase the risk of operations in Human Exploration and Development of Space (HEDS), our approach will minimize risk and ensure reliability by: 1) building our new technologies on top of state-of-the-art proven technologies and 2) leveraging our extensive knowledge of mission operations, advanced automation, and wireless communications. Thus, our innovative approach to operations will help NASA meet the objectives in the NASA Strategic Plan 2000 of reducing the costs of HEDS through operations automation and consolidation.

POTENTIAL COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (LIMIT 150 WORDS)
We anticipate building new commercial applications on top of the new technologies, as well as incorporating them into our commercial IncidentPortal? product. One field that will receive the greatest benefit from this SBIR?s technologies is public safety/homeland defense. IncidentPortal provides incident management and wireless interoperability for the first responder community (i.e., police, fire). IncidentPortal has already been used for several major counter-terrorism exercises post 9-11. Public safety shares many of the needs addressed in the SBIR. By incorporating the new capabilities, we project capturing a 25% market share by 2005. We have already incorporated technologies from our Air Force SBIR into IncidentPortal, generating significant recognition for our AF sponsor. Other applications include network monitoring and the remote monitoring of assets or infrastructure. For example, our system could be used by the oil industry for monitoring thousands of miles pipelines and improving the response to anomalous conditions in the lines.

POTENTIAL NASA APPLICATIONS (LIMIT 150 WORDS)
The culmination of this research will result in an advanced wireless solution to enable the distribution and sharing of information over wireless devices. The resultant technology will be of tremendous value to all of the space operations communities: Federal (civilian and military) and commercial. Upon completion of the SBIR process, mFI plans to incorporate any new technologies into our commercial space offerings. The monitoring and alerting technologies that will be developed for ISS operations can also be applied to monitoring other NASA assets via telemetry streams, such as its networks and facilities. For example, the system that we are developing could easily be applied to monitoring intrusion detection systems, firewalls, etc. in order to protect NASA?s networks. Likewise, this system could be interfaced in the fire and HVAC systems at NASA centers in order to improve the response times of maintenance and first responders.