Three solicitations from the NASA Office of Chief Technologist

NASA released three solicitations on March 1, 2011, in support of programs in the NASA Office of Chief Technologist (OCT).

These three solicitations were announced through the Office of Chief Technologist mail list in NSPIRES. You are receiving this announcement because you are subscribed to the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) mail list in NSPIRES. If you would like to receive future announcements for Office of Chief Technologist solicitations, you must sign up for the Office of Chief Technologist mail list through NSPIRES. To do this, login to your NSPIRES account, click on Account Management, then click the Email Subscriptions link.

These three solicitations are:

Unique and Innovative Space Technology Broad Agency Announcement. The Game Changing Technology Division, within NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist is soliciting executive summaries, white papers, and proposals for research and development for technology that is innovative and unique and promises to enable revolutionary (game-changing) improvements to the efficiency and effectiveness of our countrys space capability. Novel (unique) capabilities are sought in any of the NASA Space Technology Grand Challenges or the NASA draft Space Technology Roadmaps. Responses may be submitted at any time while this solicitation is open. Responses will be reviewed and award decisions made throughout the year. As detailed in the BAA solicitation, the last dates for acceptance of each type of submission are as follows: Executive Summary Due Date is October 1, 2011; White Paper Due Date is November 1, 2011; Proposal due Date is January 3, 2012.

NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts NASA Research Announcement. This announcement solicits multiple studies, each of which will investigate an architecture, mission, or system concept that has the potential to change the possible in aeronautics or space. NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is part of the Office of Chief Technologist. Concepts proposed for NIAC Phase I studies must be innovative and visionary, technically substantiated, and very early in development (10+ years out; Technology Readiness Level 1, 2, or early 3). Focused technology maturation and incremental improvement are explicitly not of interest in this program. Finally, while NIAC encourages great leaps and accepts the accompanying risk, all proposals must be technically credible, based on sound scientific principles. Notices of intent (NOIs) are strongly encouraged and are to be submitted by March 29, 2011. Final proposals are due on or before May 2, 2011.

Technology Demonstration Missions Program Broad Agency Announcement. This announcement solicits proposals for the demonstration of space technologies that provide new system-level technological capabilities. The Office of Chief Technologist’s Technology Demonstration Missions Program is seeking to identify candidate crosscutting, system-level technologies to be demonstrated in the relevant environment such as ground, air, suborbital, or orbital regimes. A key requirement in this program is that the technology under consideration must clearly be crosscutting. Crosscutting is defined as a technology with potential to benefit more than one customer, where a customer can be a NASA Mission Directorate, another government agency, academia, or the aerospace industry. Proposals will be due on or before May 31, 2011.

These solicitations may be found by opening the NASA Research Opportunities homepage at http://nspires.nasaprs.com/ and then linking through the menu listings “Solicitations” to “Open Solicitations.”