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S14

NASA · 39 awards from 2022 to 2025 · 19 distinct firms

Awards in this topic include: “GLOBAL FORECASTING OF EARTH’S ELECTRON RADIATION BELTS WITH DATA ASSIMILATION” · “Low-Energy Charged-Particle Detection via an Avalanche Silicon Detector coupled to an Amor” · “Sodium Excitation Laser for Mesospheric Analysis”

What awards in this topic are actually worth

Median Phase I award $149,997

Middle half of awards fell between $149,936 and $156,347 (28 Phase I awards).

Median Phase II award $849,991

Middle half fell between $849,699 and $899,774 (11 Phase II awards).

Award values are as reported by the agency to sbir.gov. For contract awards that is the value of the award, which for multi-year instruments covers several years rather than a single year's funding.

Who wins here

Distinct firms that have won 19

Across 39 awards.

Share held by the top 3 firms 38.5%

The single biggest winner, ATMOSPHERIC & SPACE TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH ASSOCIATES LLC, holds 17.9% (7 of 39).

First-time winners at NASA 7

of 19 firms had no prior NASA award before winning here (12 were returning winners). This is the closest honest answer to “can a newcomer win in this topic”.

Phase I → Phase II conversion (inferred)

39.3% of the 28 Phase I awards in this topic have a Phase II we could link to them (11 of 28).

This is our estimate, not an official figure. No agency publishes an award ID linking a Phase II back to its Phase I, so we match on firm, agency and topic code. It is also not your odds of winning — it is the share of Phase I winners who went on to a Phase II. How this is computed, and what it can't tell you.

Most awards in this topic

FirmAwardsShare
ATMOSPHERIC & SPACE TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH ASSOCIATES LLC7 17.9%
SPACE ENVIRONMENT TECHNOLOGIES, LLC5 12.8%
PREDICTIVE SCIENCE INCORPORATED3 7.7%
VIRGINIA DIODES, INC.3 7.7%
FIFTH GAIT TECHNOLOGIES, INC.3 7.7%

Firms are counted by federal UEI where available. sbir.gov has backfilled UEIs to 99.5% coverage for 2025 awards; a company that re-registered may appear more than once in older years, which would understate concentration slightly.

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Sources and caveats (the honest part)

Sourced vs computed: Phase I/II selection rates (applications → awards) come from the SBA's SBIR/STTR Annual Report — FY2022 is the latest published edition, and SBA itself calls the rates estimates because proposal cohorts span fiscal years. Phase I→II conversion and first-timer shares are computed by us from sbir.gov's public award records. Linked by firm + agency + topic code where topic codes carry (suffix-tolerant for DOE's phase renumbering), with a title-similarity fallback elsewhere. 70% of links match on topic, 30% on title; each pair's match_tier is in the downloadable CSV, so you can recompute under stricter rules. Firms are identified by federal UEI where available (99.5% of 2025 awards, down to 54% for 2001), with a normalized-name fallback for older records.

Fast-track and Direct-to-Phase-II: no agency publishes a fast-track flag, so we derive it — HHS/NIH: a Phase I record carrying a Phase II activity code (R44/R42/U44) plus its linked Phase II; NSF: the 2024 Fast-Track pilot solicitation (NSF 24-582). Where fast-track exists, conversion is shown both organic (fast-tracks excluded) and all-inclusive, because a fast-track Phase II was committed at award time, not competed. DoD's Direct-to-Phase-II share is different in kind: there is no marker at all, so our number is an inference (Phase IIs with no same-firm DoD Phase I in the prior 3 years), always labeled an estimate and kept visually separate from measured stats.

What nobody publishes: per-topic application counts are published by no one — not the agencies, and not the $500–$42,000-a-year intelligence platforms either; the data simply isn't public. Any per-topic number on this site is award-side only (who won, how often winners repeat), never your odds of selection.

Sources: sbir.gov award data · SBA FY22 Annual Report. Free to use; verify anything critical against the originals.