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S2.04
NASA · 55 awards from 2004 to 2017 · 29 distinct firms
Awards in this topic include: “Freeform Optics for Optical Payloads with Reduced Size and Weight” · “Pre-Collimator Chemical Milling for X-ray Telescopes” · “Battery-Powered Process for Coating Telescope Mirrors in Space”
What awards in this topic are actually worth
Middle half of awards fell between $98,796 and $124,930 (40 Phase I awards).
Middle half fell between $598,276 and $746,339 (15 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
Across 55 awards.
The single biggest winner, OPTIMAX SYSTEMS, INC., holds 7.3% (4 of 55).
of 29 firms had no prior NASA award before winning here (18 were returning winners). This is the closest honest answer to “can a newcomer win in this topic”.
Phase I → Phase II conversion (inferred)
42.5% of the 40 Phase I awards in this topic have a Phase II we could link to them (17 of 40).
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
| Firm | Awards | Share |
|---|---|---|
| OPTIMAX SYSTEMS, INC. | 4 | 7.3% |
| Dallas Optical Systems Inc | 4 | 7.3% |
| APRE INSTRUMENTS INC | 3 | 5.5% |
| OPTIPRO SYSTEMS, LLC | 3 | 5.5% |
| TREX ENTERPRISES CORPORATION | 3 | 5.5% |
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.
Quarterly-ish, and only when something's actually new — a new SBA report year, a new stat, a dataset update. The weekly refresh alone never triggers an email. No account, one-click unsubscribe, and every number on this page stays free and open either way.
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.