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Z2

NASA · 85 awards from 2018 to 2025 · 39 distinct firms

Awards in this topic include: “Self-Healing Radiator Coolant Tubes for Spacecraft Thermal Control” · “Prototyping a Resilient, Versatile, and Future-Proof Spaceflight Coprocessor Platform” · “Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit Spacesuit Heads-Up Display”

What awards in this topic are actually worth

Median Phase I award $124,999

Middle half of awards fell between $124,952 and $149,964 (58 Phase I awards).

Median Phase II award $799,800

Middle half fell between $749,944 and $898,497 (27 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 39

Across 85 awards.

Share held by the top 3 firms 27.1%

The single biggest winner, ADVANCED COOLING TECHNOLOGIES INC, holds 12.9% (11 of 85).

First-time winners at NASA 14

of 39 firms had no prior NASA award before winning here (25 were returning winners). This is the closest honest answer to “can a newcomer win in this topic”.

Phase I → Phase II conversion (inferred)

43.1% of the 58 Phase I awards in this topic have a Phase II we could link to them (25 of 58).

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
ADVANCED COOLING TECHNOLOGIES INC11 12.9%
CREARE LLC6 7.1%
LEWIZ COMMUNICATIONS, INC.6 7.1%
THERMAVANT TECHNOLOGIES LLC5 5.9%
RESILIENT COMPUTING, LLC5 5.9%

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.