Northwest Aerospace News February | March 2019 Issue No. 7 | Page 13

About NASA contractors
While Tethers Unlimited is a direct (Tier 1)
NASA contractor, they are not in the top 20
NASA contractors (per Statista 2017), but
they contract with other Tier 1 NASA con-
tractors such as Boeing (two billion, 2017).
The top five largest NASA contractors are
California Institute of Technology, The
Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin, Alliant
Techsystems, Inc., and Space Exploration
Technologies, Corp. (SpaceX).
Machines on the space station
For anyone who is a space nut and perhaps
watched National Geographic’s “Year in
Space” in 2016, you would have seen how
much equipment is on the space station.
With all the equipment it seems like a lot of
work for astronauts to train and maintain.
Porter responded to this question, by shar-
ing more about astronaut training and usage
of their product.
HYDROS-C
The HYDROS Propulsion System will initially be
available in two standard configurations: a 2U
HYDROS-C module intended for CubeSats and
NanoSats, and a HYDROS-M module intended for
50-180 kg microsatellites. TUI can also develop
customized tank configurations of these modules
for your spacecraft for a reasonable NRE cost.
“We are doing the direct commanding and
monitoring at Tethers (headquarters) —
commanding the payload, telling it what
do, and ensuring it is running properly,” she
said.
She added, “Once the samples are returned
to earth, NASA will do the material testing
to demonstrate the performance.”
Regarding astronaut training on machines
like the Refabricator, Hoyt noted that when
they went to training at Marshall Space
Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, they
interacted with astronauts and discussed
safety and use of the equipment.
He added that the Refabricator was de-
signed to “Ensure that an astronaut cannot
hurt themselves.”
Following use of products on the Refabri-
cator on the ISS, they will use the feedstock
and recycle it several times. It will then be
put into storage and sent back to earth for
analysis.
SWIFT-SLX
The SWIFT-SLX is a programmable
S/L-band transceiver for small
satellites built upon a high-per-
formance SDR architecture that
provides software control to key radio
parameters, including frequencies/
channels, waveforms, and modulation
parameters.
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