SBIR funny papers part 1

I’ve long been a reader of the SBIR funny papers. SBIR is “small business innovative research” grants -aka the government gives you some welfare cheese to think about something for a while. I actually quit my first job out of grad school to pitch one (failed, because I don’t have people in DC blackmailing the grant administrators -yes, that’s really more or less how it works). There are entire businesses built around this stuff, doing lots of quick little R&D projects to see if something looks viable. I don’t think these programs do much for the country other than keep people like me employed semi-productively, but they’re not quite pork either (pork is actually easier to come by; just make a campaign contribution -yes that is really how it works; famed dude told me he got some significant cheese from making a modest donation to Barbara Lee). They’re fantastic views into what we can’t do, but want to and think we might be able to; great reality checks for ding-dongs who think muh AI or muh quantum computer is right around the corner.

It’s a shame nobody has archived the historical ones in a database somewhere, as they’re a lot of fun, and can tell you a lot about technological development and technological dead ends. They’re probably not saved in such a repository because they also reveal a lot about deficiencies in Pentagon programs. I saved a couple of them from when I was looking at such things, which was mostly quite a few years ago now, and think it will be fun to pore over them like medieval colophons. To facilitate this little project, I’ll stick them in a github repo so other scholars of technological history can fiddle with them. Pull requests welcome if you have others.

 

The first chunk I found was March 2006, as I began again to look over these materials post-Ph.D. and while thinking of moving my career in more interesting directions than fiddling with CPLEX and SNOPT. 2006 was probably peak Iraq war times, and so the security establishment was mostly concerned with this sort of thing.  As another historical context, Facebook didn’t open itself up to normies until September 2006, the human genome project hadn’t published its final data set until May, and Wikileaks wasn’t formed until September. Saddam Hussein was still in jail. Intel was using 65nm “core duo” architecture; 1.5 to 2.3ghz, 2 processors, finally using 64 bits. Most people were driving 32 bit machines in those days.

 

Starting with the Navy we find the amusing N06-171 Automated Shipboard Dishwashing System.

Even in 2006 when there was a ground war going on, the Navy had to compete with the Army and Air Force for personnel. The Army was in a war, so it had to pay reasonably well. This left the Navy wondering why it had to pay people so well to wash the goddamned dishes. I doubt as anything came of this effort. I had a high school buddy who worked as a machinist on a sub-tender; one of his pals on the boat was a sign painter on the sub tender. And he wasn’t the only one. So, I’d have to guess the Navy probably still has sign painters and dishwashers potentially collecting Navy pensions on washing the dishes and painting the signs.

N06-172  Affordable Alternative Power Supply for Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) Systems Lead acid batteries are still a pretty good tradeoff for UPS systems. They’re super cheap and low tech and they have been used for over 100 years. On the other hand they don’t last as long as modern batteries, have much lower energy densities. I don’t know if this SBIR came to fruition, but I’m pretty sure modern lithium ion batteries would fill the role. Though they may not use them on boats for military “we don’t  know how to put out their fires” reasons.

N06-175  High Energy Material Containment Navy ships contain lots of blowey uppey materials; flares, rocket engines, lithium ion batteries. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a box to put such things in? I doubt much of interest came of this other than rockwool boxes, but it is fun reading about such Navy problems and imagining the dangerous through Monty-Pythonesque scenarios which led up to them.

 

N06-179  Real-Time, Secure, and Fault Tolerant Discovery for Publish-Subscribe Middleware in a WAN Environment This is pretty interesting in that I hadn’t thought of it, but all kinds of weird congestion modes could occur in an over automated ship with a WAN. They may have solved the problem with faster chips and better network cables (they certainly have in cars), or they may have the same problem now. I suspect they have the same problem now, and deal with it by turning things off. The review article they reference on the topic of shipboard network protocols was already old, and has been rarely cited in the literature; most recently by Koreans claiming they can solve this problem (they also sell boats). Also the American computer scientists who can do useful things like design RTOS fault tolerant discovery middleware are mostly retired by now. Finally it was restricted under ITAR which makes it commerically basically useless.

FWIIW ITAR is one of those amusing things for which I can see some historical utility from when the US was a manufacturing power which had an effectively autarkic economy, but which has very, very limited applicability in current year. A friend of mine wanted a laser for his pistol; it’s restricted under ITAR so he couldn’t get it from the US “manufacturer.” So he ordered it straight from China. For my own self, I wanted an image intensifier/night vision scope for my telescopes. I could get one in America where most of them are made, but I’d violate ITAR taking it home, so I had to purchase one at double the price from a guy who makes astro-specific ones from German MCPs. Similarly if the Russians weren’t busy with a war I probably could have bought one of those (which are less adequate for astronomy, but are fine for shooting people). QED.

Air force:

AF063C-011   Terminally Guided Robots and Robotic Applications in Confined Spaces  -this one is fun, as it apparently is for stealth gizmos or cruise missiles; they seem to need robots to crawl up inside and stick some rivets in whatever funny little passages prevent the fan blades from reflecting too much radar. Either because there’s some new kind of sensor they’re installing or for structural stability. Either one would be interesting, and this RFC is pretty revealing.

AF063-002              Radiation Hard High Precision Agile Star Tracker -this one is kind of weird. I know a lot of guidance systems have star trackers, both as backup and adjunct data. According to this, it’s needed for spacecraft. We know the X37 space shuttle does some complicated maneuvers in orbit while it’s skull fucking enemy satellites, this requirement was probably for this weapons system. Apparently space radiation burned out normal star trackers.

AF063-004       High Data Rate, Low Power Analog to Digital Converter -this one is completely unsurprising; they want listening capabilities in orbit and they want it sensitive and low power. Probably also related to something like X37 or other orbital spy platforms.

The MDA (missile defense) stuff is all entirely unsurprising stuff, and some of the R&D done here is probably why I get Elon minisats bombing my telescope views in the early evening and mornings.

MDA06-055    High Performance, Long Life, Lightweight, Corrosion Resistant Valves -is a sort of fun example which reveals a little bit about projects underway in 2006.  I guess the air force uses Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser gizmoes in its missile defense research. Since the kind of fluids (chlorine, iodine, hydrogen peroxide and potassium hydroxide) used in such lasers are corrosive, they apparently had reliability problems with the valves used. Again, completely unsurprising stuff but I had never looked at the wiki page for such things. Maybe someone made a nice ceramic valve for them.

Similarly the OSD (office of secretary of defense) stuff is the kind of thing you’d expect in 2006; computer models of foreign languages, models of foreign mindsets, video games you can play which model foreign social and cultural systems: aka how can we use computard and video game to replace having shitty human capital (as opposed to well trained officers) in pacifying foreign places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Dorks. More interesting to technologists:

OSD06-EP1       Sulfur-Tolerant Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) Anodes -the military would really like to use jet fuel batteries. If there are ever reasonably useful fuel cells using ordinary fuels it will probably come from a military application. Apparently they have solid oxide fuel cells which work, but the anodes get corrupted by the amounts of sulfur in normal fuels. I had vaguely heard of these things; they’re not ever going to be super convenient for civilians as they work at 1000 degrees C, but I could imagine a number of military applications where that doesn’t matter so much.

Also amusing:

OSD06-H11       Simulation-based Planning and Training Tool for Infectious Disease Outbreak, i.e., Pandemic Influenza -obviously they didn’t have this handy for corona-chan, or if they did, it didn’t do anybody any good, so they went and used that imbecile Neal Ferguson’s shitty code. Just a reminder: Ferguson predicted 50,000 deaths from mad cow disease, 150,000 deaths from a 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, 150 million dead from 2005 bird flu, and 65,000 British deaths from 2009 Swine Flu. It will never not be hilarious he got sacked for banging someone else’s slutty wife under lockdown.

OSD06-H03       Integrated Medical and Biosurveillance Early Warning System Technology -this was apparently for colonels to track outbreaks of biowarfare on the troops, but presumably would have been useful for everyone else as well. Gee, the government sure did fuck up the events of 2020 and 2021 despite all this preparation, didn’t they?

They also want to control more robots (navy does too) and have better solid rocket fuels of various kinds. I suspect such requests will be ongoing, as it’s pretty cheap to train a guy to fly a drone, and they’re always going to want better solid rocket fuels.