Shoots for the Stars
By D.A. Barber, Inside Tucson Business
Published on Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Over the past 13 years, Paragon Space Development Corporation has had an unusual mission: Bridge the gap between aerospace engineering and biology to provide solutions for environmental control and life support systems in space.
“The culture of language gap between the two is enormous and this problem exists in spades in space,” says founder and CEO Taber MacCullum.
“When you have a research scientist who’s trying to conduct experiments in space and a physiologist who’s job it is to keep a human healthy in space, you have these cultural divides and you must translate across these different fields. That’s essentially where we exist.”
The idea of a small engineering firm that brings together science and technology was born when MacCullum was analytical systems director of the Biosphere 2 near Oracle for two years. It was there that the idea of a biology/high technology connection was formulated.
When he and Jane Poyner left Bioshere 2 in September 1993, the two became the first full-time employees of Paragon Space Development Corporation.
MacCullum, with help from several friends and consultants along the way, set out to create a company focused on solving the problems created when biology, business, and technology are required to work together.
What now is a multi-million consulting company started out the hard way: personal credit cards.
“We started working out of several people’s houses, really doing a ‘living room proposal shop’ kind of thing,” says MacCullum. “Then we got some commercial work and some government work and we started to expand.”
Grant Anderson, Max Nelson and David Bearden joined up when Nelson worked at Rand Corp. and Anderson worked as an engineer for Lockheed. The five met through their connections to the International Space University (ISU).
In a 1991 ISU lecture, Grant first heard of the Biosphere 2 project, which captured his attention. He followed the the project on a web bulletin board and replied to a message posted by MacCullum. The e-mails led to phone calls, which led to in-person meetings, which led to incorporation on May 11, 1993.
Their first contract was with Phoenix-based Planetary Design Corp.
“They wanted us to help them develop a series of technologies to clean indoor air pollution,” says MacCullum. “The next major thing we did was start working on these ABS experiments, getting them patented and then on the Shuttle.”
That work on ABS n Autonomous Biological System n led to a stable sealed ecosystem that Paragon had designed on its own before approaching NASA. The design was patented in 1996 and sent on the Space Shuttle and Mir Space Station.
Paragon was also the first to place animals in space to perform complete life-cycles, from birth, to adulthood, to procreation.
Today, almost one-half of all Paragon’s income comes directly or indirectly from NASA contracts and Taber attributes their success with NASA directly to Arizona’s FAST Grant program.
“The FAST grants are great,” says MacCullum. “What the FAST grants do is allow you to hire someone to write and review proposals.”
AZ FAST Grant program (Federal And State Technology partnership program) is administered through the Arizona Department of Commerce, gives $5,000 to recipients. Since its inception in 2003, the grant program - funded by the U.S. Small Business Administration and the Arizona Department of Commerce - and focuses on getting federal Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grants for Arizona companies.
“The SBIR is essentially a fraction of every government agencies R&D that must be granted,” explains MacCullum.
These grants result in enhance partnerships with new, hi-tech business, create new jobs and help technology entrepreneurs in Arizona commercialize their technology, he says.
“We’ve received, over the last three years, $1.4 million in grants that we can attribute to that $5,000 worth of assistance from the state,” MacCullum said. “That’s a pretty good rate of return for the state because this is federal money, so it’s out-of-state money we’ve brought to Arizona.”
Besides past projects that have resulted in experiments conducted on the Shuttle, Paragon is currently involved the University of Arizona’s Phoenix Mission to find life on Mars. That flight is scheduled to lift-off in 2007, and arrive at Mars in 2008. And, unlike past unmanned space flights, this one will be controlled from the University of Arizona.
“We provide occasional support for the Phoenix Mission in terms of engineering and schedule support,” says MacCullum. “We also have a series of grants from NASA to develop life support technologies that will support the human exploration of the Moon and Mars.”
Today, the 20 employees of Paragon do between $2 million and $3 million annually out of their 8,000 square foot facility near Tucson International Airport.
“We’re in the process of expanding by mid-year into something double that,” says MacCullum.
That expansion is in anticipation of the two huge engineering projects that he says is the next big thing in space development: The replacement of the Shuttle, and the commercial “Space Tourism” market being developed at breakneck speed since last year’s “X-Prize” competition for a working, commercial rocket plane was won by Space Ship One.
For Paragon, focusing the company’s future on the future of commercial space flight is just good business.
“Our major focus will remain human space flight and the long term vision of the company is to be part of the commercial and government exploration of space.”
E-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. D.A. Barber is a
freelance writer based in Tucson.
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