Space Habitation Module
 |
|
| Traded as | NASDAQ: ASTC |
|---|---|
| Industry | Science & Technology |
| Founded | 1984 |
| Headquarters | Austin, TX, United States |
|
Number of locations
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3 |
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Key people
|
Thomas Pickens, CEO |
| Services | Technology Incubator |
|
Number of employees
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71 |
| Website | www |
Astrotech Corporation, formerly Spacehab Inc., is a technology incubator headquartered in Austin, Texas. Astrotech uses technology sourced internally and from research institutions, government laboratories, and universities to fund, manage and sell start-up companies.
Astrotech Corporation's subsidiaries provide commercial products and services to NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense, national space agencies, and global commercial customers.
Astrotech Corporation was established in 1984. Prior to 2009, it was known as SPACEHAB, Inc., a company that provided space habitat microgravity experimentation equipment and services to NASA during the Space Shuttle era. As the Shuttle program came to an end, the company put more focus on its spacecraft processing business, Astrotech Space Operations, Inc. (ASO), its mass spectrometer instrumentation business, 1st Detect, Inc. and its microgravity vaccine development company, Astrogenetix, Inc. In August 2014, the company sold Astrotech Space Operations. In February 2015, the company acquired defect correction software and Astral Images Corp. was created to commercialize government funded satellite imagery processing technology and research into automated image correction and enhancement.
Spacehab was founded in 1984 by Bob Citron with the help and support of CSP Associates from Cambridge, MA. The team from CSP Associates included founder David W. Lippy along with his partners Brad Meslin and Marc Oderman. It was one of CSP's consultants, Dr. David Williamson who conceived of the idea to increase the cargo space on the Shuttles as the primary focus of the Spacehab mission. Early venture capital was supplied by Al Zesiger of BEA Associates in New York City as well as Dr. Shelley Harrison also from New York. CSP Associates and its venture contacts were responsible for raising most of the early seed monies to get the company off the ground and funded. Throughout its more than 20-year history, Spacehab has contracted over $1 billion dollars in total sales.
Spacehab hardware consists of:
The Spacehab hardware was specifically designed to be nestled inside the cargo bay of the Space Shuttles and flew on a total of 22 Space Shuttle missions, including seven to the Russian space station Mir and eight to the International Space Station (ISS). The Single Module flew on seven missions, and the Research Double Module flew only on the ill-fated Columbia STS-107 mission, in which it was destroyed.
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Wikipedia