Volume 5, Number 1     January/February 1997

  Commercial Development of Space

NASA Technology Spins Off New Company

N THE MID-1980's, GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT Center's GSFC Jim Chesney was asked to develop a new telemetry system.

Through this directive, Chesney founded Goddard's Microelectric Systems Branch. When he realized the technologies he was developing had commercial application, Chesney created a program to make the technology available commercially.

Today, after commercial entities did not make use of the technology, Chesney left his job at Goddard and formed his own company.

TSI Telsys designs, manufactures and supports Gateway Systems for the telemetry, remote sensing and high data rate SatCom communities. Gateway Systems seamlessly interconnect local and wide area terrestrial networks to space communications networks at speeds of up to 300 Mbps.

	Following 26 years with NASA, James Chesney found TSI-Telsys, Inc. which designs and manufactures Gateway System products that autonomously perform CCSDS telemetry data processing and distribution for satellite imaging.

TSI Telsys' network management application, Gateway Management Software (GMS), allows users to remotely control, operate and monitor Gateway Systems, as well as other ground station equipment via a graphical user interface.

Chesney reported on the recent delivery of two Test and Simulation Satellite (TSS) Gateway Systems to Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). The delivery, worth $550,000, is in addition to MSFC's spring delivery worth $2 million. The most recent delivery uses TSI Telsys VIP card which is based on TSI TelSys Reconfigurable Systems Technology.

"Our ability to rapidly develop solutions for our customer's unique needs stems from the flexibility inherent to our Reconfigurable Systems Technology. We can even make major logic changes to systems after a delivery, greatly extending the life of our customer's equipment. Without modifying the physical hardware, we can make changes to a card at the core logic level after it has been installed," Chesney said.

Chesney retired from NASA and founded the company in 1994. The Columbia, Maryland, business, a subsidiary of TSI Telsys Corporation, Vancouver, British Columbia, is a spin-off company formed expressly to commercialize the technology developed under Chesney's leadership at Goddard.

In 1985, the Microelectronics Systems Branch began research and development on technology to support CCSDS, a protocol developed by NASA to meets its increasingly sophisticated requirements speedier data processing and to develop maximum commonality, reusability and interoperability among all new systems deployed by NASA. The initial product line includes communication processing switches that support Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deep Space Network and NASA's Mission to Planet Earth.

The new system can receive telemetry from space much faster, according to Don Vargo of GSFC. The Gateway System also can remove header and trailer codes from data automatically, do frame synchronization and REED-Solomon Error Detection. He said the system reduces the costs and complexity of accessing satellite data by processing and distributing data in real-time.

Although TSI Telsys' products and technology were developed for satellite telemetry applications, the system can be used in the commercial communication field to process voice, imagery and text data quickly. Industry interest in the space-data-receiving system is high because of the need to link space-data satellite networks to terrestrial networks that use protocols like Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM).

For more information about the Gateway System, contact
Don Vargo at Goddard Space Flight Center,
Call 301/286-2642E-mail: donald.j.vargo@gsfc.nasa.gov
or James Chesney at TSI/Telsys,
Call 410/872-3900E-mail: jchesney@tsi-telsys.com
Please mention that you read about it in Innovation.