Black Sun Planetary Solutions

Fun news at the other company I work with...

Parabilis' Hybrid Motor Proposal Comes up "ACE's"

Parabilis was awarded a Phase II SBIR for development of a novel hybrid rocket motor design employing a technique called "Aft-injection, Center Exhaust" or ACE which radically shortens the length needed for a hybrid motor. This allows motors to be packaged in configurations well suited to sample return missions and for use as kick stages where length is very constrained. This project will build on the testing done during phase I shown in the photo at the Parabilis test site in San Diego county.

Here's some video of spacecraft vibration testing for one of our customers that Adam recently helped with. https://medium.com//vibration-test-passed-9e77980f671b #.4c0vcbfdx

Vibration test passed! We just passed the vibration test down at Crystal Instruments in Sunnyvale. The shake table test ensures our satellite c…

Here's a tweet from one of our customers showing Adam hard at work on their next satellite project. https://twitter.com/astrodigitalgeo/status/713452785501495296

Astro Digital on Twitter “Beautiful day to be outside testing solar panels.”

With great Thankfulness, we welcome our first Patent as a company, issued this past week. Great job by the whole team who have contributed over the years to realize this goal! And to be clear, Brandon Copp and TJ Sayer are co-inventors but we don't have a nice joint document printed up yet :)

Just signed another purchase order from one of our consulting customers, extending our contract further. Adam and I continue to find consulting customers to keep the business running along and it looks like there will be some new customers coming on line shortly (we've been supporting proposal and pre-contract efforts on several fronts over the last months) so we hope to have more announcements shortly. Also, the solar power project has made some good progress lately with improvements to the cost of manufacturing and we should be very close to being able to get our first patent issued. Alex has been working to increase our investor outreach to support this part of the company and we're hoping to take advantage of the building momentum shortly.

Performing some initial testing on components for our latest secret invention at the home office. Keep your fingers crossed and the fire extinguishers at the ready.

I'm pleased to announce that we've picked up a fifth consulting award this year for our aerospace engineering expertise with yet another new customer. Our consulting work continues to make Black Sun profitable and allows Adam and I to continue development on our big environmental projects including the solar concentrator and a low cost water desalination system.

Just a quick note on progress. Alex, with help from a partner oversees, has submitted a proposal for R&D funding to a joint India-US development program focussed on green technologies. There are several stages that we have to pass through before final award and we are at the beginning of that process, but it's good to be moving forward on these opportunities again. Our finances have stabilized as well and our consulting efforts have about halfway replenished the R&D expenses of the previous year. Last week we also supported a presentation to a potential customer for more spacecraft consulting work that would be for the next nearly 2 years. So all in all a very positive up-swing for the year which will hopefully lead to more development on our primary projects soon.

It's been a long while since we posted an update but I wanted everyone to know that we are still here and still working on our projects. Without the Kickstarter funding we were forced to lay off the work force but within 2 months of that we had secured a few contracts with customers for our consulting products. This year so far we have signed purchase orders for $350k in support for 2 of our staff with various customers. Hopefully we will be posting some information about these projects to share with all of you soon. This has also allowed us to restart our R&D efforts as well so those are ramping back up this summer.

This past week we've been testing a new pipe configuration that has two thin fins welded on the sides, giving it the appearance of a Star Wars X-wing fighter. We predict that the increase in surface area will help the pipe absorb more sunlight and drive more heat into the water. So far, things are looking really good! Check out the pictures below and let us know what you think!

NEWS UPDATE - Press Release distributed today!
Our Press Release can be found in the sites listed below. We are also excited to test our prototype collector in the upcoming weeks using our finned pipe configuration. We've included an invitation in our Press Release for anyone who's interested to witness the testing.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/black-sun-begins-commercialization-revolutionary-183000838.html;_ylt=AwrSyCN5dJ5SzSUADbWTmYlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTBmMnFmanUyBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2dxMQ--
You can also see who's tweeted about us here:
https://twitter.com/search?q=Black%20Sun%20Begins%20Commercialization%20of&f=realtime