A small aerospace technology firm based in Howard County is working to make the monitoring of space satellites more efficient and cost effective for clients like the Defense and Homeland Security departments.
Applied Defense Solutions, with about 15 employees working out of its Columbia office, recently opened a Mission Operations Room — a small room with a couple laptops and several computer monitors handling big projects.
ADS is accomplishing what many in the aerospace sector thought would be impossible: Dramatically reducing the manpower, hardware and cost required to fly the satellites.
“These operations are usually staffed by hundreds of people,” said Ryan Frederic, president and co-founder of ADS. “We’ve got a lot of operations in about 150 square feet of space.”
In October, ADS began working with Southwest Research Institute to launch a small NASA spacecraft to give scientists a map of the edge of the solar system. ADS has been responsible for positioning and monitoring the spacecraft — the company can monitor from its Mission Operations Room, but its staff has the ability to do it on a laptop while sitting at a coffee shop.
ADS doesn’t develop the software — it uses exisiting technologies and innovative thinking to help clients like SRI meets its goals. ADS sells its services rather than products.
Looking ahead, ADS can use the strategies its using to track the NASA spacecraft to track vehicles, boats and airplanes at U.S. borders and ports, said John Carrico, principal astrodynamics specialist for ADS.
“We always wanted to push these technologies,” Carrico said. “That really has been the philosophy of this company.”
Frederic founded ADS with Hank Grabowski, the company’s chief technology officer, in his basement in Exton, Pa., in 2004, moving to Columbia in 2006. The company still has a small office in Exton and another in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Working in a region that includes defense and technology giants like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, ADS has many opportunities to win contracts on many large-scale defense projects. The average contract for an ADS project totals in excess of about $100,000, Frederic said.
Rep. Elijah Cummings visited the ADS office Thursday and congratulated Frederic and his staff for the ongoing accomplishments. Cummings commended ADS for its innovative thinking related to national security.
“In the economic situation we’re finding ourselves in, we have got to be innovators, because we don’t have any choice,” Cummings said.
