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Out of Space
Brevard companies' technological advances are felt outside the Space Coast

By Anne Straub
Brevard Technical Journal

When considering the impact that technology that starts in Brevard County has on other areas, it’s easy to focus on space. But Space Coast technology companies affect much more than their namesake.

“Anywhere they’re sending a product, they’re affecting another market,” said Kim Meehan Agee, managing director for the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast.

That goes to the core of why economic development organizations target manufacturers and other high-tech companies for recruitment. “Most of their customers are outside the area, so money is coming in from outside your region,” she said. If the same dollar is transferred around town from a dry cleaner, to Wal-Mart to a gas station, you’re simply moving money around. But companies that sell products outside the area do much more. “You’re taking new money and inserting it into this economy,” she said.

Here’s a look at a few Brevard companies whose impact is being felt beyond the county’s borders:

• Paravant Inc. Among other products, the Palm Bay company makes rugged computers and handheld electronics for the military to use on battlefields. Late last year, the company became part of DRS Technologies Inc., which operates a site in Melbourne.

• Renco Electronics. The Rockledge manufacturer, which recently relocated from New York, makes transformers, conductors and coils. “It could be the spring where you put the batteries in your camera, or it could go in a huge machine,” Meehan Agee said.

• MSI of Central Florida. The Melbourne contract manufacturer has garnered honors for its outsourcing solutions in data communications and networking.

• Intelligent Machine Concepts in Titusville makes high-speed vision inspection systems for the food and beverage industry. The automation helps companies check products for defects much faster than a sampling process does.

Advances in space are felt by more than NASA and its contractors. In fact, Kennedy Space Center operates an office devoted to sharing technology developed for the space program that might help a commercial enterprise solve a problem. KSC breaks its technologies and their spinoffs down into six areas. The areas plus examples of the space industry’s contributions, according to Spaceport News:

Fluid systems technologies. NASA and its contractors developed fire extinguishing equipment that can pierce an aircraft’s outer layers and inject chemicals. Heat pipes used to cool components in the shuttle, Skylab and Hubble Space Telescope now are used with traditional air conditioning systems to cool and dehumidify air better.

Spaceport structures and materials. KSC has developed a process to prevent structural corrosion in buildings, bridges and radio towers. It also developed a metal coating that can extend the lives of steel structures and metal parts of TVs, computers and other electronics. Another example: A safety exit system designed in the 1960s for manned rockets was used to develop a lightweight aluminum structure to help the elderly lift themselves from seated positions.

Process and human factors engineering. A citrus company adapted KSC’s shuttle inventory management system to monitor inventory, purchasing, receiving and costs.

Command, control and monitoring technology. A portable leak detector developed to find leaks in fluid systems of critical launch and ground support equipment can be used commercially on pipelines, underground utilities, air conditioning systems, petrochemical systems, power transmission lines and medical devices.

Range technologies. KSC’s lightning detection and ranging systems, which measure in-cloud and cloud-to-cloud flashes, can be used by utility providers, aviation companies, forecasting services, airports and commercial space vehicle launch facilities. A lightning current detector was developed to monitor the magnitude of lightning strikes, which is useful in evaluating the parameters of protection designs.

Biological sciences. To try to eliminate a waste stream of 250,000 gallons of contaminated water per year, KSC helped develop a control system to convert hazardous nitrogen oxide scrubber liquor into a useful, beneficial, and marketable fertilizer.