Wave Motion awarded $1.35MM by U.S. Navy!
Wave Motion has acquired its first customer, the United States Navy!
Wave Motion Launch Corporation has been awarded a $1.35 Million Other Transactional Authority (OTA) agreement by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), via the Naval Surface Technology and Innovation Consortium (NSTIC). NSTIC is a contracting consortium run by the company Advanced Technology International (ATI) that is responsible for fielding competitive offers for advanced prototypes on behalf of the United States Government. The award will sponsor a project with Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Dahlgren Division that will contribute to the development of Wave Motion’s barrel-less launcher technology, the jet-gun, and provide necessary information for the eventual goal of launching a payload vehicle into space. The current project agreement is expected to last through the end of 2023. If successful, Wave Motion may be selected for future awards to further develop this technology for the United States Navy. The award is listed on the NSTIC website opportunities page here.
Using the jet-gun for space launch will require the development of a new control system for vehicles that utilize a radically new method of propulsion. To meet this challenge, Wave Motion will use a portion of the funding to work with the University of Washington’s Autonomous Controls Lab and develop a method of steering vehicles launched via the jet-gun as they make their way through the atmosphere and into space.
This contract is a fantastic opportunity for Wave Motion after years of unsponsored development and will serve to accelerate (pun intended) our company towards our aspirational goal. The “investment” being made by the U.S. Navy via this contract demonstrates the potential for the jet-gun to become an incredibly compact and cost-effective means of getting objects to move very, very fast. Though there’s still A LOT of work to be done, getting to this point has been a long journey. Wave Motion is still a pre-seed company that has not taken institutional investment, however we’ve had huge support especially from the University of Washington and in particular CoMotion, the University of Washington’s innovation hub. Wave Motion is not a UW spinout and the technology was not developed in an academic lab, but we have nonetheless gratefully enjoyed the support that CoMotion has provided to us throughout the years. Programs like the NSF I-CORPS program and DubPitch have given us both financial support and training in key areas of entrepreneurship like customer discovery and making a compelling pitch. We would also like to extend our appreciation to the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship at the UW’s Foster School of Business, whose Dempsey Startup Competition was instrumental for refining our vision (fans of Wave Motion lore may remember we won the prize for Best Technology in 2019). As we continue on to other and bigger opportunities, we’ll always take the lessons from those terrific programs with us!
Stay tuned for more, Wave Motion as usual has big things, and big booms, planned!