Open letter from the CEO and founder of Broad Reach Engineering – Chris McCormick

"This year marks Broad Reach Engineering’s 10th anniversary. We founded the company in 1997 in order to bring the aerospace market avionics and space science instrument development choices. The spaceflight avionics market has always desired fully qualified, highly capable and high reliable space systems when often the existing heritage components were no longer sufficient.  Broad Reach has been successful in facilitating new missions without relying on heritage components. We rely instead on ‘heritage between the ears’ of experienced designers enabled to perform superb engineering with the cost, mass and power savings that are called for to enable newer science, experimental and commercial missions.

The last 10 years have shown steady growth with many launches to date with over 14 of our systems on orbit and another 3 in final stages of Integration and Test. This includes 5 fully executed Technical Assistance Agreements, required under the International Traffic and Arms Regulations (ITAR) with countries in every continent except Antarctica and Africa. In 2005 we launched our first Integrated Avionics Unit (IAU) onboard the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) XSS-11 mission. As a supplier to Lockheed Martin, we supplied the spacecraft core avionics for this important mission. In the spring of 2006 we then launched Dual Frequency GPS radio occultation and Precision Orbit Determination receivers onboard the six COSMIC spacecraft. Based on the licensed BlackJack design by JPL, these GPS receivers have been providing key atmospheric data to the science, weather forecasting and climate monitoring communities. This data has been of such high quality that many weather centers around the globe have started using this information operationally. Shortly thereafter another set of our avionics was launched from Cape Canaveral for a mission in the geostationary belt. In December of 2006 we then participated in the integration, launch, and early orbit checkout of the TacSat-2 spacecraft, for which we have provided the core avionics, flight software, GPS receiver, and two payload components. The TacSat-2 mission has been operational since, and we are glad to be instrumental in its performance, along with all the other associate contractors that built this spacecraft at the Air Force Research Lab. More recently, in the summer of 2007 we claimed our first completely international launch, a GPS Radio Occultation receiver on-board the German TerraSAR-X satellite. Finally, in September of 2007 we witnessed the launch of a Broad Reach Engineering supplied component on Digital Globe’s Worldview-1 satellite.

We now look to the future in improving and making our current products obsolete by our next versions. In 2005 we started the development of a new, fully radiation hardened PowerPC licensed processor for space applications. This ‘System On a Chip’ will be our processor foundation for our next generation of high end GPS receivers for space applications, including GeoOptic’s CICERO GPS/Galileo Radio Occultation constellation, due to be operational in 2011.

I would like to personally thank our employees, partners, and past and current customers for enabling our success of the last ten years. Thank you."

Chris C. McCormick
Founder & CEO

For media inquiries, contact Christian Lenz @ 303-216-9777

Broad Reach Engineering Company announces the successful launch and operation of its Ancillary Data Formatter (ADF) Electronics onboard the DigitalGlobe WorldView-1 spacecraft. Developed under a contract with Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., the ADF electronics component provides subsystem interfaces, a MIL-STD-1553B interface, data formatting and AES encryption on a compact, radiation tolerant 6U cPCI subassembly. “It has been an honor to work with Ball on this program and we are very excited to be a technology provider to such an important space mission,” says Broad Reach Engineering CEO Chris McCormick. The ADF electronics delivery and on-orbit success adds hardware based AES encryption capabilities to the suite of Broad Reach Engineering avionics.

Broad Reach Engineering is a privately held company, founded in 1997 by a group of experienced aerospace engineers with the intent to provide innovative and cost effective high-end products and services to the aerospace industry. Broad Reach Engineering develops hardware and software for spaceflight missions and ground systems. Products include spacecraft avionics, science payload electronics, spacecraft flight software, ground and space borne GPS receivers for precision orbit determination (POD) and occultation science, ground support hardware and software, and mission design and analysis services. Broad Reach Engineering maintains offices in Tempe, AZ, Golden, CO, and Boulder, CO. [www.broadreachengineering.com]

For media inquiries, contact Christian Lenz @ 303-216-9777

Broad Reach Engineering announces the successful launch and full functional check out of the IGOR GPS receiver onboard the German TerraSAR-X mission. Launched on a Dnepr rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the TerraSAR-X spacecraft was successfully deployed in its mission orbit of 514 km at 98 deg inclination. The IGOR GPS receiver was declared operational on 6/30/2007. The GPS receiver is used on TerraSAR-X to provide high accuracy position and velocity information for image collocation. In addition, the unit is used as a radio occultation sensor, which provides approximately 500 daily measurements of atmospheric property profiles, ranging from the surface to the upper Ionosphere. The IGOR GPS receiver is a dual frequency, dual redundant, 48 channel space qualified GPS receiver for precision orbit determination and radio occultation science. Based on the JPL BlackJack design, the receiver provides real-time position solutions with accuracies of 3 meters or better. Laser ranging validations by DLR show post processed orbit positioning to be from 2 to 5 centimeters. The TerraSAR-X receiver joins 7 other similar IGOR GPS receivers currently on orbit, one each on the 6 COSMIC (April of 2006) spacecraft and one on TacSat-2 (launched in December 2006) for a current running total of over 10 years of on-orbit success. Two additional receivers will be launched in the near future on the German Tandem-X mission and the Korean KOMPSAT-5 satellite.

Broad Reach Engineering is a privately held company, founded in 1997 by a group of experienced aerospace engineers with the intent to provide innovative and cost effective high-end products and services to the aerospace industry. Broad Reach Engineering develops hardware and software for spaceflight missions and ground systems. Products include radiation-hardened spacecraft avionics, science payload electronics, spacecraft flight software, ground and space borne GPS receivers for precision orbit determination (POD) and occultation science, ground support hardware and software, and mission design and analysis services. Broad Reach Engineering maintains offices in Tempe, AZ, Golden, CO, and Boulder, CO.

For media inquiries, contact Dan Smith @ 303-216-9777