NASA contract returns company to its roots

The company is building parts for a telescope that will search for planets.
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Brashear LP's past is rooted in telescopes. Founder John Brashear, after all, was a Pittsburgher who more than a century ago studied the stars through telescopes he made at home.
But the company that now operates in a custom-built facility in O'Hara Township shifted much of its business in recent years away from telescopes and into optics for high-tech military defense systems.
Now it's returning to its former focus with a $7.5 million contract to design and build the lens and mirror for a NASA telescope that will try to detect planets in other solar systems.
"We never lost the capability [to build telescope parts]," said Dawn Rucker, executive vice president and chief operating officer. "We just lost the edge."
But Ball Aerospace & amp; Technologies Corp., the Colorado firm that is primary contractor for NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, recognized that Brashear had enough know-how in optics and approached the local company a couple of years ago about providing specialized parts for the Kepler.
Brashear declined because it was tied up with other business and Ball awarded the contract to Eastman Kodak. But when that deal fell apart, Ball came to Brashear, and Brashear won the contract in March.
2006 launch date
The telescope Brashear is helping to design and build will fly on a NASA Discovery Mission set to launch in 2006. It will be "the first space-based, planet-finding mission," said John M. Barentine, manager of business transformation and development for Brashear.
Using a high-precision camera, the telescope will search for planets by measuring tiny changes in the brightness of stars caused by planets as they pass between stars and Earth. The size of the planet can be determined by the brightness of the star. Whether these planets may be able to sustain life can be analyzed by measuring how frequently the planet passes in front of its parent star: Planets too close to the parent star would most likely be too hot for life while planets too far away would be too cold.
As it orbits, the Kepler Telescope will monitor 100,000 stars and is expected to locate more than 600 planets, said Barentine.
It also will have more capability to view much larger portions of sky and for much longer periods than NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched in 1990.
What company's making
The specific components for which Brashear is responsible are a lens that's just less than 1 meter in diameter and the telescope's primary mirror, which measures 1.45 meters in diameter. Brashear also will design and build the suspension system that will carry the mirror in the spacecraft.
Once it's constructed, the lens and mirror will be finely polished and tested on site at Brashear in temperature-controlled labs that simulate the cold and vacuumlike conditions of outer space.
It should be completed in two years, said Barentine.
Though it's a sizable contract, the Kepler work won't generate increased employment at Brashear, which now has about 160 full-time workers. Rucker expects sales this year to reach $40 million, up from $32 million last year.
Since 1997, Brashear has been owned by investor William E. Conway Jr., a founding partner of The Carlyle Group, a $16 billion investment fund based in Washington, D.C. Conway also serves as Brashear's president and chief executive.