I will clarify my question. What else is very similar between the pioneering (first of it's kind) reserach at Sandia and the CDEx meth gun, besides the fact that Dr. Poteet and Harold Cauthen both reportedly worked with Sandia back in 1995 and both are currently listed as inventors on CDEx patent applications (see bold text below)?
Not even the sky is the limit for OSEM
Richard Ducote. Arizona Daily Star. Tucson, Ariz.: Apr 23, 1995.
MADE IN SOUTHERN ARIZONA
Things are looking up at OSEM Inc. - and not just because the company makes telescopes.
When it was founded last summer, OSEM had three employees. It now has 25 and is looking to expand by 10 more.
The company name stands for Optical Systems Engineering and Manufacturing, and that is a fairly good shorthand profile of what OSEM does.
It occupies three separate locations in an industrial area near Interstate 10 and West Prince Road and serves customers worldwide.
Henry Blair, the company's chief executive, says he "conservatively" expects to book sales this year of about $13 million and hit actual revenues of $8.5 million. Gross profit, before taxes and reinvestment in the company, should be about $1.6 million for the privately held company, he says.
In its six months in business last year, total sales were about $1 million and gross profit was $314,000, he added.
But OSEM didn't just appear in the business galaxy out of nowhere. It is the successor to Henry M. Blair Consulting, founded in July 1992.
Blair, who holds a Ph.D. in engineering, thinks his company has no rival in the private sector anywhere in the world for expertise in optical instrument design and manufacturing.
In fact, Blair says, his company really has only two rivals, and they are both more like "one man" operations that subcontract nearly all the component manufacturing for systems.
He says OSEM's ability to design and manufacture sophisticated instruments in quantity and nearly all in-house will put it in a very competitive position.
The key, he says, is the company's ability to make "low-cost, high-performance mirrors" because of Tucson's wealth of resources in optics and astronomy.
"We like Tucson," he says, because astronomy likes Tucson's weather and mountains, which Blair calls the source of the UA's reputation in the field.
While astronomy has been here for decades, the opportunity for a company like OSEM is a recent development, according to Blair.
The decline of government-supported "big science," as demonstrated by cancellation of the Super Collider project, has opened the way for greater use of more but smaller instruments - just the field OSEM intends to plow.
"Small," of course, is relative. OSEM can build scopes with mirrors up to 2.5 meters in diameter, the size of the Mount Wilson scope in California that was the biggest in the world at one time.
Today's biggest optical scope has a main mirror 10 meters in diameter.
Blair's goal, however, is to compete in the field for smaller instruments by putting together a vertically integrated company to produce optical systems at about 40 percent below the cost of traditional custom design and build methods.
Blair essentially wants to adapt mass production and automation to the optical instrument field.
In February, the company was chosen to build two telescopes for the University of Massachusetts - the so-called 2MASS Project, which stands for Two Micron All Sky Survey.
The telescope system will map the entire sky from telescopes in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
OSEM will design and install the first 1.3-meter telescope at Mount Hopkins, 40 miles south of Tucson, by January.
A twin unit will be built at Chile's Cerro Tololo about a year later, Blair said. The contract for just the Mount Hopkins scope is about $650,000, he added.
The 2MASS contract calls for OSEM to provide the telescope, large optics, a digital focusing system, drives, system computers, a finder telescope, mirror handling equipment and other systems.
Much of the OSEM staff was recruited from University of Arizona astronomy and mirror lab programs. Blair is more direct:"Raiding is what we do," he shrugs.
Company facilities will soon house five mirror-casting furnaces, a key ingredient in the OSEM strategy of building its own components to cut costs.
A 1-meter instrument will sell for a bargain $280,000, Blair says, about $200,000 below the cost of a custom scope the same size. A 2-meter OSEM scope will sell for about $590,900, he says, about half the cost of competitive hardware.
Blair said that as "big science" slows down, demand will increase for instruments like those offered by OSEM.
In astronomy, he says, discoveries are made with large instruments, but the diligent science spurred by the discovery is done on small scopes.
Blair was project manager for the Smithsonian Institution/UA Multiple Mirror Telescope on Mount Hopkins, the two existing Mount Graham scopes, and was engineer or manager on numerous other optical projects.
The company's director of optical projects, Lawrence K. Randall, has worked for the European Space Agency, the National Science Foundation, Kitt Peak National Observatory and numerous other groups.
OSEM project scientist Wade M. Poteet, an astronomer, is a veteran of the UA Spacelab-2 IR Telescope Project and has worked on Department of Energy, Sandia Labs and NASA projects as well.
The company's mirror lab director, Walter Stoss, worked on various Steward Observatory mirror lab jobs.
Peter Wangsness, head of casting process development for OSEM, also was involved with the UA mirror lab and developed a process for producing lightweight honeycomb glass mirrors.
Roberta McMillan, OSEM systems staff engineer, worked on lunar instruments carried to the moon by NASA astronauts, designed mirror-polishing components at the UA, and was involved in numerous other optical projects.Software development specialist Fatima Lopez is responsible for programming the company's mirror furnace temperature control system and other systems. Systems engineer Harold K. Cauthen is a specialist in laser applications and has worked for NASA and Sandia Labs projects.
Fabrication manager Kent Johnson has extensive UA Mirror Lab experience.
Engineer Robert L. Meeks was start-up engineer for the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope on Mount Graham.
Michael Nakamura, with 13 years of experience in optics, is in charge of large optical finishing.
Vince Luongo, with 30 years of experience at IBM in various production and reliability posts, is OSEM production manager.
In addition to astronomy, the company also sees an opportunity in optical monitoring of airborne contaminants, technology that can have applications in such fields as semiconductor manufacturing, and environmental or nuclear non-proliferation compliance.
Last year, OSEM was awarded a $400,000 federal contract for Brookhaven National Laboratory to design and build a mobile laser-equipped system to measure air pollution.
OSEM and Sandia National Laboratories have a cooperative research and development agreement to focus on remote sensing systems.
In recent weeks, Blair said, representatives of the Smithsonian have expressed interest in buying two 2-meter scopes from OSEM, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has contacted the company about buying two 1.5-meter scopes for testing of laser communications equipment for JPL's proposed lunar and Martian observatories.
While Blair is busy putting the company together and dealing with customer inquiries, one of the things of which he is most proud is the company's involvement with a project to put a telescope atop a new building at Tucson High Magnet School.
Blair said he just happened to notice that a telescope dome was built on the new facility near the UA campus, but never saw a scope being placed in the structure. He was told by Tucson Unified School District officials that no funds were available for an instrument.
OSEM has committed about $250,000 to a two-year project that enlists students to help design and build a half-meter scope at the school's Technology and Science Building.
The project will apparently make Tucson Magnet High School the first public school in the nation to have a research telescope.
