NASA's 2026 NIAC Phase II Opens a $600,000 Path for SBIR-Track Aerospace Concepts

NASA's 2026 NIAC Phase II solicitation (NNH26ZTR001N-26NIAC-A2) — posted to Grants.gov and scheduled for release on NSPIRES in May 2026 — opens a $600,000, two-year funding lane for SBIR/STTR small business founders whose Phase I award produced a feasibility study NASA wants to push toward flight.

What the Phase II solicitation actually funds

The Grants.gov posting for opportunity 362393 names the mechanism in language NASA has carried since the program's 2011 relaunch: Phase II awards continue "the exploration and development of revolutionary advanced concepts started through a NIAC Phase I award." In practical terms, that buys two more years of effort and up to $600,000 to mature a concept from feasibility (Phase I, up to $175,000 over nine months) into a credible technical and mission case — including risk reduction, subscale testing where it applies, and identification of infusion partners inside NASA, DoD, or commercial industry.

NIAC sits inside the Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), the same office that runs NASA's SBIR/STTR portfolio. That overlap is not accidental. Where SBIR Phase I expects a six-month feasibility on technology with a near-term commercial customer, NIAC starts further upstream — concepts that are "potentially game-changing" but at TRL 1–3 with no obvious near-term buyer. Phase II is the bridge: enough money and time to drag a TRL-2 idea up to a TRL-3 or 4 demonstration where SBIR, NASA Tipping Point, or DoD AFWERX/SpaceWERX programs can pick it up.

Who can submit — and the strict Phase I gate

Phase II is not an open solicitation. Only Principal Investigators on a completed NIAC Phase I award are invited to propose, and two conditions are firm:

1. The Phase I final report must have been received by NIAC on or before the Phase II proposal due date — NASA calls this a "firm requirement," not a soft deadline.
2. The PI cannot have previously received a Phase II for the same concept.

For small-business founders without a prior Phase I, that closes the 2026 cycle but maps a clean two-year runway. The 2026 Phase I solicitation (NNH26ZTR001N-26NIAC-A1) is the entry point; recent Phase I selections included small companies like Skyeports LLC and Tentguild Engineering Co alongside the more familiar university and FFRDC names. NIAC program officers have been explicit that they will award Phase I to commercial PIs when the concept warrants it — the program's bias is toward concept boldness, not institutional pedigree.

Team composition is more permissive than most NASA solicitations. PIs and co-investigators may be affiliated with any combination of educational institutions, commercial firms, not-for-profits, NASA centers (including JPL), or other federal agencies. That flexibility lets a small-business PI bring in a university partner for instrumentation, or a NASA-center co-I for mission integration, without forming an SBIR-style subcontract structure.

Why $600,000 over two years is structured the way it is

NIAC budgets are calibrated against a specific failure mode: concept-stage programs that hand out small Phase I checks and never fund the maturation step that determines whether the concept survives contact with engineering reality. The $600,000 Phase II ceiling — released in tranches across roughly 24 months of effort — is sized to cover one or two FTEs, modest hardware, and the analysis depth needed to either confirm the concept's mission case or kill it cleanly.

That last point matters more for small businesses than for university teams. A Phase II that ends in "this concept is not viable, here is why" is not a wasted award; the NIAC program treats rigorous negative results as success. For founders, this is structural permission to run an aggressive de-risking study without the pressure of a commercial milestone — useful when the underlying technology is too early to support a Series A pitch but too interesting to abandon.

NASA expects roughly six to nine Phase II selections per cycle, judged against the prior year's Phase I cohort. The base rate from Phase I to Phase II historically runs around 25–30% — closer to a peer-reviewed grant competition than to an SBIR win rate.

The Phase I-to-II-to-infusion path the program is designed around

The most productive way for an SBIR-track founder to read NIAC is as a three-stage funnel that lands you in front of NASA mission directorates with a maturity case already built:

• Phase I (NNH26ZTR001N-26NIAC-A1): Nine months, up to $175,000. Three-page Step A proposal, followed by an invited full proposal. Concept feasibility only.
• Phase II (NNH26ZTR001N-26NIAC-A2): Two years, up to $600,000. Maturation, subscale demonstration where possible, infusion plan.
• Phase III / external infusion: No standing solicitation. A small number of Phase II finishers each year receive a separate $2M Phase III award. Others transition into SBIR Phase II, NASA Tipping Point, ESI, or DoD analogs.

The 2025 cycle produced a Phase III selection for a solar-sail concept that began as a Phase I in 2017, illustrating both the timescale and the payoff. For founders working in propulsion, in-space manufacturing, autonomous robotics, or advanced sensing — categories that have dominated recent NIAC selections — the funnel is well-mapped.

Proposal mechanics that disqualify otherwise strong teams

Two compliance details account for a disproportionate share of rejections. Both are easy to miss for first-time NIAC proposers, including those coming from an SBIR background.

Final-report timing. NIAC will reject Phase II proposals where the Phase I final report has not been received by the Phase II due date. The report is held to a single submission, not a draft, and there is no waiver. SBIR closeout culture, where final reports are sometimes submitted weeks after the period of performance, will not survive contact with this rule.

Page and format limits. The Phase II technical proposal is capped at 25 pages and must be submitted as a single PDF through NSPIRES — not Grants.gov, despite the Grants.gov cross-listing. Submissions outside NSPIRES are not reviewed. NIAC program officers have flagged this in past cycles; the dual posting on Grants.gov is a notification convenience, not a submission channel.

A third trap worth naming: the Phase II concept must be "based on" the Phase I concept. NIAC reviewers have, in past years, declined Phase II proposals that pivoted hard from the Phase I scope. If the Phase I result suggests a more promising adjacent concept, the right move is usually a new Phase I, not a stretched Phase II.

Positioning a 2026 Phase II proposal

For founders sitting on a 2024 or 2025 Phase I award, the May 2026 release date is the planning anchor. Three things are worth doing now.

First, lock the final report. If the Phase I period of performance ends within four months of the Phase II due date, get the final report into NIAC early. Treat it as a hard gate, not a closeout task.

Second, pre-commit infusion partners. A Phase II proposal that names a specific NASA mission directorate POC, DoD program office, or commercial partner who has signed off on the concept of operations scores meaningfully higher than one that gestures at "future infusion." This is the highest-leverage edit a small-business PI can make.

Third, plan the SBIR-side parallel. If the underlying technology has a non-NIAC commercial pathway, file an SBIR Phase I against an aligned NASA SBIR subtopic in the same cycle. SBIR and NIAC funding can co-exist on overlapping technology so long as the work scopes are non-duplicative; many of the strongest Phase II finishers run both tracks in parallel.

Founders who have not yet entered the NIAC pipeline should treat the 2026 cycle as Phase I prep. NIAC publishes detailed past-cycle abstracts and Phase II final reports on the program site, and the patterns are legible — concept boldness paired with a credible technical-risk argument tends to win, and incrementalism does not.

Tracking the May release and adjacent SBIR funding

The official 2026 Phase II solicitation will post on NSPIRES at nspires.nasaprs.com, with hq-niac@mail.nasa.gov as the program contact. Granted indexes the active NIAC posting alongside related NASA STMD and SBIR solicitations — search NASA NIAC and adjacent advanced-concept funding on Granted to pull the current Phase II opportunity, NIAC Phase I, and aligned NASA SBIR subtopics into a single view. Broader coverage of NASA solicitations and SBIR-adjacent funding mechanisms lives on the Granted blog.