Family Pronunciation (US): Rothe (rawth’)
Business Pronunciation (US): Rothe (rawth’-ee)

Rothe Development, Inc. (RDI) is a Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) company that provides a variety of services and capabilities to government and commercial industries including Calibration & Metrology, Engineering, Technical Services, and Information Technology. We have been serving calibration customers continually since 1973 and supporting NASA’s mission as a prime or subcontractor consecutively since 1978.

Founded in 1967 in San Antonio, TX, the Rothe brothers began supporting research and development projects at Brooks AFB School of Aerospace Medicine. They quickly began to branch out with contracts in Precision Measurement Equipment Laboratory (PMEL) at Brooks AFB. By 1975 RDI had earned engineering and software work on a small but vital operation known as San Antonio Air Force Data Services Center (SADSC), one of the first known Air Force “fee for service” models supporting Randolph AFB and Brooks AFB IT requirements. The past performance of this effort yielded award of the Central Shop Support Services (CSSS) at Johnson Space Center (JSC) in 1978. This contract supported the Technical Service Division and Manufacturing, Materials, and Process Technology Division of the Engineering Directorate. There we worked on the Remote Manipulator System (RMS) Simulator where they redesigned and upgraded the software control system. This then led to supporting the development, design, and production of the Space Shuttle Joystick Controller and a payload flight test article which verified the performance of the RMS simulator. The past performance of this effort yielded an award of the Central Shop Support Services (CSSS) at Johnson Space Center (JSC) in 1978. This contract supported the Technical Service Division and Manufacturing, Materials, and Process Technology Division of the Engineering Directorate.

The CSSS contract, subsequently named MACS (Manufacturing and Calibration Services) in 1997, remained a vital part of RDI supporting the JSC Engineering Directorate until 2003. With the knowledge and performance gained on MACS, REI, as a teammate, was awarded a NASA/JSC contract responsible for facility operations of high and low-fidelity pre-flight EVA crew training at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratories (NBL) and Space Vehicle Mockup Facility (SVMF) facilities, which we continue to support today as NOC. Since 2016 RDI has significantly grown in the government sector as we embraced our role in providing engineering, information technology, and technical services to NASA and its customers. RDI continues to discover government commercialization opportunities by identifying external customers interested in utilizing the NASA NBL pool’s excess capacity.

The second ownership change since 1967 occurred in March 2021 and RDI is now owned by Karen Hall. We continue to be headquartered in San Antonio, TX but with the sight of moving our headquarters to Webster TX in 2023. As a family-owned company, we understand our company’s strength comes from our professional Exempt, and Non-Exempt workforce. Our efforts to grow Rothe Development are driven by our focus to continually invest in our employees and support all of our commercial and government customer’s missions with diligence.