The impact of the U.S. Digital Service is difficult to measure in real numbers or data sometimes.

Sure, USDS’ work with the Social Security Administration to improve its website and customer satisfaction saved an estimated $285 million over five years in infrastructure costs.

But the true measure of USDS comes in ways that don’t always lend itself to numbers, said Mina Hsiang, the administrator of the USDS.

“Every single day that I work with each of our agencies, we get to see the tremendous shifts as a result of small coherent interdisciplinary teams of feds, USDSers and contractors working together can really make these changes. I think it moves everyone’s frame of expectation for how things should be able to shift right,” Hsiang said on Ask the CIO. “The people who rely on Medicaid for their health care and the extent to which the continuity of our health care can sometimes be subjected to bugs and small changes in technical systems that aren’t what the states intended, but aren’t the kind of thing that most of us get to see because technology lives inside of a black box. It is just really nice to be able to share the human, the efficiency impacts of a lot of the work we get to do. So being able to help states preserve continuity of healthcare coverage for 5 million people who really deserved it is an incredibly meaningful number to be able to put a pin on something that feels like a very wonky, like code change, and working through of like technical requirements in collaboration with policy.”

USDS’ annual report tries to detail its impact through stories, examples and other approaches than pure data.

Hsiang said just because cost savings or avoidance data isn’t obvious, it doesn’t mean the organization impact isn’t real to dozens of agencies and millions of citizens.

One example of USDS’ impact is the Digital IT Acquisition Professional Training Program (DITAP). It has trained more than 900 federal acquisition workers across more than 50 agencies on how to buy and manage technology acquisitions. The Office of Federal Procurement Policy had set a 2022 deadline to get all contracting officers who buy technology trained. It’s unclear if OFPP and agencies met that deadline, but DITAP is well regarded as a success in the community.

USDS collaborated on new hiring program

“It has a major hands-on component where the students come in and work on digital services programs and procurements with us sometimes and with agencies. It’s a really practical education, and it means that there are DITAP graduates that we get to work with across government who can be doing a better job of working with contractors and vendors on building out digital services,” she said. “DITAP is a great program, and we are actually refreshing and continuing to update some of that curriculum right now.”

OFPP USDS launched the DITAP program in 2015 through Challenge.gov. The two agencies and the Office of Personnel Management recently built on the concept of DITAP with another challenge to improve how agencies hire and train technology workers.

“USDS, PPM, and OPM aim to create a specialized and immersive training and development program for federal hiring professionals so that they can better understand the rapidly-changing market for technology talent and learn how to implement and scale modern practices for recruiting, implementing hiring authorities and flexibilities, and candidate management at their agencies,” the agencies stated in the challenge.

USDS, OPM and OFPP are about to move into Phase 3 where the Phase 2 winner, Mediabarn, will receive $100,000 to implement at pilot.

$10M rescission ‘disappointing’

Hsiang said DITAP and other examples of how USDS doesn’t just come into the agency, but ensures there is a long-tail of success.

“We never just come in and like do the work for an agency and then leave, both because that wouldn’t work literally at all as there’s nothing about that that would be tenable. They own and run their systems and are the key decision makers for the long term. We ended up doing always in our programs is coming in building an integrated team with agency and their vendors and really running the program together to improve the digital services,” she said. “Through the course of working together, there’s a tremendous amount of knowledge that’s transferred. We give them a hands on training and how to build digital services, and a lot of them have a lot of experience so some of it is just updates to some pieces of IT. But we definitely focus very much on leaving agencies with the tools that they need to continue doing this work.”

Of course that work will become more difficult the rest of this fiscal year as Congress rescinded $10 million from the $200 million in funding USDS received through the American Rescue Plan Act.

Hsiang said the rescission, of course, was disappointing, but it will not prevent USDS from doing its work.

“It’s something that was broadcasted early so we can do some planning around it. Ultimately, this impacts and impedes our ability to invest, particularly in some of the major programs that we were working to update and improve for all of the agencies,” she said. “This will result in a slight decrease in our program for interagency hiring initiatives and supporting agencies in that way.”

The post USDS measures its impact in longevity, not just raw numbers first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Army has a plan to no longer “fight the network.”

Through the Unified Network Operations (UNO), initiative, the Army wants to create an agile, software-defined network that is easy to set up and use. This is the opposite of what soldiers currently must deal with then setting up a tactical network that requires on-premise hardware, cables and unique knowledge and skillsets.

The Army is laying the groundwork for this new network set up under UNO in a new draft request for proposals that Lt. Col. Keith Jordan, the product manager for Tactical Cyber and NetOps, in the Army’s Program Executive Office Command Control Communications-Tactical (PEO-C3T) said will bring efficiency, ease of use and, most importantly, meet the needs of commanders more readily.

“There’s a time component of how long it takes to make the network operate. That’s a concern. But also, it’s a manpower issue. It’s specialized training and skills that our signal soldiers are required to have in order to make all these different components of network work, both from a hardware perspective, a cabling, a software interoperability issue perspective and troubleshooting. So there’s a lot of different factors that the soldiers have to go through to make the network work,” Jordan said in an exclusive interview with Federal News Network. “When they are having to do those tasks across multiple items, one-by-one, it does take a lot more time. And depending on a unit, you’re going to always have a degree of soldiers that have the right requisite training and the right requisite experience. So there’s always a little bit of inefficiency built into that model. What we’re looking to do through this is to really improve that inefficiency, and make it much more a much simpler task for those soldiers, especially if we’re not fully manned that at each unit to do that mission.”

PEO-C3T has been leading the UNO effort for the better part of two years and the draft RFP is the second piece of a three-pronged effort to create this new software-defined network.

Jordan said the draft solicitation, for which responses are due by July 17, will help inform its long term plans to bring in commercial technologies and take advantage of cloud services. PEO-C3T expects to issue a final RFP for this multiple award indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract in early 2025 and make awards in early 2026.

In the meantime, Jordan said the Army will soon award “several” other transaction agreements (OTAs) to examine prototypes of what UNO may look like.

“The Army acquisition executive last year decided that UNO would utilize the software acquisition pathway. This is a new pathway under the adaptive acquisition framework that really is focused on how we manage, contract and deliver software capability to the Army. It’s different than what we might typically see under the some of the older pathways. This really is a revolution of thinking in the Army of how we recognize that software is different than hardware and it needs to be procured differently,” he said on Ask the CIO. “Really, what that does is it allows us to deliver capability incrementally versus like a big bang where the product is done all at once. We recognize that this will not be done right off the bat, you’ll get updates to the capability over time and each time we make an update, the capability will get more and more mature, more and more capable. The whole idea is we’re able to rapidly make these updates versus in the past where it may take a really long time to make an update. We want to update very often based on feedback in whatever theater we might be operating in.”

Army testing prototypes through OTA

Through the OTA process, Jordan said vendors will demonstrate SDN capabilities that can bring together several disparate systems and handle a large number of users over a several month period.

He said the vendors will demonstrate the SDN capabilities in the lab and in the field so soldiers can provide real-time feedback and the contractors can add or change the network as required.

Jordan said “usability” and “simplicity” will be key concepts that the Army wants to see in the prototypes.

“We think by doing that we’re going to really get down to a good vendor, and then following that, we’re going to pursue a FAR-based contract that will allow a lot more vendors to get in the mix and be able to deliver various capabilities,” he said. “We don’t know how many vendors we’re going to end up with so that’s why the window [for timing] is a little bit difficult. But we think between late 2024 and 2025, we’ll be able to complete that [OTA award] process. Then as we go into the prototype phase, the idea would be that’s a little bit of a longer phase because there’ll be a downselect. We’re not going to take the same amount of vendors from the lab to the field. We’re going to take those vendors out to the field and that’ll be a little bit longer because what we do want to do is see their agile development process and we want to be able to see as a soldier provides feedback to a particular company, we want to see him make the changes that we’re looking for. It’s not just about the technology, it’s also going to be about the company’s ability to manage the process.”

Jordan said the network of the future will depend on agile and DevSecOps process, where signal soldiers will not have to have special skillsets.

The future network also will enable commanders to make faster and better decisions as data will be easier to get and use.

“We’ve had to fight the network for a long time. This will help us be able to get the network up and running efficiently, tailored to our mission needs and operationalize it,” Jordan said. “For industry, there’s going to be lots of opportunities inside UNO to deliver unique and value added capabilities to the network. We’re really excited because there is so many opportunities for businesses, both small and large, to deliver capability inside the network, around things that we haven’t even thought of yet that we may want. As long as our vendors are able to operate in a modular open system approach, and that we’re able to integrate capability into that architecture in a rapid and easy to do methodology, we’re really going to be successful.”

The post With UNO, Army intends to stop battling its own network first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and NASA are collaborating with eight American universities for the second year of the Mission Concept Program. The program provides universities with assistance in helping students gain skills focused on early satellite mission design, through mentorship and guidance from space professionals. The Space Hour host Eric White had the chance to speak with two folks who are a part of the program, Seth Sisneros is a systems engineer with AFRL’s space vehicle directorate, and Emi Colman is deputy program manager for the lab’s University Nanosatellite Program.

Interview Transcript: 

Emi Colman  So, the mission concept program is something one of the efforts within the University Nanosatellite program. So just to give some more context there, University Nanosatellite program or UMP has existed since 1999. So, we’re in our 25th year, super exciting. We’re a STEM education focused program that is here to support universities and their labs to build satellites. So, the Mission Concept program really birthed a couple years ago. It’s a joint program with NASA Kennedy Space Center, and CSLI or CubeSat Launch Initiative, specifically. So, what we’re really trying to target here is new universities just trying to get into this space. It’s our entry level summer program to teach schools with mission design and concepting of their satellite. We ran it for the first-time last year, we’re doing it again this year, we’re super excited. And we really want to increase opportunities to schools that want to dip their toes into this small satellite industry. So that is what UMP is doing within the Air Force Research Lab. We are providing the curriculum and the funding. We’re also giving internships to these 24 students this year through Space Dynamics Laboratory, which is another contractor. Within this and my role, specifically, I’m the deputy program manager of University Nanosatellite program or UMP. So, my responsibility is to, you know, coordinate the logistics and make sure that, you know, everyone has equal say, between AFRL and NASA, you know, refining the curriculum. From the last time we did it last year, and just making sure that the ship is moving, so to say.

Eric White  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I’ll get back to you on the on those changes and curriculum that you all made from the first year. Seth, why don’t you talk a little bit about things on the engineering side? And where do you fit in? And all this?

Seth Sisneros  Yeah, so as a systems engineer, what we do here within AFRL is really the entire the entire satellite build. On the engineering side, we’re teaching students the entire satellite build from cradle to grave, I mean, the entire concept, the engineering concept, seeing engineer development, and then the post development of these missions. So, we teach students, how do they go through designing their mission statement, designing their objectives, designing the requirements, understanding their customer, their stakeholder? And what is it they truly want out of a mission, and then they translate through systems engineering knowledge and practice that we give them in this curriculum. What really matters and how technically feasible is that? That’s really what we’re evaluating here. And what we’re teaching students is the systems engineering knowledge or practice to have feasible, successful missions within small satellites. It’s difficult, right? It’s not exactly rocket, or rocket science. But you know, it’s up there, it’s hard to do. A lot of people will underestimate or say, hey, it’s just small satellites, because that’s the world that we’re working in right now, Eric, just for background there. But you know, small satellites are still satellites. It’s still hard work. And so, it goes through these students go through a rigorous program through multiple reviews that we would see a flight missions from the Air Force and from the Space Force actually go through. So that’s through a slew of multiple reviews of the system concept review of system requirements review, and then eventually to critical design review or preliminary design review. So, it’s rigorous and stuff, but it’s meant to be that way so that the students really understand really get a good foundation for understanding the concept of mission design.

Eric White  Yeah, let’s stay here because you know, the UMP has been around since 1999. But you really only have started to see the actual mean just from a person who covers it. standpoint, I’m sure you’ll disagree with me, but you really have only starting to see a lot of heavy use in the idea and concept of nanosatellites, and cube sats and things like that. Only recently. I mean, can you just kind of give us what you think of the standpoint of where things are currently and where this program could fit into that and building a workforce of the future.

Seth Sisneros  Yeah, totally. It’s 25 Year program. And so, for myself, it’s almost a little bit limited point of view here with my experience within UNP, but just for the workforce side of things, because it’s 25 years, we’ve met a lot of people ourselves. So, between myself and Emi, and just other people, we know who UNP alumni are, there are a lot of UNP alumni who’ve graduated from multiple universities working in all areas of aerospace. So, whether they’re working for federal agencies, such as NASA, or for other DoD agencies, such as SSC, the Space Systems Command, or even AFRL, we’ve hired over 50 UNP alumni within our space vehicle structure alone, which is a lot it’s a lot of people. We’re estimating is anywhere between, and Emi, feel free to check me on this, 7000 to 8000 people who have graduated have gone out into industry. And so, we’ve met a lot of those alumni through other industry partners or contractors, so through Northrop Grumman, or through Boeing, Ball Aerospace, you know, just for a few examples there. So, we’ve seen these students really change the landscape of small satellites and of pushing forward and systems engineering practices that we’re teaching them. Right. Yeah. I mean, do you have anything to add on to that?

Emi Colman  Yeah, I think 8000 is the estimate that’s currently in my head. And with this mission concept program, UNP has formally reached and formally mean, meaning that, you know, there was a formal proposal process and all of that stuff. We’ve reached 53, universities, US universities. So, we’re really encouraged by that number. And to kind of hit a piece of your question, Eric, although I don’t remember the specific question. Yeah, UNP exist as a workforce development STEM program for, you know, the small satellite industry, the government, you know, kind of like our whole nation, in a sense, we’re not one of our focus areas is technology development. Although that’s not our first and foremost focus. Our main focus is education. And really educating the students on like Seth said, the systems engineering principles and practices when they’re a freshman in college, so that they have this real-world experience from the cradle to grave. They’ve done some, you know, actual satellite design. And then, you know, once they get to the workforce, they’re, they’re that much further ahead. And it’s super impactful to them as a person as well.

Eric White  I promised I wouldn’t, I’m going to stick to it here. You know, this is the second year of the Mission Concept program, if you could just lay out a couple of the changes that you saw in the curriculum from year to year and tell us a little bit about those universities participating this year? And how do you all measure success when it comes to the Missions Concepts program?

Emi Colman  So, I’ll start in Seth, feel free to jump in changes to the curriculum, we wanted a bit more hands on. aspect. So, within UNP sits within the small satellite portfolio at Air Force Research Labs are AFRL. So, we have a satellite a CubeSat in space right now. So, you know, we were throwing around the idea in the office of Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if we had the students actually operate this satellite? So, Seth is actually focusing on doing a satellite operations week with these students. And it’s kind of a surprise, we haven’t told them yet. But we’re we will take them through, you know, a lecture series on, you know, the ground considerations, and how do you operate a satellite, and then we’ll actually get, let them operate the satellite. So we wanted to show kind of like the end cycle of the satellite design process to then help inform how to mission concept because once you have an actual, I guess, data point where you’re actually doing it, it kind of helps with this more abstract mission design mission concepting, more of the beginning side of the satellite design. Another thing that we’re doing is, we’re working with Jet Propulsion Lab, JPL, NASA, JPL, and their F prime software framework. So, some NASA folks are coming out here and giving a workshop on their software, which we’re super excited about JPL have run this a couple times. Once at like the small satellite conference. They do this with a bunch of different universities. So, we’re excited to expose our students to more technical software considerations.

Seth Sisneros  Yeah, and just to add on to there. Emi is spot on. She hit a few of the, like, specific examples of that we’ve changed to this curriculum, but like to more encompassing, I guess, our broader scope Eric on in terms of changes to the curriculum, and what we’re trying to do Is pack as much of the entirety of a satellite’s life and give all that knowledge. But really, it’s a fire hose that we’re giving to the students in a span of two to three months. So, we’re trying to show Hey, this is how long this is the in depth, give them a preview a peek into the years and the time and expertise that takes into building a satellite. But we’re giving them a peek into that now within two to three months in this crash course of a program. And so, these students really get the valuable opportunity. As you know, earlier, I alluded to like cradle to grave operations. Because that takes so many years, these students, you know, within this time span, obviously, can’t take part of that. But what we’re doing is we’ve been adding a curriculum, we’ve been adding experts’ expertise, specific topics from that we’ve learned within our branch, about satellite operations and commanding. We added in these topics to these students say, Hey, you’re not going to be you know, years off for making a satellite. But keep in mind, you need to work on new ground, your ground station, keep in mind that you need to work on your flight software, keep in mind that this is what satellite operations is actually looking like for a satellite in orbit today. So not only we’re giving them the chance to fly satellite, giving them the chance to work with hardware the we’ve developed, but also to, you know, by time they get into industry in their own or while they’re in college working on their own satellite mission, they can have that in mind the entire time looking towards the future. That’s the part of the, you know, overall scope and change in curriculum that I would say we’ve made this, so far this year.

Emi Colman  Another big piece of the Mission Concept program that we hadn’t mentioned was the reason why we’re targeting people that are just wanting to step into the small satellite industry is because we have a lot of opportunities for university, you know, NASA CSLI, us, NSF has stuff, there’s a lot of different STEM opportunities, but they’re competitive with their proposal process. So, one of the outcomes of that we’re hoping to do is to make their proposals a bit more on par with the competition. So although we’re not directly doing like a proposal writing workshop, we are having a principal investigator, the professors in the PI’s, a focus lecture series, where we take in professors that have been doing this for the past 20 years, or the past 15 years, or just started and kind of let them network let them have, you know, an intimate conversation on, you know, how do you start your lab? How do you get students excited? How do you retain lab knowledge across years? How do you actually close a satellite? So, we’re actively having these conversations this summer. And that’s been a huge change that we did in the curriculum, with the hope that these PI’s and professors and the labs and the universities can kind of have, you know, some sort of foundation to start, as well.

Eric White  Let me set the table here. And Seth, maybe give you the last word on where you think this could all be going and how this will kind of evolve over time as the industry itself evolves? Pretty quickly. I would have to say, I don’t know if you agree with that. But I’ll get your insight here.

Seth Sisneros  Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Yeah, I totally agree. I think the landscape is has been changing dramatically. I mean, even just, you know, talking about like launch vehicles alone. We’ve seen the landscape of launch vehicles and flights that are happening regularly changed dramatically. It’s increased dramatically. We’re having reasonable rockets, right. We’re having flights with highest success rates; with less harm or damage we’ve seen ever before right revving two to three launches. We, you know, we just kicked off the program, Kennedy Space Center, and one of our partners in this, Jose Nunez from NASA, he was mentioning how you know, launches are happening every you know, it’s every week for two to three times a week, which is unprecedented. It’s huge. So yeah, we’re expecting the, from this. The Mission Concept program is going to play into that by maturing universities and maturing the students themselves and their satellite hardware and software understanding and in their systems engineering practices, but also the university PIs themselves. So, the professors, the professors who are getting new into the world of satellite technology, the university labs, so the laboratories, enabling them to work on this technology at a faster pace, and with more hardware experience, more software experience in mind. So yeah, we definitely plan to see a change in there in these universities, university lab students and the laboratories. And from there, it’s only going to exponentially grow, at least from what I’m anticipating personally, because these students will then go into the workforce and, you know, continue to push this technology forward. Yeah, so we’re expecting a huge change for us, in particular with UNP. We’re planning to release another RFP later this year for our Nanosat 12 or Nanosat cycle, yeah. So, we’re actually anticipating a lot of these universities have participated with us last year for summer 2023. And for this summer of 2024, we’re actually anticipating a lot of them to use the ideas that we taught them last summer and this summer through the Mission Concept program and assessing the technical feasibility of the proposals that they get to us. So yes, we’re very positive. We’re looking forward to seeing a high growth rate from our next Nanosat cycle with these university students who are involved in this who’ve never had a chance to before.

Eric White  That’s Cisneros, a system engineer with the Air Force Research Laboratory. You also heard from me Colman, who is deputy program manager for the labs University Nanosatellite program. You can find this interview along with all of our interviews and previous episodes at Federal News network.com Search the space hour. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts.

The post A sneak peek at the newest class of engineers from an Air Force and NASA collaboration first appeared on Federal News Network.

There are a lot of regulatory boxes you need to check to get your space project underway. This can be hard for companies with smaller budgets and legal resources. To help, the firm Aegis Space Law has created a regulatory calculator tool to help commercial space companies understand which regulations apply to them. To learn more, The Space Hour host Eric White got the chance to talk to Bailey Reicheldt who is a partner at Aegis.

Interview Transcript: 

Bailey Reicheldt   We’ve developed with what we’re calling the space regulatory calculator. It’s a free tool posted on our website, a bunch of regulatory attorneys at Aegis Space law. We built it because we wanted to come up with a tool that could just give our clients an idea of what the regulatory timelines and costs even look like before they even engage with an attorney or start going down the route of talking to regulators. So, Aegis Space law, we’re in a niche, boutique law firm. We work with a lot of space startup clients. And over our last four years of working with those startups, we realized more and more that there’s kind of a regulatory valley of death that they run into, because they’re very focused on the technology and getting investment. And they leave regulations as the last leg of that, when they get to the regulations, they suddenly realize, oh, some of these timelines are two years long, you know, and they’re already signing commercial contracts. And they’re trying to get launch agreements in place commercially. And the spectral allocation they might need from the FCC could take them a really long time. So, they don’t quite realize how long those timelines are, or that they can be very expensive. So, export licensing under the State Department costs money, licenses with the SEC cost money. And that’s just the regulatory fees and application fees, getting people to help you build this stuff can also be equally expensive. So, we created this tool. And it’s really simple logic it’s a decision tree. And it answers three primary questions for a US based Space company, starting their regulatory journey. It tells you which of the primary agencies you’re going to need to talk to, the federal agencies, how long the timeline is, from application to submission to possibly getting your license. Now, it doesn’t take into account how long it takes you to even build the application, but from submission to getting it back. And about how much it’s going to cost you it gives you the regulatory fees. So, we think that just putting that out there on the internet, and it at least gives people some idea of the journey they’re about to go on, hopefully allows them to prepare a little better. So that we see fewer space startups hitting that regulatory valley of death.

Eric White   Yeah, is it you know, you use the word startup. So that generally means that it’s folks who may have some experience in the business, but are just getting their feet wet at this moment? Have you noticed in working with a lot of your clients that they’re just not aware of the regulatory burden that is required for this kind of work? Or how shocked I guess, is my real question of, you know, when something when you give someone a timeline, and they go what?

Bailey Reicheldt  Well, it’s pretty common that they’re absolutely shocked, especially if they’ve worked for a bigger company, and they’ve had a department that’s been handling this for them. And then they went out and started their own business, they just they have no concept, they were siloed from this information, or say they came from a foreign country and started a company here, which is quite a bit of our commercial space sectors, we have foreign persons coming here to bring their innovations to the US. And it’s not like when you go through immigration, they inform you of US export control law, that just doesn’t happen. So, unless you’re encountering it somewhere in industry in the US, no one’s telling you about it. So, it’s a pretty unreasonable expectation that most people even know how many regulations they’re going to deal with. And even if you go and talk to the agencies, they don’t necessarily understand how onerous the other agencies in this process’s regulations are like, State Department and Department of Commerce worked together quite a bit like on the export front. But the FAA often has no idea about the export licensing piece or SEC has no reason to know about the other regulators. They don’t understand how all their licensing requirements stack up and the timelines and how they run in parallel. So hopefully, it even allows regulators to kind of see how hard it can be for a commercial space company to navigate this process.

Eric White  Yeah, a little bit of look what you made me do, right? Do you have to deal with all of this? So, you know, with all those variables that you just described, I mean, just multiple regulated regulatory agencies having a hand in just launching a new piece of technology. I know that this you’re probably going to tell me that it’s not meant to be super accurate, but how can you guarantee the accuracy of this new tool With all those variables that you have to consider, just, you know, even some paperwork getting lost in the shuffle or anything like that?

Bailey Reicheldt   Oh, absolutely, we can’t guarantee anything, especially when it comes to the regulatory timelines, because some of them are more fixed than others. Regulators can often stop the timelines. For instance, when they go back to an applicant, and they ask for additional information, those timelines will toll until you respond, or the application might get returned to you. And you have to start all over. There’s lots and lots of variables. This is just to get people started asking the right questions and getting an idea, we anticipate there might be a second version of the calculator that comes out with a lot more sophisticated knowledge, or a sophisticated assessment. But that’s going to take us a lot more time to build because that’s actually going to require more than just yes, no questions and branching logic. So that’s, that’s in the works. But yeah, we can’t guarantee those timelines, there’s too many variables. But you should have an idea of whether it’s going to be one month or two years. And that’s still going to be helpful.

Eric White   Yeah, so just doing its part to set expectations, right, you know, with all the talk these days about AI taking over jobs. Or is this a new tool that may actually lighten your workload a little bit.

Bailey Reicheldt   You know, if I can figure out a way for AI to better inform industry, I think we’ll pursue that. I’m not terribly concerned right now. Because there are so many variables, and there’s so much of a human element on this, when you start talking to regulators, there’s a lot of discretion on the regulatory side. Again, for instance, AI is not deciding, oh, I need to go ask them more questions, or let’s apply a different definition of this word like AI is not necessarily making decisions like that. That would cause this timeline extension. So, I’m about terribly concerned.

Eric White   So when we last spoke, you know, this was you had mentioned how niche your law firm actually is, and helping folks in this realm of, you know, the commercial space sector and all the regulations, can you give me a bit of a sense of how have the regulatory agencies behaved, you know, even over the past few years, this is all new for everybody. And they’re also trying to make the adjustments so that there is a successful commercial space entity that they’re not hindering too much of progress. Is that the case? Are they starting to hold hands a little bit better for these folks that are just starting out?

Bailey Reicheldt   That’s an interesting question. I don’t think that regulators are necessarily thinking how can we cater to the burgeoning commercial space industry? So much as they’re thinking about streamlining regulations overall? And how can we keep the American economy competitive in leading technological innovation worldwide? And how can we also protect national security and make it easier for industry to work with us and for us all to be on the same team? And that’s one of the issues I think, with this space industry, when it gets super niche sometimes is we tend to think so at such a granular level, but really, regulators are thinking about many, many things beyond just the tiny space industry. So that’s part of I think, how we have to shift our mindset, for instance, export controls, we are seeing reform, where many things are coming off the ITAR, hopefully many more things off the ITAR going over the EAR, because they’re technology that’s no longer controlled for military application, or it’s become kind of ubiquitous and use around the world. So, it doesn’t have the same need for the national security protections to keep it under the State Department on the United States Munitions List. You know, we’re seeing we’re seeing the government asking industry more for input on what they should control less or put less restrictions around. But I don’t know that the motivators specifically driven on making things easier for commercial space so much as the economy overall.

Eric White   Gotcha. And, you know, you had mentioned how you were kind of hoping that regulators may even use this tool just to show what the regulatory burden looks like for a startup company, could this be something that, you know, they may contact you for, you know, and utilize this tool for themselves, and maybe even work with you to make it a little more accurate?

Bailey Reicheldt   So, we actually just released it on Tuesday, this past Tuesday, June 5, I don’t know what day it is anymore, but we just released it. And we’ve actually already had some regulators contact us and ask about the second iteration. So, I think you might see that happen. And I do want to clarify, so Department of Commerce Office of Space commerce, they actually are pretty interested in streamlining the regs, they have a mission to streamline the regs for commercial space. So that stands out among the regulators in my mind and how they might do that. We don’t quite know yet. This tool might be part of it. I do want to make sure people know about the tool. We’re putting a whole suite of tools out there Aegis is, over the course of the rest of this year. We’re going to be putting more medicals out, just trying to lower that regulatory barrier, making sure people have resources aggregated in one place that, you know, if you want to go start a space company that the barriers shouldn’t be the regulations and the law, the barriers should be the technological innovation. So, we’re trying our best to put out tools that lower that barrier, making things accessible to companies that you know, they don’t have positive cash flow, yet. We’re very aware that the markets can contract it. And investment into commercial space is contracted right now. So, we’re doing what we can, we’re going to have a lot of tools come out if people want to go use the regulatory calculator, and they have ways they think it could be improved, or they have feedback. I welcome that feedback. And our contact information is, of course, on our website.

Eric White   And I am curious about, have you ever worked with clients who have said, you know, they’ve gotten that timeline that they had no idea about? And said, okay, you know what, this is just too much, we’re going to have to move on to something else. Has that been the case with maybe not even a client? But you’ve heard stories?

Bailey Reicheldt   Yeah, so a really obvious one for me is on the export control side. That’s where I spend a lot of my time. If someone tells me, hey, we want to hire this foreign person to come work with us on this program, and I tell them, Okay, we can get permission for them to have access to that controlled information, but it’s going to take about six months, a lot of times that that changes the equation of who they might hire, when they figure out that oh, this person would sit in pending regulatory approval to receive certain technology for six months before they could even start work. But, you know, we’ve actually we’ve pursued some more aggressive licenses, especially on the telecommunication side, and we’ve been able to turn things around much more quickly than we ever thought we would honestly so if we can find a way to turn licensing and talk to regulators fast if we can. If we think we have a shot. We’ll take the shot, but we’ve tried to be realistic with people too.

The post A new tool to help startups navigate through the many, many, many space regulations first appeared on Federal News Network.

Voyager Space has entered into an agreement with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center to help develop an airlock for the Mars Transit Vehicle, also referred to as Deep Space Transport. It’s a 12-month study that will look at the applying the concept of Voyager’s Bishop Airlock design, currently being utilized on the International Space Station, towards a future mission to Mars. To learn more, the Space Hour host Eric White spoke with Marshall Smith, Chief Technology Officer for Voyager Space.

Interview Transcript: 

Marshall Smith  So, basically, when I was working in NASA, and NASA has always been on the plan to go to Mars. Or, you know, if you go look back at the legislation back in 2010, you know that the end goal is to go to Mars, we are going to the moon, but all in process of going to Mars. So one of the things that that’s really important and going to Mars is you need to be able to keep the mass as low as possible, the amount of things that you push out to Mars and back, we have developed an airlock that we actually self-funded and put on the ISS International Space Station. One of the tasks that it does is ejects garbage, it gets garbage away, and we can point it wherever we want to and, and get garbage out of the ISS, which is a really big deal. And so, if you’re going to be traveling to Mars, and back for, you know, many, many months along the way, mass is really important. So, when we look at how do you get rid of the garbage, this is one of the ways you can do that. So, we’ve been talking with NASA, NASA has been talking to us Marshall Space Flight Center about the ability to take the Bishop Airlock and develop a smaller version of that that can be used on the Mars transit vehicle. That’s the vehicle that’s going to go take crew and cargo from here, from the Earth to Mars and back.

Eric White  So, was it that feature of the Bishop Airlock design the ability to dispose of trash? That is, you know, in a controlled manner? Was that the main reason why you think that they are interested in it for this long journey where you know, the humans they’re going to generate some waste while they’re while they’re taking that trip?

Marshall Smith  Yeah, actually, that is their primary reason. You know, obviously, the bishop airlock, we can talk about that in a minute, if you want about all the things it can do it can do payloads and launch payloads into space and those types of things. But when you’re on a trip between Earth and Mars, you’re probably more functional. I’m going to use it as a trash injection system. There are some other things that can be done with it as well. And we can we’re going to look at some of those opportunities as well. But I think that’s their primary interest.

Eric White  Yes. And you did have that correct. I would like to get a little bit more into the actual Bishop Airlock design itself. What else can it do? And are there other things that I can do that would be utilized on a mission to Mars?

Marshall Smith  Yeah, so let’s talk about Bishop a second, a second. First of all, as I said, Before, it was a self-funded program, you know, we looked at the ability to launch payloads and to do pilot and you know, a modified payload, do things with them and put them out and expose them to vacuum. And, you know, Voyager came up with this idea of building an airlock. And this is a very large airlock, actually, it’s about five times larger than the current size airlock, that is that is on the vehicle. On the ISS. It’s a four cubic meter bell shaped canister, if you will, that attaches the tranquility module on the ISS. It uses the ISS arm that came with the arm to go down and grab the canister, if you will, the Bishop Airlock, and we’ll pull it away. And they can actually move it around and point in any direction that that you want to maybe point at, particularly if you have payloads that want to look a certain direction, or you want to launch payloads in a certain direction, or if you wanted to launch trash so that it burns up appropriately, and then doesn’t get you know, in the way of hitting anything on the ISS or even being close to anything on the ISS or any operations that are going on. And use as a berthing port, which is different than a docking port. It’s actually much larger, it’s pretty large, I think it’s about six feet seven inches, or Americans are about two meters, or for Europeans of others. And the size itself is kind of a common berthing mechanism that CBM which allows it to be very large, you know, an astronaut can actually get in the, the actual and put his, his or her arms out. And, you know, stretch around and move. And one of the cool things about it is there’s a lot of volume in there. So we can actually put a lot of payloads inside this, we can work in a shirtsleeve environment, because when it’s actually on the ISS, there’s a hatch and the hatches opened up and so the crew can go in and work and assemble payloads and check things out and make sure everything’s good to go and close the hatch and then you can depress it, and the arm will then move it away and point it wherever it needs to be pointed. And the other thing that it has is the ability to actually have external payloads mounted to the side of it as well. for a longer duration type of activities that you want to do.

Eric White  We’re speaking with Marshall Smith. He’s the chief technology officer for Voyager space. And so is this the I imagine this isn’t the sort of thing that was on the ISS when the ISS was first put up. I mean, the ISS is a giant Lego project anyway, it was this something that was put in after the ISS was already in orbit.

Marshall Smith  Yeah, actually, it’s only been up for about four years or so three or four years, we launched this, this was an idea that we had, we went to NASA and said, hey, we would like to do this. So, this is actually self-funded, commercially owned and operated by border space, it’s one of the only commercial properties, they may be the only commercial property on the International Space Station that is owned by another company, not a government. So, we came in assets. And we believe this is a really good concept that can offer opportunities to do payloads and get more commercial activities going. And it’s done just that. And like I said, it’s been a very efficient way to use and expose systems to space and vacuum and to deploy payloads, etc. Those types of things.

Eric White  And to throw a curiosity question in there, you had mentioned some of the reasoning why you would want to be able to aim where you’re actually shooting off any trash into space, you know, for obvious reasons, you don’t want to hit anything, but it was that you know, something that NASA was actually looking for. I know you said you approached them. But was that something that they were like, oh, wow, that would be a big help.

Marshall Smith  Actually, that kind of developed, you know, we were coming at it from the standpoint of payloads and being able to deploy payloads and launch payloads in space. But the whole concept of getting rid of trash. Trash management is a really big activity on the International Space Station, because obviously, humans create a lot of trash. And we do the best we can to keep that down as much as possible. But the only time you can really get rid of trash is when you have a cargo ship come up, it brings on more cargo, and then you can pack the trash into the cargo ship, and then it can be deployed and burned up and in the atmosphere. Well, if there’s a way to get it out quicker and easier, then that’s better. So, we developed a squirt like if you will, a trash bag that we can actually put on the inside of the Bishop Airlock, and then turn around and deploy it and get rid of that. And that became very interesting to NASA, because it helped really helps dramatically with the trash management system.

Eric White  It’s Venus’s problem now, right?

Marshall Smith  It burns up. But if we’re on the way to Mars, then then obviously we’ll want to point it in a way that maybe gets incinerating the sun eventually, or something along those lines.

Eric White  Gotcha. Okay. And so yeah, let’s talk about the future in that trip to Mars, the design for the new airlock would be categorized as the Red Knight. And allow me to oversimplify again, you said you want to know they want to a smaller version of the Bishop design is it just going to be a matter of just shrinking down every element to fit whatever vehicle is going to be used? Or are other things going to be factored in?

Marshall Smith  Pretty much, you know, we’re looking to maintain the belt jar shape, and we have the form factor itself, the seals and mechanisms probably can be reused. We’re also going to look at some lessons learned from the ISS and dealing with you know, disposing wet garbage and those types of things. You know, when we, when we started doing it, we learned a few things, oh, we got to make a little modification here or there. So, we’re going to make some opportunity, the opportunity to put some upgrades in there and make sure that the system can operate as best it can in that environment. It like said it will be designed to be smaller, because, you know, on your way to Mars, you’re really just looking to probably eject trash maybe on a weekly basis. You know, because every grand you carry unnecessarily is a required skill to be the push that system along. So, we want to we want to get rid of the trashes relatively soon as possible.

Eric White  And not so much worried about any payloads. Right? I imagine that nobody they’re not going to make a pit stop or anything along the way, are they?

Marshall Smith  It’s kind of hard to make pit stops. Once you do what’s called a trans Mars Mars injection burner, TMI, you’re not really stopping because then you have to turn around and do a burn to slow yourself down. So that requires a lot of fuel, so there’s really no points to stop along the way.

Eric White  Marshall Smith is Chief Technology Officer for Voyager space.

The post Applying tech being used on the ISS toward a future mission to Mars first appeared on Federal News Network.

The intelligence community’s new IT roadmap lays out a plan to pursue artificial intelligence “at scale,” as IC technology leaders develop guidance for AI standards and services.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence published the roadmap, “Vision for the IC Information Environment,” late last month. In an exclusive interview, IC Chief Information Officer Adelle Merritt said the roadmap calls for “bold and transformational investments” in technology. She said the roadmap was developed in coordination with all 18 elements of the intelligence community.

“This roadmap really provides a unified vision for where the IC needs to go over the next five years,” Merritt said on Inside the IC.

The strategy makes clear that officials believe AI is poised to “transform the IC’s mission.” It describes several efforts to advance “AI at scale” through 2030.

“Secure, generative, and predictive AI can reduce the time for intelligence insights from days or weeks to mere seconds,” the document states.

By fiscal 2025, intelligence community officials will develop enterprise guidance for AI, including standards, use policies and architectures, to guide how intelligence agencies adopt the technology. The IC’s recently designated chief AI officer is also leading the development of a new IC-wide AI strategy.

The roadmap also shows that between fiscal 2026 and 2029, officials plan to establish “AI enabling services at scale,” including a model repository and training data.

Merritt said ODNI officials need to move quickly with their guidance to keep up with the rapidly evolving state of AI.

“It is critically important that we focus on getting this out and not let it languish, because things are moving on,” she said. “The world has started to adopt this. And it’s a really exciting capability.”

At the same time, Merritt emphasized that the IT roadmap’s five focus areas and 19 initiatives can’t be done in isolation.

“It is a collection of things that all must be done,” she said. “It’s not something that’s ala carte, that you can pick and choose what you decide you want to work on.”

‘Optimizing’ the IC’s cloud

The intelligence community’s successful use of AI will in large part depend on other elements of the roadmap, including cloud computing, data management and cybersecurity.

“As a CIO, when I hear about AI, I quickly think, you’re going to need a lot of data in order to do AI,” Merritt said. “And to have all that data, I’m going to need to store it. I’m also going to need to process it. And I’m going to need to move it around from where I get it to where the users are. So when I hear AI as a CIO, I’m thinking, storage, compute and transport.”

The roadmap lays out a key initiative to “optimize” the intelligence community’s use of the cloud. Intelligence agencies had initially adopted cloud infrastructure using Amazon Web Services under the CIA’s “C2S” contract. But agencies are now moving to the CIA’s “C2E” contract, which includes five major cloud vendors.

Merritt says four of the major cloud providers have now received an authority-to-operate on the IC’s classified networks.

“So we now have some of the best cloud capability on the planet available to us, and so making sure that we continue to nurture that infrastructure underneath upon which all the amazing capabilities will be added,” Merritt said.

In fiscal 2025, the roadmap describes how the intelligence community will develop “a tool, methodology, or process to help IC elements determine which approach and service provider would be most appropriate to meet their individual requirements.”

Merritt said a multi-vendor cloud environment is “critical” for the IC

“It is critically important that we turn the different capabilities that each of these unique cloud service providers have and turn them into mission advantage, and not just resort to the lowest common denominator,” she said. “And so much as we learned how to operate in a single cloud environment, we are now turning our attention to learn how to operate and thrive in a multiple cloud environment.”

Zero trust steering committee

The roadmap also homes in “robust cybersecurity” as a key focus area. And the IC’s strategy for zero trust largely lines up with the Defense Department’s timelines for adopting the security architecture.

The strategy states the intelligence community will achieve a “basic” level of zero trust maturity by Sept. 30, 2025, and an “intermediate” state by Sept. 30, 2027.

Merritt said the IC has also established a “zero trust steering committee” to guide those efforts. The committee includes officials from all 18 elements of the intelligence community.

“Some of our elements have done some amazing things on their zero trust journey, and they have been very willing to share,” she said. “So we’ve had some technical exchanges where we brought in subject matter experts in a specific area invited technical experts from across the elements to learn and to ask questions, so we can accelerate our journey by sharing our knowledge.”

Meanwhile, the roadmap also highlights the move to post-quantum cryptography. “Cryptographic security in a post-quantum world will be pivotal for safeguarding data and digital communications,” the document states. “This includes the development and deployment of advanced cryptographic algorithms designed to be secure against threats from quantum computers, both in commercially available and government devices.”

By fiscal 2027, the intelligence community plans to deploy quantum-resistant cryptography solutions “to bolster the confidentiality of IC networks and transport services,” the plan shows.

Merritt said the IC is working on the plan for deploying quantum-resistant algorithms in the coming years.

“It is important that we do this in a deliberative, thoughtful way, because whenever you start to change technology, you do open up some risk,” she said. “And so when we talk about this as being a race, we can’t be moving so fast that we get sloppy on this.”

The post Intelligence community pushes for ‘AI at scale’ under new IT roadmap first appeared on Federal News Network.

New tools and better data are putting the CFO community in a stronger position to do more to reduce improper payments and fraud in federal programs.

The Joint Financial Management Improvement Program (JFMIP) recognized this opportunity in its new three-year plan that it hopes can spur even more progress to ensure agencies are paying the right amount to the right people in a timely manner.

David Lebryk, the fiscal assistant secretary at the Treasury Department, said the JFMIP three-year strategy outlines three pillars of effort that will give agencies tools, best practices and guidance to do more to prevent fraud and improper payments.

“It’s focusing on prevention. It’s promoting best practices, and it’s strengthening the partnerships. The Treasury piece that I think is very much important here is focusing on that prevention. What tools can Treasury bring to the payment process that can actually really help reduce and prevent process fraud from happening?” Lebryk said on Ask the CIO. “The second pillar, which is promoting best practices, was about working with agencies. The Office of Management and Budget has done some good work with this, as well as when a new program has stood up. Do you put controls in place up front that help reduce the potential for improper payments? There are really a number of things you can do like doing risk assessment in your program and you can talk about different data that you need from recipients that you can get from them.”

As part of the focus on prevention, Lebryk said his office has launched several programs where Treasury followed many of the steps outlined in the JFMIP strategy to prevent and reduce fraud in large programs.

In helping local communities recover from the Deep Horizon oil spill back in 2010, Lebryk said ahead of implementing the Resources and Ecosystems Sustainability, Tourist Opportunities, and Revived Economies of the Gulf Coast States Act (RESTORE Act), Treasury designed the program to make sure recipients understood the requirements to apply for funding as well as controls to make sure the money went to the right people.

“We’ve had no fraud in that program that we’re aware of because we’ve really focused on those controls in the design of the program up front. We haven’t had an issue about slowing payment down. It does prove there’s opportunity, both to be quick, but also careful in the issuance of money,” he said. “In the third pillar, which was strengthening partnerships, it comes down to doing more with the states, the inspector general community and other government agencies to really strengthen those partnerships. I think we’re very confident that it’s going to have a real major impact and there’s a real commitment across the different entities to make sure it works.”

Increased focus on improper payments

The JFMIP strategy outlines strategies and objectives for each pillar based on the work by Treasury, OMB, the Government Accountability Office and others.

Both Congress and the Biden administration have increased focus on preventing fraud and improper payments as well as recovering lost money due to bad actors. The Government Accountability Office estimated that agencies spent $236 billion improperly in fiscal 2023, which was down about $11 billion, as compared to 2022.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers have introduced at least eight bills since February 2023 focused on improper payments and fraud. A recent one from Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, called the Fraud Prevention and Recovery Act, would, among other things, give resources to agency IGs to investigate people who committed pandemic fraud and recover the taxpayer dollars and create a new fund to help agencies prevent fraud and identity theft through a new early warning system for detecting fraud.

The Justice Department’s COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force (CFETF), for example, reported in April that it “charged more than 3,500 defendants, seized or forfeited over $1.4 billion in stolen COVID-19 relief funds, and filed more than 400 civil lawsuits resulting in court judgements and settlements” since it launched in 2021.

Another administration priority is the rewrite of Circular A-123 internal controls for overseeing and administering programs. OMB’s last major rewrite was in 2016 when it added risk management to its updated internal control processes.

Making A-123 less compliance-based

Lebryk said one of the goals of the A-123 rewrite is to reduce the compliance requirements and make the circular more usable.

“We want to make it less of a compliance exercise and more of a real actual set of practices that will help agencies. Some agencies have been further along in terms of setting up internal programs to actually adhere to the spirit of A-123 and here to the spirit of really trying to reduce the improper payments,” he said. “But again, it’s less so about paperwork and reporting, and more so about how do you make sure you actually make an impact in this area. I think the CFO community can be very helpful in this regard. The CFO community plays a very unique role in that we’re supposed to speak the truth. We have an obligation to raise our hand and say, ‘hey, something isn’t necessarily looking right on the financials.’ We want to make sure that we have integrity and stewardship of government resources, so I think that we can do a better job in a financial community of saying to program agencies, ‘hey, the one way to create problems for you not to be able to meet your program’s mission, is if you do have things like fraud because it means that the right people aren’t getting the money.’”

Treasury already has several tools on new and existing platforms and databases to help agencies move from being reactive to proactive in stopping fraudulent payments. One tool uses machine learning to look for anomalies on paper checks. So far, Treasury has run about 40 million checks through the ML application.

Lebryk said Treasury is the co-chairman of a CFO Council working group, which is determining the impediments for agencies to use these and other fraud prevention tools.

“They’re also doing some important work about creating a fraud catalog that collects trends and fraud, which I think is also very important. But one of these really important workstreams is for us to say, ‘hey, is there something that Treasury can do to make it easier for you to access these tools?’” he said. “Having looked at the government environment over a number of years, one of the real challenges that you have is asking someone to make a systems change. It is a very lengthy, long process because, quite frankly, oftentimes system changes aren’t funded. They can be difficult. So what we’re really looking at is whether there is opportunity for technology to help in this, in terms of things like interfaces with existing systems, which can make it easier to interact. Are there just organizational issues within the agencies that would be helpful if the agency was organized slightly differently or had the information going in one place versus another place, that would mean that you could take action?”

Lebryk added the committee will make a series of recommendations that would lead to improvements with a goal by the end of the year identifying a set of tools that agencies can take more advantage of to prevent fraud and improper payments.

The post New strategy, A-123 update to help reduce improper payments first appeared on Federal News Network.

During this webinar, you will gain the unique perspective of top federal and industry cybersecurity experts:

• La Monte Yarborough, Chief Information Security Officer, Department of Health and Human Services
• Rob Thorne, Chief Information Security Officer, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
• Chris Wallace, Chief of Cybersecurity and Chief Technology Officer, Program Executive Office, Defense Healthcare Management Systems
• Michael Epley, Chief Architect & Security Strategist, Public Sector, Red Hat
• Greg Carl, Principal Technologist, Pure Storage
• Paul Kurtz, Chief Cybersecurity Officer & Field Chief Technology Officer, Splunk
• Moderator: Luke McCormack, Host of the Federal Executive Forum

Panelists also will share lessons learned, challenges and solutions, and a vision for the future.

The post Federal Executive Forum Zero Trust Strategies in Government Progress and Best Practices 2024 first appeared on Federal News Network.

George Mason University will be the site of the recently approved Landolt NASA Space Mission. The mission will kick off in 2029 by launching a light into the sky that will help scientists determine the brightness of stars so they can more accurately study how fast the universe is growing. Leading the mission is GMU associate professor Peter Plavchan, who joined me earlier to discuss.

Interview Transcript: 

Eric White  So why don’t we just start with an overview of how this all came together? And what exactly you all are trying to accomplish with this mission?  

Peter Plavchan  Well,if you want to go way back, you could call it a lightbulb moment. Right? So we had, I was thinking about the challenges we have in astrophysics, and how with certain missions, like the NASA Kepler mission and the NASA test mission, I can point at any star in the sky and measure if it changes in brightness by as little as 0.001%, right? 10 parts per million. But if I point to that same star in the sky, and ask how many actual photons per second are coming from that star, I have to do a little bit of … I might get that number accurate to a few percent. And that’s a big gap of our knowledge. And so I started thinking I had a light bulb moment, what can we do to bridge that gap?  

Eric White  So the gist of it is to send something up into the sky that you know the exact photons that it is letting off so that that way you can then compare and contrast to the stars that you’re seeing. I know I’m oversimplifying it, but is that the basic idea?   

Peter Plavchan  Yeah, absolutely. So I had this idea back in 2017. And there’s plenty of history we can get into. But I was looking at how we measure the brightness of things in the sky. And it dawned on me unintended, that we haven’t changed how we do this. For half a century, we have been using the same four stars in the sky as our anchors, and how we map what our sensors see or digital cameras or going back even further in time, our photomultiplier tubes are equivalent to film these photographic plates, we look at these four stars, and we say okay, here’s a model of how we think the stars work. So that makes a prediction of how bright it should be. And that’s how we map from what we measure on our sensors, to what the actual physical brightnesses are being emitted by the stars in the sky. So those four stars are Vega, which everyone hopefully knows about. You can see it in northern sky most of the year. And three white dwarf stars, which came in vogue a little bit later, that had been anchoring the calibration for the Hubble Space Telescope. What has changed in the last half century, of course, is our sensors or digital cameras, the technology behind those, as well as the models that we have for the atmospheres and radiation coming from those stars. They’ve gotten more sophisticated over the decades, but the way we approach it hasn’t changed. So like, do we believe these models? Do we trust these models? Are they are they doing what we think they do. And in fact, just a couple of years ago. Right when we were getting ready to propose this mission, a new model came out for these three white dwarf stars and the old model and new model disagreed by more than a percent in their predictions of how bright that white dwarf star should be. So if the models are disagreeing with each other, the natural question is, how close are they to the ground truth? So how could we measure the ground truth and that’s when we decided to launch something by working in partnership with NIST, which is like ground zero for how we measure the brightness of things, they set the standard for the country, and then put that in space and look at it with our telescopes. So we know without a doubt, how much light is putting out?  

Eric White  And what do folks like yourself and other NASA astrophysicist use the brightness of stars to determine obviously, there’s an interest in knowing what the universe is doing? Because you know, that’s kind of the bread and butter of space. But do they use that for mapping other routes for other missions? What sorts of tools are at their disposal? If they know that information is super accurate?   

Peter Plavchan  Yeah, you had me worried for a second because we got way into the technical details right away, which is okay, I’m glad we had an audience that’s interested in that. But there’s some amazing science that we’re going to do with this mission, and it’s potentially transformative. And when we thought this mission, I’m an exoplanet astronomer, so I study fancy terms. I’m a discoverer of worlds, the fate of entire planets hangs in the balance of the statistical analysis that I do, right. So kind of imagine a planet vanishing if the statistics show is not real. So we’ve found over 5000 planets around other stars, and it’s been an incredible time over the past quarter century kind of a Golden Age of Discovery of these worlds. So when I was thinking about this problem, I was interested in addressing, how big are these planets? How big are their host stars? How hot are the planets? Like, are they actually in the habitable zone? Are they too hot, too cold. And for the past 25 years, we’ve mostly just kind of wave our hands a little bit and said, it’s roughly the right temperature, give or take. But we wanted to get those numbers more accurately known. And it turns out that until about 2016, about eight years ago, we only knew very precise measurements of the distances to stars from the prior to the Gaia mission, we only knew about 250,000 stellar distances. The Gaia mission when it launched in 26, to 2015 or so gave us the distances to over a billion stars to suddenly, we knew very accurate distances to a lot of these stars that hosts the exoplanet systems we are discovering, and that was no longer question. There’s been this long standing question is the star this size, is it this size, we don’t really know. But we could make some good educated guesses. Well, now we know the distance to the stars really well. And it turns out what limits our understanding now of the habitability conditions, the sizes of these other worlds, is that calibration, how we map what we see with our telescopes, to the physical amount of radiation coming from those stars, hitting those planets and reaching our telescopes here on the ground. So that was what drove me to kind of think about this problem in particular, but then I met some other people, other scientists in my community, and it turns out, they have the same problem. So in cosmology, right, we’re looking at an expanding universe. We’ve known that for almost 100 years now. 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the further away a galaxy was, the faster it was moving away from us. And Nobel Prize was awarded a decade ago, when we not only do we discover that the universe is expanding, but how fast that expansion is happening is accelerating. And the way in which we measure that is by comparing the explosions of certain types of nearby supernovas, to very distant supernovas. And it turns out their ability to calibrate the brightnesses of those distant supernova explosions that happened billions of years ago, billions of light years away to these nearby supernovas also depends on our ability to map how bright something is in the sky that we see with our sensor to real physical amounts of radiation. So two different fields in astrophysics very far separated, right, nearby exoplanets and distant supernova explosions, same problem. That’s how this mission got born, is going to answer some great questions. And to add one more bit to that NASA right now is investing in building the Roman Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. And the National Science Foundation is investing in the Vera C. Rubin observatory down in high Atacama Desert of Chile. All three of these, the case of Rubin a $400 million ish telescope, the Roman observatory, a $3 billion plus mission, the web observatory performing beautifully over $10 billion of US taxpayer money invested, all of them are doing amazing science. But it turns out, we can make that science so much better if we could improve that mapping of brightness to physical units and what we measure with our telescopes. So all three of these facilities, which are coming online, are already online, in the case of the Webb telescope, are going to benefit from this mission when it launches in a few years. We’re speaking with Professor Peter Plavchan, he is with George Mason University. So I’ll get into the actual device itself in a second. But I’m just kind of surprised. And I want to know if that was your reaction that this wasn’t thought of before. I mean, it’s kind of a basic tenet of science that you need a control right to measure something. Why wasn’t this already an idea that NASA was working on?  So that’s a great question. And we have to get a little bit into the history of this. And, you know, there’s an old saying, like, every idea out there has already been thought of there’s nothing under the sun that someone hasn’t already come up with or under the night sky in this case. And when I came up with the idea in 2017, I was like, Oh, look how creative I am. But no, no, I wasn’t the first one to think of this. And people have been thinking about this and working on it for decades. So you go back to the 1970s they would launch sounding rockets into the upper atmosphere to look at Vega and these white dwarf stars. Some early infrared observatories would actually like spit out these little spheres that would radiate heat, and since they knew how big those spheres were, and temperatures of the spheres, they can kind of calibrate their telescopes that way, but it was a much cruder level. And so I wasn’t the only one that started thinking about this recently. And I ended up meeting as we started getting further and developing this concept. About five years ago, we started bringing together a team of people that were interested in doing this. And since the news about our selection came out, other people been coming out of the woodwork, I’d say, Yeah, you know, we’ve been wanting to do this for years. So right time, right idea, and right science.  

Eric White  So let’s talk about the actual device that’s going to be up there. What is it? Is it going to be just a rocket with a flashlight on it? What? What’s it going to be?  

Peter Plavchan  Yeah, so the simplest way to think about it is a light bulb in space. And definitely, this is what NASA considers a very small mission. When you’re operating on that small of a budget for NASA mission, there’s a principle you have to use, called the KISS principle, keep it simple, stupid, right. So we don’t want to have an overly complex payload. And what we’re looking at right now is a series of lasers or light sources that shine light, and that light goes into one of two places. One, it goes points down at the Earth, at a ground based telescope, which we can talk about in a second, or and the other half of the light would go to a sensor on board the spacecraft to monitor how much light the laser is putting out. So we want nice stable lasers that are putting out a steady amount of light. We don’t want a light bulb that’s rapidly changing in temperature and changing its distribution of power at different colors. So we focused in on just a few set of discrete wavelengths with a nice steady power supply to these lasers, so the amount of light coming out is nice and stable. In addition to that we’ve chosen orbits, we’re hoping to put the spacecraft into an orbit was called a geosynchronous orbit or close to geosynchronous orbit, where it orbits the Earth once every time the Earth turns. So from our perspective here on Earth, it’s always in the same part of the sky. And it doesn’t appear to move. It’s the same kind of technology we used to use and still use for satellite communications and our GPS satellites, so that that satellite is going to stay at nice fixed distance between the telescopes on the ground and it place in orbit. So that will also help with things because light spreads out, depending on how far away you are from the light source, we also have to put it far enough away from the telescopes that looks like a star. So we couldn’t say fly a drone above the telescope, that would be too close for these telescopes to get a proper amount of photometric calibration or even a high altitude balloon would be too close. So we had to put it out in space. So the simple part that goes into orbit, it’s actually quite simple. It’s just settled lasers that point to the ground and shine on them. One of the key technological advances we’re taking advantage of here are what are called radiation hearted, single mode fibers. So getting further into that helps stabilize the how much of the light is coming out of lasers. And a lot of the complexity actually happens at the telescopes on the ground, they’re doing this stuff is a lot cheaper than doing it in space. So we can have well characterized filters for the telescopes, and well characterized detectors, what we call flat Fielding. And so a lot of secret sauce is going to happen with those telescopes. When we do the data analysis.   

Eric White  You had slightly mentioned that some other folks have come out of the woodwork to ask you about this project. I’m curious, is this something that not just NASA can use but it’s going to be I imagine utilized by other space agencies in their work as well? Is that what you had in mind when thinking of this project?   

Peter Plavchan  Oh, absolutely. So our mission when it launches roughly targeting 2029 date to be determined. We have right now a one year primary mission scheduled, it’s a very quick development timescale, a very relatively short mission as far as NASA goes. And we’re planning to reserve a fraction of that time for what we call a guest observer program. And a citizen science program. It turns out that when these lasers shine down at these telescopes, it’s not like a little pencil beam, it spreads out. And it’ll spread out about 1000 kilometers or 600 miles or so. So anyone within range, this telescope could look at this artificial star in the sky. Now, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, depending on who you ask, it’s not going to be bright enough for you to see with your eyes. So, it’s pretty faint, you will need a telescope to see it. But there’s gonna be plenty observatories that are gonna want to point their telescopes at this calibration star and calibrate their facilities. So, we have four ground stations as we’re calling them built into the mission, but we’re going to be looking to open up to other professional and citizen science telescopes, operations for them to look at this star in the sky as well.   

Eric White  Alright, so finishing up here, you got the approval, the champagne has been poured. What is the first step that you all are going to take to nail that 2029 timeline that you have set for yourself.  

Peter Plavchan  Yeah, so I’ll tell you actually, the first step was not popping champagne. The first step was actually two weeks of panic. Writing the proposal is one thing, winning it and now we have to execute is another. So, we’re past the panic phase. So, we did pop some champagne after that. We are now in what’s called phase A. So, this is the planning phase of the mission. It lasts a little bit under a year. And at the end of that we have to go to NASA and participate in what’s called a mission design review. And the system requirements review and once we get past that milestone where NASA takes a close look at our mission, they’ll make sure that everything looks like we were ready, we can prove to NASA that we’re ready to build this and fly this operate it. That’s when we so quote, unquote start cutting metal and that’s when we start buying the parts and buying products and putting spacecraft together.  Professor Peter Plavchan is with George Mason University. You can find this interview along with a link to more information at Federal News network.com Search the Space Hour. 

The post You may see one more star up in the night sky soon, only this one will be man-made first appeared on Federal News Network.

The VA is looking at how smart home technologies and wearables like smartwatches could flag when aging and disabled veterans are having a medical emergency.

Joseph Ronzio, VA’s deputy chief health technology officer, said the department is also taking steps to ensure veterans have a stay in who gets this data, and how it may be used.

“Everyone nowadays has some smartness in their home, whether it’s a speaker, whether it’s light switches, whether it’s different types of lights or other physical devices — cameras, motion detectors that leave a digital service,” Ronzio said during a Federal News Network-moderated panel discussion at ATARC’s DevSecOps Summit.

“Most of the time we’re not able to access that digital footprint because it’s kept in a cloud service or a cloud system, and that’s masking to us what’s going on,” he added. “We’ve been able to implement some technologies that have actually been able to unmask it, and then evaluate what is the best kind of healthy and then start detecting where there’s problems.”

This use case hits close to home for VA’s tech leadership. VA’s Chief Health Technology Officer Craig Luigart is a disabled veteran.

Ronzio said Luigart’s Apple Watch has saved his life “multiple times already,” by alerting family members when he’s experienced a medical emergency — and that the same technology can help veterans continue to live in their own homes.

“As we look more and more towards our veteran population who are aging in place and look at the need for skilled nursing beds and skilled nursing facilities over the long haul, or nursing homes, there’s definitely a need for this capability to be refined and developed,” Ronzio said.

The VA pays for disability modifications to veterans’ houses and provides veterans with accessible equipment.

“We are providing those sensors and those technologies. Now we just have to peel the onion on this and start building better algorithms to detect and share that data with caregivers – whether that’s a spouse, whether that’s a child, whether it’s a loved one, whether it’s a friend of the family,” Ronzio said.

As VA continues to develop this project, Ronzio said veterans get to decide who they wish to share data and alerts with, so that that person can support them.

“Everyone always talks about sending data to VA, but we are not ambulance crews, we’re not 9-1-1,” he said. “We need to interact with family members. Having this data available to the family, so that they can understand if that patient’s at a dehydration risk, [or] a fall risk, having mobility challenges, needs to go through advanced rehab — that they can live a happier and healthier life within their home, instead of being put off into a skilled nursing facility or even hospice at a time.”

Ronzio said veterans will always have a say in how their personal data is used.

“Having those data controls in place is tremendously important. From my perspective, I wouldn’t want all of my home data, all of my sleep data, all of my stuff, getting out there to anyone,” he said.

“As we talked about smart homes, my goal has always been to keep the data local to the person’s house. I don’t even want people sharing their data 100% with their medical staff. If you have a problem, we would be pushing out analytics that your devices can analyze your data with. And once you hit a tripwire or you hit a concern, you can select that you just want to share it with your loved ones,” he explained.

Meanwhile, the VA is setting up a Digital Health Office.

“This realignment is going to align a lot of virtual, a lot of AI, and a lot of technologies that typically had responsibilities in other places, into one area,” Ronzio said.

The creation of the Digital Health Office, he added, will impact the reporting structure of several hundred officials within the VA’s Central Office.

“It’s a major change to the organization. They’re moving a lot of different arms of VA under a Digital Health Officer. We have actings and interims in these positions right now for all the senior executives, so we’re still trying to figure out what this is really going to mean for the workforce,” Ronzio said.

VA’s Office of Information and Technology will remain its own separate entity, but Ronzio said the Digital Health Office will allow for greater collaboration with OIT.

“I’m hoping that we can actually improve the speed and efficiency of OIT’s processes to have secure systems rolled out. I’d anticipate that we can save some time just by having our internal communication. But if we can actually develop better relationships with OIT, this will have the potential to have dramatic results,” he said.

“Some of my projects in the past have taken two or three years to manifest. Now that we have access to people in our own organization and have more communication at the undersecretary level and above for digital health, this should actually speed up our iteration and speed up our ability to produce something,” he added.

The post VA looking at ‘smart home’ tech to keep aging, disabled vets living independently first appeared on Federal News Network.

Technology in government continues to change rapidly, and agencies must work closely with each other and private sector partners to drive innovation and success. What initiatives have been successful and what are plans for the future?

During this webinar, you will gain the unique perspective of top federal and industry technology experts:

• David Larrimore, Chief Technology Officer, Department of Homeland Security
• Kaschit Pandya, Chief Technology Officer, Internal Revenue Service
• Doug Robertson, Chief Technology Officer, Small Business Administration
• Christopher Wallace, Chief of Cybersecurity and Chief Technology Officer, Program Executive Office, Defense Healthcare Management Systems
• Adam Clater, Chief Architect, North American Public Sector, Red Hat
• Greg Carl, Principal Technologist, Pure Storage
• Moderator: Luke McCormack, Host of the Federal Executive Forum

Panelists also will share lessons learned, challenges and solutions, and a vision for the future.

The post Federal Executive Forum CTO’s Profiles in Excellence in Government 2024: Innovation and Emerging Technologies first appeared on Federal News Network.

The professional organization AFCEA International has launched its 139 national chapter right in Orlando, Florida. It’s meant to help facilitate connections for members of the space industry with government agencies. It’s even calling it the Space Coast Chapter. To learn more about how this came together and what the chapter has planned, I spoke to Tony Brown, who is Director of the Products/Software Division for TM3 Solutions, Inc. and will be leading the new group.

https://spacecoast.afceachapters.org/

Interview Transcript: 

Tony Brown  So, this all came about through a series of some funny things that I probably wouldn’t want to say on air, but I could say, because it’ll make people laugh. But basically, I came to the Florida region from Washington DC, after COVID. I was kind of looking for scenarios to kind of grow my networking because I was still flying back and forth, back and forth to DC for meetings and after COVID things kind of, you know, shut down or they did shut down. And so, I started to look at venues and the Florida area for networking. And I was already doing some work with our exploration with SOCOM and the combatant commands over in Tampa. The Tampa AFCEA chapter is a very strong chapter within AFCEA. Of course, they support the combatant commands, so CENTCOM, a lot of the tenants out of MacDill Air Force Base. So, I started getting involved there. When I got there, it was still the Tampa chapter, became the Small Business chair of that chapter, and started to really get involved. And then at some point, we decided to call ourselves the Central Florida chapter. And within our logo, it had Cape Canaveral, and also Orlando, saying that the Tampa region was so how should I say, well established with their AFCEA chapter, when we voted to extend our region and call it the Central Florida chapter. I kind of looked at Orlando and I said, well, I don’t know very much about Orlando. I am physically based near St. Augustine. So, I’m on the east coast of Florida. And knowing that there was really not much representation for the Canaveral area, I started to dip my foot into what that could look like. Ironically, Eric, a funny thing. I went to a trade show or trade Expo down there. And we actually had an AFCEA a table that one of the purses, the tradeshow venue had actually given us. And I didn’t have any collateral about AFCEA. And as people would come and say, hey, what do you all do? I was like, Well, I’m with AFCEA. While I’m thinking I’m in DC, and everybody knows what AFCEA is. And people are like, what’s AFCEA? And I’m like, oh, God, I remember leaving that venue, very distraught and wondered how this was going to happen. As we had some other meetings, I met someone his name is Justin Filler. He’s with a company called NewSat. He says, hey, if you’re really interested in doing this, we’ll make sure we get people that are interested. But let’s keep you know; we have to keep it moving. Because there have been efforts to get a chapter started a while ago after the other one, the previous Canaveral chapter when you told it. there been some efforts, but it didn’t. It didn’t grow any feet. So, we started having a what we call it space coast presence events. And Eric by the third event, something really unique happen. The participants at the event, were chanting AFCEA Space Coast, and that’s when I knew it was real. And at that point, we really put a lot of efforts into getting a solid chapter started. And it took about took 11 months, but within a 10th or 11 month it started getting real and here we are now as though 139th AFCEA chapter.

Eric White  Wow. So clearly, there was a lot of enthusiasm to start this chapter. What about it is going to make this one unique. I guess I should ask there you just said 139 chapters, the Space Coast chapter probably one of the more unique names Some of the chapters that I’ve seen, at least from an AFCEA perspective, what sets you all apart?

Tony Brown  Totally agreed. And I’m glad you picked that up. So, I think a number of things, as I look at it, when I first got down to the Florida region, I would come down to the Canavero region, because it’s so point of entrance, right? And I would come down, and I was like, ah, it looks like it’s growing, but it’s not quite there. And then, as you saw, when Space Force was starting to get settled, and actually started, launches, for whatever reasons, may be undisclosed, and some disclose the ULA launches with NRO, and then also SpaceX. So, as I’m seeing all these launches, and some of them being federal, and then also you had NASA, I said, Wow, this is this is this region is really starting to grow with the space programs, as they have been over the last three years, and especially with Space Force. So I thought, and I thought as the community, the and the tenants down at Patrick, I really believe that an AFCEA chapter would be instrumental as this whole area is growing, and also just very unique, and the mission for Space Force and all of the other all the other tenants at Patrick to be able to have kind of an app co platform, which would offer the collaboration, and your stem, scholarships, all of the all of the values and virtues that encompass the AFCEA organization as a whole.

Eric White  And so yeah, you kind of finished up by discussing what I was going to ask you next. What does this mean, now for all of those folks who have really grown with the Space Coast, it’s crazy that you say, you know, it wasn’t quite there yet, when it was referred to as the Space Coast. And it just, you know, wasn’t prime for the picking just for from a government standpoint, but now, with the growth of the Space Force and the really the reinvigoration of US air or US space travel? What does this mean for the industry as a whole, especially down there?

Tony Brown  Eric, it’s, again, you know, fun, I don’t mean, to be cliche, in my, in my responses, it’s kind of the sky’s the limit. I mean, the projects, and the missions that are that are going on down here are just actually mind boggling. So many of the any, any of the military establishments, even, you know, NASA civilian, also, you know, foreign partners. There’s just so much going on with space right now. And again, I’m gonna do it again, I hate to do this, but it’s, it’s the final frontier, right? It’s one area, that we as a nation, and also not just for exploration, and the good of mankind, as we’re speaking up, like with the NASA projects, but also in the DOD, in the DoD sector with trying to achieve space dominance and make sure that our nation is protected.

Eric White  Yeah, you’ve been at this for a long time, if I could just, you know, finish it up here, pick your brain on what, you know, where you see things going. And you say the sky’s the limit. But, you know, what does that mean? Are we going to see just continued growth in this sector? Or is there a saturation point?

Tony Brown  In my mind, but from what I can see, I don’t really see a saturation point. I mean, if you look at, I kind of look back at the army, I looked back at Navy, I’ve looked at Intel agencies, and scenarios like their missions. Right. And certainly, I would say that the US Air Force has air superiority across the world, I would say the Navy, the same in the same token, right? And space, now that’s an open area. And I think a lot of our adversaries are well, I don’t think but we know that a lot of stories are or are looking to achieve space dominance. And by the way, whatever that means. For all intents and purposes, I just, I don’t see a saturation point anywhere soon.

Eric White  Looking towards the future, anything that you all have set up on the horizon, so far, is there anything that we can certainly plug for you here.

Tony Brown  On the AFCEA side, one of the things that I think is important with this region and, and the tenants over at Patrick, one of our goals is to really have a collaborative set of communications with them. So, we want members, the tenants of Patrick, which, Eric, I gotta say something else. I got down here. And I thought it was just Air Force and Space Force and a couple of other tenants that were out of Patrick. Well, I got down here and I learned that there are a number of very high value and very well-known tenants that are down here. So, I’ll tell you a quick story I was I was going to a meeting at an agency under defense human resource agency called our administration called Domi, which is a diversity platform within a DOD sector. So, I thought that was interesting, right. And then, as I’m getting directions from the guard, that he says, go past the State Department hanger, you’ll notice that there are a couple of Coast Guard planes outside of there. And I’m thinking Coast Guard State Department I didn’t like that. I know NRO is down here and a National Recognizance office. And also, as I went past as one of the tenants here that has really been instrumental and participation with AFCEA has been AF tech. And I believe that’s the Air Force Technical applications, technical applications. And when I found out about their mission, I was like, wow, just out of curiosity. Have you heard of AFtech?

Eric White  No, I have not.

Tony Brown  Okay, well, Air Force to technical applications. I think it is center, but they’re responsible for monitoring nuclear treaties around the world. And I’m like, wow. So, as I started to learn about a lot of the tenants here, I really wanted this AFCEA chapter to be a collaborative organization or platform where we could talk to leadership with these tenants and find out what they could use from AFCEA as a platform to help them fulfill their mission. We just really want support from the community down here. I I’ve had a lot of folks ask about volunteering efforts. We plan to do, you know, a bunch with a scholarship with scholarships and also work for us development and also the students. It could be K through 12. Kind of, you know, introducing them into a potential career opportunity and, and also grooming the next workforce in order to support the commands here.

Eric White  Tony Brown is leader of the new space coast chapter for AFCEA International.

The post A prominent industry group creates a new chapter right on the space coast first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Army tackled one of its toughest challenges: Creating a common operating picture for all of its allied partners.

The recent Yama Sakura 85 exercise demonstrated how the Army, the Australians and the Japanese could securely share information by using an architecture based on zero trust principles.

Col. Rett Burroughs, the chief information officer & G6 for the Army’s I Corps, said over the course of the 10-to-12 day training event last December, the Army successfully brought their allied leaders onto a single and secured network at the tactical edge.

“What we are looking at is properly being distributed across the entirety of the Pacific. We could have a command and control node anywhere in Australia, Thailand, Philippines, Japan, Korea, Hawaii, Guam or Alaska, and back here at Joint Base Lewis McChord, Washington so that now every node has roles and responsibilities. How do we ensure that conductivity happens across all of those different nodes that are very disparate and spread out? And then how do we leverage the technology of transport to ensure that we’re getting applications all the way to the edge?” Burroughs said on Ask the CIO. “We spent months preparing to ensure we had right safeguards in place. In its simplest form, in the application for the warfighter, which is definitely my area of concern, it brought the Australians and the Japanese together because before it was the Australians and the Americans, and then it was the Americans and the Japanese. The Australians couldn’t be in the same Tactical Operations Center as the Japanese. Now we have the ability for the first Australian division commander to talk directly with senior generals from the Japanese Ground Force Command.”

Burroughs said in previous exercises, the Americans and Australians would talk, and then the Americans and Japanese would talk, with the Army acting as the “go-between” for the Australians and Japanese. And Burroughs readily admits everyone knows what happens when you play the game of telephone.

“Our goal here was to establish one common operating picture and the ability to voice video chat, and share specific information,” he said. “The application of this proved critical in the ability for staff to make informed recommendations, and for commanders to make informed decisions. We weren’t just slinging all this data just because commanders need and want everything.”

Broader application than just the Army

The success of the Yama Sakura 85 exercise proved this shared network and zero trust concept for more than just the Army, but any federal organization can take the basic concepts to create a common operating picture.

John Sahlin, the vice president of cyber solutions for General Dynamics-IT, which supported the Army with integration expertise, said these same approaches could help agencies such as FEMA, which has to create shared networks to help cities or states recover from disasters.

“I’ve been fascinated by this problem set ever since I deployed for the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts back about 15 years ago. We started thinking about a military mission for that humanitarian assistance effort and it turned very quickly into an interagency and even local government support mission,” Sahlin said. “We had good communications. We had a good sight picture. We had good mapping data, which nobody else in the area did. We had to quickly share that data with first responders, the local hospital, the parish sheriff, non-government organizations like the Red Cross. I think that these are lessons of zero trust at the tactical edge for information sharing to inform that on scene commander, are lessons that can be learned, not only for the military at the tactical edge, but for any organization that has field-deployed, forward-deployed organizations that need to share data to execute a mission rapidly and make those changes dynamically with first responders with interagency support, things like that.”

Burroughs added this approach of creating a distributed network supported by zero trust tools isn’t just important for the tactical edge, but for Army commanders in garrison or commands who have to coordinate with the National Guard or local first responder communities or anyone outside of the service.

“Now we don’t have to have these disparate networks that do not talk to each other because of classification and policy, which you clearly went through during the Katrina catastrophe,” he said. “Now what we’re doing is we’re taking need to figure this out on the fly out during a catastrophe. We’re actually getting ahead of it now by addressing it before the next catastrophe. So when something does come in competition or crisis, we’re actually able to deal with it in a methodical way instead of reacting.”

Shift toward data-centricity

In many ways what Burroughs and Sahlin are describing is how the Army, and really every agency, must be more of a data-centric organization.

Lt. Col. Roberto Nunez, the chief of signal services support for Army I Corps, said the implementation of zero trust capabilities forces the end users to shift that data culture because they have to tag and label information much more specifically and consistently.

“You can say ‘all right, here’s all my data that I want to share, all my users that are also tagged and labeled as well as what they’re authorized to use and what they cannot use. Therefore, you can plug in with other mission partners to share that information and you can create that common environment moving forward, whether it’s joint coalition, at least from a DoD point of view,” he said. “If you want third parties to join in, whether it’s corporate America, academics, other organizations or other government agencies, you can do that if everything’s data-centric, labeled and tagged accordingly. This is what is great about zero trust.”

Burroughs said planning for the next Yama Sakura 87 exercise in December already is underway. But he said these capabilities aren’t turned on during the exercise and then turned off. The network is always on and therefore the Army is always iterating how to make secure information sharing better, faster and easier.

Chief Warrant Officer 4 Phil Dieppa, a senior services engineer for Army I Corps, said what the Yama Sakura 87 exercise and other demonstrations have shown the service that the “come as you are” model works because of the zero trust capabilities.

“The great thing about zero trust is that we don’t trust anything until we explicitly have that conversation and say that ‘I trust you.’ Once we do that, then we can start communicating and making those services available one at a time,” he said.

The post How the Army is always testing, training on zero trust first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Grants Quality Service Management Office over the last year helped several micro agencies buy award management services.

This pilot was part of how the QSMO is crawling before it tries to walk or run with larger agencies.

Andrea Sampanis, the acting director of the Grants Quality Service Management Office in the Department of Health and Human Services, said the procurement pilots with AmeriCorps, the Inter-American Foundation and the Northern Border Regional Commission opened the door to bigger possibilities to modernize federal grant services.

“We worked with them to explore the vendors on our Catalog of Market Research, making sure they were ready to meet their needs and helping to support them through the procurement process,” Sampanis said on Ask the CIO. “IAF and NBRC are live, on target and on budget, which is not an easy thing to do. AmeriCorps is expected to go live this fall. Huge kudos to these three agencies, as they were prepared to be good customers, willing to accept the system as-is and supported by great leaders in their chief information officer and chief procurement offices.  Their grants teams came together to support a great vendor product from our Catalog of Market Research.”

While the AmeriCorps, the Inter-American Foundation and the Northern Border Regional Commission are considered micro agencies, the amount of money each of them awards through grants is anything but small. Sampanis said the AmeriCorps is more like a medium-sized agency when looking at the amount of money it awards through grants. In fiscal 2024, for example, the agency expects to award $577 million in grants.

The Inter-American Foundation and NBRC are much smaller with IAF, awarding about $145 million and about $50 million in grants, respectively.

Grants QSMO aims to speed acquisition

While these three agencies don’t reach the billions HHS or the Education Department or the NASA hand out, Sampanis said demonstrating how the procurement assistance pilot works opens the door to improve and expand the QSMO’s efforts.

The QSMO marketplace current has approved seven grants management system providers and is in the middle of conducting market research to expand its services.

“We have one quote that says having access to Grants QSMO market research puts you 1,000 steps ahead in your procurement. It’s our goal to speed up the acquisition process and give agencies more buying confidence as they are pursuing a vendor on our catalog.  The vendors on our catalog are selected to support meeting grants standards and align to 2CFR 200 requirements,” Sampanis said. “It just lets them really focus their attention on a fewer number of providers to really say, ‘Hey, this solution is purpose built for grants. It’s an award management solution that is software-as-a-service and very configurable.’ It should feel easy. They don’t have to go and renegotiate a contract.”

The QSMO also works with the agency’s CIO and security leadership, helps develop performance work statements and serves as advisors during the entire acquisition phase.

“I always encourage agencies to meet with all the vendors on our Catalog of Market Research to understand what’s out there and share their specific needs. I think they learn a lot about themselves by talking to the vendors,” Sampanis said. “I helped them all the way through the pilot because I’m learning a lot. Every time I hear a contracting officer ask a new question, I think, ‘hey, that’s something I need in my catalog because that’s true.’ I always say our goal is to speed up an agency’s acquisition and give them buying confidence.”

HHS has led the Grants QSMO since January 2021 and has been building its services over the last few years.

With the Office of Management and Budget finalizing the update to the governmentwide grants guidance under 2 CFR earlier this year, standardizing certain key areas like notices of funding opportunities and overall trying to expand access to more than $1.2 trillion in grants and cooperative assistance agencies pay out each year, Sampanis said the QSMO is ready to expand its services and offerings.

Two common drivers of grants modernization

Having that baseline understanding and confidence in the marketplace is a key factor in success, said Wagish Bhartiya, the chief growth officer for REI Systems, which helps agencies modernize their grant systems.

Bhartiya said there are two basic drivers of grant modernization. The first is budget and second is technology.

“There has been a greater focus on budget and how much of our budget goes towards grant funding and how that funding is being deployed? How much of that is serving management processes, some of the overhead aspects of grant management, which will exist inherently, versus how much should be deployed into the community? That analysis, I think, is getting more acute,” he said. “The technology itself has evolved and shipped in a way that, I think, is much more possible now to be thoughtful about performance and mission. The technology is enabling some of this some of these questions to be asked because we now have the potential and the power to look at it for the first time.”

These two big trends are part of how grants providers are shifting their mindsets away from being so compliance focused to spending more time and money on measuring and ensuring outcomes.

“There’s all these dollars flowing through our grant programs so we need to start to think just as much about the downside, protecting from a compliance and a risk mitigation perspective, as the upside into the mission impact in terms of what are the tangible and successful outcomes,” Bhartiya said. “The other big theme is customer experience and user experience, and now the grantee experience.”

He said this updated point of view is part of why many grant providers are more willing to change today than ever before. He said this means the singularity of the way grants management worked over the last few decades is going away.

“Every grant program thinks they’re a snowflake and they think they’re special or unique and actually bespoke. But when you zoom out, you see that actually 85% of what a grant making agency does is essentially the same in the core lifecycle design,” he said. “Convincing them that they don’t need to make everything bespoke and tailored to the Nth degree because they can leverage best practices, use what’s worked for other agencies because there’s a chance to reduce the burden on their staff and on the recipient community is part of the challenge.”

Bhartiya added that the benefits of an end-to-end system, that’s in the cloud are becoming more clear to agencies.

The post Grants procurement pilots demonstrate speed to modernization first appeared on Federal News Network.

The more nations launch satellites into space, the more crowded the orbit layers become, especially in the burgeoning low-earth orbit. NASA has a Space Environment Sustainability Advisory Board to help guide policy for an area of space that is starting to look like the Beltway at rush hour. The board has defined the problem in terms of five challenges. For more, The Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with the associate administrator for NASA’s office of Technology, Policy and Strategy, Charity Weeden.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin The more nations launch satellites into space, the more crowded the orbit layers become, especially in the burgeoning low earth orbit. NASA has a space environment sustainability advisory board to help guide policy for an area of space that’s starting to look like the Beltway at rush hour. The board has defined the problem in terms of five challenges, and here with more, the associate administrator for NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, Charity Weeden joins me in studio. Ms. Weeden, good to have you with us.

Charity Weeden Hi. How are you doing?

Tom Temin All right. Good to have you in here. And let’s begin with a definition here. What is sustainability in space to begin with?

Charity Weeden That’s a really important question to ask, so we’re all on the same page. In layman’s terms, it means what we do today, make sure it doesn’t negatively impact what we do tomorrow and those opportunities. When it comes to space, make sure our activities are responsible in orbit so that we can continue to use space for all the benefits we get from it, and future generations can use it as well.

Tom Temin And let me just ask a technical question before we get into the broader policy issue. Lots of companies are launching space items, small satellites, maybe, in fleets of them, sometimes clouds of them for various purposes of earth observation or communications. When they do that, what is required of them? Can they just say, “Tuesday, I’m going to launch”? And then, Tuesday afternoon, the belly of the mothership is going to open and these things are going to get ejected? Is there any rules of the road now, for, well, “you can do it at 3 a.m., but you can’t do it at 3:15 because you’ll be too close to the last week’s satellites”?

Charity Weeden Well, private operators do need a license from the government. And this comes back to an international treaty called the Outer Space Treaty, where every nation is responsible and liable for private and citizens and their actions in orbit. So in the United States, that means your activity in space needs to be licensed. And there’s several license authorities in the United States. NASA is not one of them, but there’s the FCC, there’s NOAA, there’s FAA, to name a few of some satellite companies would have to go through those license authorities first.

Tom Temin But is there a protocol for making sure that when they are released into the low earth orbit, that they are done in a way that they won’t crash into something that might be orbiting by two minutes later?

Charity Weeden Right. So, in that license process, there are questions asked about their debris mitigation plans. The FAA has some of that. FCC certainly has the requirement to show your debris mitigation plans. So, that’s part of the license process. But it’s not 100% clear the entire world is using the same rules, and that’s where we are right now. Space is congested. We’re not quite sure where everything in orbit is, especially the small stuff. And we’re not quite sure what other actors are doing in orbit. And that can create havoc when you’re trying to get good science done, inspire new generations to look towards the space environment. And so it’s important to have common rules, like you said, to have that authority and supervision and make sure we keep the space environment clean.

Tom Temin And two other questions then, do we have a sense of the order of magnitude of quantity of satellites in low earth orbit at this point?

Charity Weeden Well, we certainly have a good understanding of the number of satellites in orbit. It’s on the order of 5,000 or so right now. The problem is, we don’t necessarily know exactly where all the small pieces of debris are. And we modeled upwards of 500,000 or more pieces of small debris that we can’t even track. And that could be really devastating for a mission. So that’s the essence of the issue; if you can’t maneuver out of the way of debris, then we have more debris getting generated.

Tom Temin By the destruction of satellites that run into debris.

Charity Weeden Right. In low earth orbit, satellites are really going fast. And you talked about the highways and the Beltway. That’s a great analogy because there are orbital highways, common orbits that we use for earth observation or communications. And so those are getting crowded as well. And debris-generating events, they could really create havoc. If you can imagine on the Beltway, a bunch of cars, you know, crashing into each other, what that would look like.

Tom Temin And are there other effects of this crowding? Could it be not just debris and crashing situations, but is there RF interference or some degradation that could happen in what the satellites are doing if they come too close? Is that a possibility also?

Charity Weeden So, in the license process, the RF interference issue is dealt with by the FCC. We’re talking here about the physical process of making sure we don’t run into each other in orbit.

Tom Temin And therefore, then, to add this all up then, sustainability for this strategy that we’re about to talk to, is having to do with just the crowding issue and the collision issue.

Charity Weeden The strategy is really about what NASA can improve in its processes, decisions, what technologies we can start to invest in to help mitigate the situation. So it’s really looking internally across the organization, at the agency and making sure we can be the best to help solve the issue.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Charity Weeden. She’s associate administrator for the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy at NASA. And so the strategy has laid out the strategy for sustainability. I guess it’s one of a series you’ll be doing, the first one dealing with low earth orbit. That sounds like the most critical.

Charity Weeden Correct. Yes. The most immediate issues right now are the inability to track the small debris, to create a sustainable space environment in the low earth orbit, which is getting very crowded. But also, there are other regions we need to start thinking about, like the cislunar environment. We’re going back to the moon. And it’s not necessarily the same situation around the moon as it is here around earth, when it comes to mitigating debris. So, we need to start thinking about that as well. And even looking forward to the rest of the solar system. How are we going to be responsible space actors when we’re going to Mars?

Tom Temin Sure. Well, we don’t want to be like two shoppers, you know, trying to get the same parking space at Christmas time, with us and China. “No, I’m there first! No, you’re going to—” bang. You know, here we got both in the same spot at the same time. Not good. Anyhow, the sustainability strategy so far then lists five challenges the agency and I guess the world is facing with respect to this. What are the principal challenges? I think you mentioned one is simply situational awareness — knowing what’s up there, including the debris.

Charity Weeden Right. So, one of them is knowing those uncertainties. What do we not know? What can we use our technical and scientific understanding to understand the environment a little better, understand how debris interacts with other debris? That’s an important issue. So is making sure that NASA is organized for success. We have a lot of stakeholders across NASA that do something to do with space debris, and we need to integrate that a little better. And so, part of the strategy is to organize for success and have that integration and collaboration across the agency, and hire a director of space sustainability to champion that.

Tom Temin All right. So, what measures could sustainability itself take? Because people need to do this launch, it’s an open, almost a wild West, really, with launching now that it’s become such a commodity and the satellites are so small and numerous. What can NASA do and who do you need to cooperate with, or who needs to cooperate with NASA to ensure the situational awareness and greater sustainability?

Charity Weeden Right. We all use space right now. You and I are probably using space. Those that are listening in a car, probably using space right now. It’s a benefit to our society. We get satellite communications, earth observation, you name it. We also get to explore and leverage space that way. So what this strategy is doing is, first and foremost, building a framework of what are all the pieces that go into creating a sustainable space environment. And that’s a complicated thing to put together. But it’s an important one, because based on this framework, NASA can take those insights and understand where are those gaps. Where are those gaps in knowledge, the gaps in technology, the gaps in policymaking? And then go out and engage, engage with all the stakeholders, not just amongst the U.S. government, but it’s important to recognize that the commercial industry is thriving, and we want to keep it thriving and create inputs from industry as well. And then further, this is not just a U.S. issue. I want to make clear, this is six decades of the world going to space. This is the world accessing space now and reaping those benefits. So, we need to engage with international partners and come up with a common plan of how to move forward from here.

Tom Temin Do you get the sense that even nations that we might be in conflict with in other domains, agree on this general need, say, like, Russia? You know, they’ve been pretty good in space over the years also. And they could be designing a satellite to shoot down all the other satellites. But on the other hand, they have some semblance of a commercial system also.

Charity Weeden Right. This is the back and forth of making sure we all get to use space in a peaceful manner. And here, I point you to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, a committee specifically designed to have this dialogue. Russia’s a part of it. China’s a part of it. There’s over 100 nations in this committee coming together to build out guidelines on how to make space more sustainable, and that’s going on right now.

Tom Temin And with 500,000 pieces of debris and maybe 5,000 satellites, which could be 6,000, you know, in another year or two, what can be done with what’s already there? Because it may be unsustainable already with 500,000 pieces of debris. What are the sources of debris, and is there anything that can be done to filter them out, like a big giant mesh in space to catch it all?

Charity Weeden Well, the earth-orbiting environment has a kind of a built-in cleaning system very low down.

Tom Temin Called gravity?

Charity Weeden Well, called drag. The atmosphere extends actually way past, even though it’s very thin. And there’s drag on some of these objects, and that will eventually burn up into the atmosphere. Saying that, there’s a certain level where this stuff is not coming down. If you generate debris, it’s expensive to go track it and retrieve it. So, we have an economic problem here as well. And so we really need to prevent any future debris, create the rules so that we prevent that future debris, but also start to think about remediation techniques as well.

Tom Temin What produces debris, by the way, in the first place?

Charity Weeden You know, so, it’s just simply launching. Sometimes there are objects that come off of the launch that aren’t part of the payload. Sometimes satellites just don’t work and they have an incident and there’s eject —  you know, there’s pieces of satellite that come off of that. And sometimes we don’t know what happens. But there’s an event whereby two satellites might have hit each other, or a piece of debris might have hit a larger satellite, and now it’s defunct and we don’t know what happened. So, there’s a lot of sources of debris. And the largest stuff is the upper stage rocket bodies, you know, meant to take all this great capability into space, but sometimes it’s left there. And these are large multi-ton objects that just linger, for decades, sometimes.

Tom Temin Wow. And, also, the satellites themselves eventually die out.

Charity Weeden Correct.

Tom Temin And then that renders them into debris.

Charity Weeden Well, there’s a trend going on that some satellite operators are deorbiting their satellites while they’re still active, so they can not create a bigger problem on space debris. And so that’s the trend we’re seeing. Also, there are companies building satellites to capture other satellites. So, we’re in this new world of not just collecting ones and zeros and transmitting ones and zeros in orbit, but we’re actually having a lot of vibrant activity called in-orbit servicing and manufacturing.

Tom Temin Wow. Crazy world. And by the way, while we have you — your office, Technology, Policy, and Strategy — what do you cover? That sounds like a pretty broad portfolio.

Charity Weeden It is broad. It’s meant to bring data-driven decisional advice to the NASA leadership on a number of issues to do with technology, policy and space sustainability, and space debris is one of those issues. I mentioned this earlier, but there’s not a lot of research on the economics of all this. And as the commercial community is relying on the ability to get into orbit and generating revenue, here we have an opportunity to put a dollar number to what is a space clean environment worth to us. So I think that’s a really important research that my office is doing that can contribute to the bigger conversation.

Tom Temin Charity Weeden is associate administrator for the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy at NASA. Thanks so much for joining me.

Charity Weeden Thanks for having me.

Tom Temin And we’ll post this interview along with a link to the space sustainability strategy itself at federalnewsnetwork.com/federaldrive. Hear the Federal Drive on demand. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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