“There are some things that we are doing. A lot of it is on the backs of young guardians that are Supra Coders, but we need to go beyond that,” Lt. Gen. Doug Shiess, commander of U.S. Space Forces-Space, said during the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Security Forum Wednesday.

The 18th and 19th space defense squadrons, for example, monitor the Space Surveillance Network, which tracks objects orbiting Earth. This involves analyzing vast amounts of data to predict potential collisions of objects in space, such as satellites or debris, and taking preventive actions to avoid accidents. The process still involves a significant amount of manual effort from the guardians.

“If we could have AI to be able to do that in a much faster perspective, we could have those guardians do other things,” Shiess said. “They are getting after that. They are getting tools to be able to do that. But we’ve got to get better at that. It’s something that we have to continue to prioritize and put to the top of the list.”

Brig. Gen. James Smith, assistant deputy chief of space operations for operations, cyber and nuclear, said that while a lot of conversation around AI has been about understanding adversarial behavior, the technology can also help the service improve operational readiness.

The service is currently building operational tests and training infrastructure, which will offer live, virtual, and constructive environments for guardians to train, test out capabilities and improve readiness. Now, the service is implementing tools to measure readiness.

“We’ve kicked off a pilot where there’s a team that has taken AI and machine learning to take all that data that comes in from a readiness aspect and identify trends. Where are your most significant deficiencies? What levers could you pull that would have the most impact on readiness? And then, hopefully, we can invest the next dollar against those levers,” said Smith.

“Our readiness has to be assessed in terms of the infrastructure that we rely on in order to execute our mission. There’s some great opportunity for AI, both automation in terms of reporting the status of our systems, as well as finding the trends.”

Avoiding “operational surprise” is part of Saltzman’s “Competitive Endurance” theory of space operations. The first step to building endurance in the domain is having “actionable” awareness, which will be powered by various capabilities, including artificial intelligence.

Saltzman said the service is focused on investing in domain awareness capabilities this year due to the growing complexity of the space environment.

“We see an incredibly sophisticated array of threats, from the traditional SATCOM and GPS jammers, to more destabilizing direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons across almost every orbital regime, to on-orbit grapplers, optical dazzlers, directed energy weapons, and increasing cyberattacks both to our ground stations and the satellites themselves,” Saltzman said.

The post Space Force lags in AI, machine learning adoption first appeared on Federal News Network.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has a new director. He’s worked at Marshall in a variety of capacities for nearly 20 years, including as deputy director. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with the new head honcho, who also has experience in both engineering and operations: Joseph Pelfrey.

Interview Transcript:  

Tom Temin You must feel like you’ve got one of the best jobs in government, because I think a NASA space Flight center director is one of the best jobs in government.

Joseph Pelfrey I agree. I cannot think of a better place to be to work with this team and work in this community to do some amazing feats for humanity.

Tom Temin And each of the centers across the nation that NASA operates kind of has a flavor. You know, the famous ones where rockets take off and go to the moon and so forth. How would you describe the flavor, if you will, of Marshall?

Joseph Pelfrey For over six decades, Marshall Space Flight Center has been leading some of humanity’s greatest achievements in space. From the initial Apollo missions, some amazing scientific discoveries, to the advancements that we’re doing today in the Artemis campaign. Marshall’s legacy is built on a strong technical expertise propulsion systems, launch vehicle systems, integrating large space systems. But we also have a very robust science and technology portfolio supporting all of the various missions that NASA is engaged with. And we have a bright history of building things. And a lot of first, as we have done through our history, building the rockets has sent humans around the Earth for the first time, building the rockets that sent humans to lunar orbit for the first time. And then in November of 22, we launched the first space launch system to kick off the Artemis campaign. And so, we are proud of our long legacy of supporting the nation’s advancements and goals in space exploration.

Tom Temin And for NASA. Often, the missions and the operations are just one step ahead of the science. I remember the speech that John F Kennedy made at Rice University, and he referenced the fact that the moonshot would eventually be made of materials and alloys that haven’t even been invented yet. And in some ways, the science is just out of the oven and off it goes. A fair way to put it.

Joseph Pelfrey Absolutely. Part of our goal is to really advance not only the things we need for space exploration, but how it can benefit those here on Earth. And there’s many, many examples of how that has progressed. One of the key areas that we focus on at Marshall is the advanced manufacturing in materials science and research. What are those materials that we need to build the space structure, build the instruments to allow us to explore further. And that’s an area of expertise for Marshall Space Flight Center. And with the advent of 3D printing has brought a whole new discipline of manufacturing. And that’s one of our strengths. And we partner with a number of industries and other NASA centers to really push the boundaries of our knowledge in that area.

Tom Temin And as director, you know, you oversee a really big, complex physically, a lot of acreage. I’ve driven past it actually a couple of times in my career. And you also have a lot of people. There’s 7000, I think, employees there, contractors and government employees. What’s the first thing you check on when you get to your desk in the morning?

Joseph Pelfrey That’s a great question. I usually, look at the reports that come in from our security teams to make sure we didn’t have any issues overnight. Our facilities teams that make sure all of our buildings and infrastructure are working correctly. We often have reports from the missions and what went on overnight for any of our active images or are upcoming launches. Just last night we had our launch writing this review for the Commercial Crew. Crew eight launch. We’re getting ready for that upcoming flight to the International Space Station. And so, we had a late review last night and had some updates this morning. So, it’s usually a summary of just trying to look at the whole portfolio, look at our active missions and seeing what happened overnight. We have a great team. And you mentioned the large team. We have civil service and contractors here and in Huntsville, and I couldn’t be more proud of the team in the community that we have here and the leadership team that I get to work with every day here at Marshall to go lead these missions for the agency.

Tom Temin And you mentioned Huntsville. We should mention that it’s the largest city now in Alabama, I believe, but it’s not a big city. So as the Space Flight Center director, that’s kind of elevates you to a public persona in some ways in the Huntsville area.

Joseph Pelfrey It’s been interesting as I become director, to get to interface in the community. Our community has so much passion for what we do at NASA and at Marshall. It’s everywhere here. The people here are just ingrained in what we do in our missions and our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues are coming out to work every day to, help advance the nation’s goals in space exploration and the force, the partnerships that we need to go further out in deep space. There are 87. He’s here on Redstone Arsenal, where we share some of that acreage, and it is a great federal city of excellence. And we partner well with these other agencies and we’re able to share infrastructure needs. And it’s just a great community. It comes together to really support many aspects of what our nation is doing.

Tom Temin And some great barbecue. We’re speaking with Joseph Pelfrey. He’s director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and tell us a little bit about yourself. You came up through the ranks and you have had science, engineering, technology work that you did hands on. What’s your personal specialty?

Joseph Pelfrey So that’s a great question. I had a lot of great jobs through my career and a lot of great teams to work with a major in aerospace engineering and ended up moving into systems engineering pretty early in my career. I was always more of a big picture thinker, and so I like looking at the total systems, looking at how the individual pieces are going to interact together and ensuring they come together. And if you think about the International Space Station program was a systems engineering marvel, and that’s where I cut my teeth on that program, designing and integrating science experiments and science facilities that are still operating on the space station today. That was a tremendous experience to see that entire life cycle of a piece of space hardware from a napkin design through requirements to design to manufacturing to testing, and then to see it be operated by an astronaut in low-Earth orbit. It’s just a tremendous experience. And, it really has set me up. Well, for the other jobs that I’ve had, here on center. And, I could not have asked for a better way to start my career.

Tom Temin Yeah, that’s an important point. I think one of the themes of NASA is how do you project complexity so that it operates really far away? You know, they used to say about old planes, it’s 5000 bolts flying in close formation. You’ve got millions of parts flying in close formation really far away where you can’t just go up and kind of wrench them if you need to. And that informs a lot of the thinking about reliability and precision, doesn’t it?

Joseph Pelfrey It absolutely does. And our teams have to work well together. When you look at the International Space Station as an example or the Space Launch System that we’re developing today for the Artemis generation, both of those very complex vehicles have support from companies and individuals and organizations really across the world. And to bring those individuals together, those different sets of expertise to build these amazing machines, it takes a lot of communication, it takes a lot of dedication and a lot of hard work that people put in to ensure that what we’re building is going to operate as the mission needs are, but also operate safely to take care of our astronauts, to take care of people here on the ground and ensure that we can accomplish the mission fully. It is amazing engineering feats. You know, our team, just the dedication they have. It’s inspiring every day.

Tom Temin And you have inherited a set of missions and responsibilities, you know, at Marshall related to Artemis and some of those other programs. What effect can a director have then on the Space Flight Center when everything is kind of preordained in place, when you change hands?

Joseph Pelfrey Clearly, I’ve been involved as the deputy director before, in shaping and helping ensure that these, programs and projects stay on schedule and have the capabilities, the infrastructure they need to be successful. I see my job is somewhat of a blocking tackle and making sure that our program managers have the resources they need, that we develop the capabilities, the engineering disciplines, the professional disciplines that they need to go run these programs and projects. And then we are delivering hardware, within Marshall for these different missions. And so we have the responsibility to ensure that that hardware is meeting requirements, meeting the mission specifications, and then ultimately is ready to fly when we’re ready to do our certificate of flight readiness and ensure that, you know, it’s safe and the hardware is telling us it’s safe to fly. And so, I’m part of that entire process working with our leadership team, within our governance structure. It’s a great honor. It’s a big responsibility to do that. And I really appreciate the team that we have to go pull those things together.

Tom Temin And you get a chance to still wander into the lab or to the manufacturing facility once in a while, just to get your hands on or hands near. I should say they probably don’t want you to have your hands on anymore.

Joseph Pelfrey Yeah. I don’t get to do as much fun stuff anymore. But one of the things that we started when I came up here is we started what we call field trips. And so, once a month, we pick a different area of the lab and the directors, we go down and we just go visit the team and go see what’s going on and get a brief and get to see hardware and see testing, see what’s going on in the facilities. I wish I could do more than that, but we take a focused field trip. Yeah, we spend some time with our teams just really seeing the progress that they’re making on the hardware and seeing some of the amazing expertise that we have on the center. I’ll tell a funny story of myself. I went down, I was going to just surprise one of the teams and go visit and drop in and say hi and, well, my badge wouldn’t let me in the building. So, one of my first acts as the center director was to request that I get access to all of our buildings, so I can do that now.

Tom Temin That’s good. Two questions to wrap up. As a child, were you one of those Erector Set and Tinker toy kinds of kids?

Joseph Pelfrey Absolutely. I was always enthralled with how things worked in engineering and flight, and I grew up in the shuttle generation. I recorded every shuttle launch, would get home from school and study it, and watch it over and over again. So, I wore the tape out and, just from a very early age, I knew I wanted to be a part of what NASA was doing. And it’s just really a dream job to be in this place now.

Tom Temin Yeah. Wearing the tape out does date you a little bit. And finally, do you notice the outbreak of more bow ties as you go around the campus?

Joseph Pelfrey I’m trying to start a trend here as we move. If I look down the pictures of all the passenger directors, there hasn’t been a bow tie, any of those formal pictures. So, I’m going to change that trend.

Tom Temin All right. We’re going to post it at Federal News Network. Joseph Pelfrey is director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Thanks so much for joining me.

Joseph Pelfrey Thanks for having us. And thanks for helping tell our story.

The post Experienced hand takes helm at big NASA center, meet Joseph Pelfrey first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Air Force and National Reconnaissance Office have been jointly managing an effort to deliver space-based Ground Moving Target Indicators — sensors that can track and monitor moving objects of interest on the ground in near-real time.

Frank Calvelli, Air Force space acquisition chief, said the project is expected to complete its Milestone B review by the end of March, allowing the program to begin engineering and manufacturing development.

“NRO is in great shape to do that program, I’m expecting that milestone to go very smooth,” Calvelli said during the NSSA Defense and Intelligence Space conference Tuesday. “What I need for that program is for Congress to pass a budget because it’s a new start. If we don’t get the budget passed, we are stuck in a [continuing resolution]. We can’t do much with that program this year.”

The House passed another stopgap bill Thursday, which will keep some of the government agencies open through March 8 and the rest of the federal government through March 22.

Some lawmakers have floated the idea of funding the government through a year-long continuing resolution, which will leave the federal government operating at the 2023 budget levels and prevent some new programs from starting.

“A [continuing resolution] for the year cripples our ability to implement what we want as the Department of the Air Force in terms of our vision for operational imperatives, and it’s just horrible, quite honestly. It’s crippling our ability to compete,” Calvelli said.

Under a year-long continuing resolution, the Air Force would lose up to $1.4 billion in research, test, development and evaluation dollars. The Space Force, however, would face the largest funding gap, losing nearly $2.6 billion in research dollars, or 10% of its entire budget.

According to fiscal 2024 budget documents, the Air Force plans to transition part of its ground-moving target indicator mission from its current platform, the aging E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System aircraft, which is set to retire at the end of this year, with GMTI capability.

The Space Force is asking for $243 million in fiscal 2024 to research and develop satellites capable of tracking moving targets on the ground. The service estimates it will need more than $1.2 billion through fiscal 2028 to fund the program.

After years of debate, defense officials decided to task the Space Force with developing requirements and supervising the acquisition process. At the same time, the National Reconnaissance Office is in charge of procuring sensor payloads.

Details about the new classified sensors are limited, but similar GMTI systems have been based on radar use of a pulsing technique and Doppler shift analysis to detect and track moving targets on the ground.

Calvelli also said his focus in the coming year will be on classification reduction.

“It is something that hinders our ability to actually integrate space in with other domains and space just within the space programs to really enable a warfighter to go do their job. I will tell you that it’s easier said than done,” Calvelli said. “My vision is to bring the majority of space programs out of the [special access programs] down to [top secret] level.”

The post Space ground tracking program to reach key milestone first appeared on Federal News Network.

But Gen. Daniel Hokanson, the chief of the National Guard Bureau, is currently working with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman to explore potential options for the future of the Air National Guard service members supporting space missions.

The 2024 defense bill requires the Pentagon to conduct a study on the feasibility and advisability of transferring all Air National Guard space functions to the Space Force.  The study must explore three options —  maintaining the current model under the Air National Guard; transferring all the National Guard space functions to the Space Force; or standing up a new National Guard component of the Space Force. The study is due by March 1.

The study will inform the next round of discussions in Congress on whether a separate Space National Guard is the best way to support the Space Force.

“For me personally, I’ve been very clear in my congressional testimony when asked for my best military advice. I believe the establishment of the Space National Guard is the best use of our folks that have been doing this mission in many cases for over 25 years. But as we look at where we are, no decisions have been made,” Hokanson said during a press briefing at the Pentagon on Thursday.

The White House and much of the Senate are not sold on the idea of a separate Space Guard, and Congress is waiting to see what Air Force, Space Force and National Guard leaders propose. The Biden administration and lawmakers say the move will create unnecessary bureaucracy and add millions of dollars in cost.

But supporters of creating a separate Space Guard argue that creating a Space Guard won’t be as expensive, with some advocates saying that the price tag would only be $250,000, which would cover the cost of changing name tapes on uniforms, signage and unit flags.

Several lawmakers are making another push to establish a Space Guard. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and a bipartisan group of 11 senators reintroduced the Space National Guard Establishment Act of 2024 on Jan. 31. Rubio and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced the bill in 2022 and 2023, but Feinstein’s passing last year required a reintroduction of the legislation again this year.  The 2022 bill was referred to the Armed Services Committee but never reached the Senate floor for a vote.

“Creating a Space National Guard would boost military readiness and efficiency. It would also ensure that the Space Force retains needed talent,” Rubio said in a press release.

The National Guard space units have been performing missions ranging from strategic missile warning to nuclear detection to space domain awareness to command and control and electromagnetic warfare. The units are already doing the work for the Space Force, Hokanson stressed during a congressional hearing last year. A separate Space Guard would allow the space professionals in the Air National Guard to better support the Space Force.

“I think there’s 12 senators that support that, which is the most that have supported previously,” Hokanson said. “My ultimate desire is to make sure that no matter what decision is made, that the mission that the Air National Guard folks are doing in space has got to continue. Space is a very contested domain.”

The post Future of Space National Guard remains uncertain first appeared on Federal News Network.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, deputy chief of space operations for operations, cyber, and nuclear, said on Jan. 5 that the document will focus on how the industry can fill capability gaps that Air Force and Space Force systems don’t meet. It will also provide details on where the service wants to see new technologies.

“We are days away, hopefully, from signing a commercial strategy,” Burt said at an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

The other part of the strategy will address how the Space Force can buy something as a service rather than purchasing a new space capability.

“Working with the commercial [sector] to build a satellite, or a rocket, or a ‘thing’ is how we’ve historically worked. How do we start to think about buying things as a service?” Burt said. “I don’t have to own the satellite. I don’t have to own those things. I just write a contract and buy a certain level of service from you. I think what we’re trying to also make sure we capture in the strategy is how do we get after buying some of these capabilities, particularly something like SATCOM as a commodity, rather than, ‘I’ve got to own and operate the entire satellite.'”

The strategy has been a year in the making, and the initial version went to Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman for approval last September. Upon reviewing the draft, Saltzman sent the strategy back, requesting a more comprehensive roadmap for the industry on how it can work with the Space Force.

Last year, the Space Force established a Commercial Space Office to foster partnerships with the booming space industry and better leverage commercial space capabilities to improve the DoD’s space architecture.

Burt said that the move will help the Space Force invest in space infrastructure and bolster the space defense industrial base.

“Every domain has an industrial base that supports them. The space domain has not necessarily had a very large base in the past because, again, the cost of entry, and typically, it was primarily the government running those capabilities,” she said.

“Now that you see entrepreneurs and commercial vendors going into the domain and more nations are also spacefaring nations, you’re starting to see that industrial base start to build. So in our interests, I believe we should allow the work in every domain in every gap that we have because the more we build from an industrial base, again, it goes back to that competitive endurance. I have more resilience because I have an ability to fill a gap if it’s taken out in combat,” she said.

Protecting commercial satellites in conflict

Space Force officials continue to have conversations with the industry about how to defend commercial capabilities in space should a conflict ensue.

Burt said that some companies might want to align themselves with the department to protect their assets, given their large DoD customer base. At the same time, some companies want to stay neutral without taking sides in a conflict since they might have customers on both sides.

“Those are all conversations that we’ve had in those war games,” Burt said.

And given the proliferation of commercial technologies in space, all those caveats will need to be addressed during contract negotiation.

“I think now as we continue to move forward, and as we’ve seen commercial capabilities used in the Ukraine conflict, and what has happened, there’s been a significant growth in the use,” Burt said. “How do you write contracts that say, ‘Hey, if I have capability onboard your satellite, or I’m going to buy a service , how do I write that contractually in a way that there’s a certain standard of you’re going to ensure me delivery? And then if I need to defend you – or there becomes an issue where I need to defend you – are you willing to work with that?”

At the same time, DoD will have to determine its own ability to defend commercial capabilities and where exactly they fall on the department’s ‘critical asset’ list.

“As we move forward for the future, where do those commercial capabilities fall on their critical asset list? And where did they fall then on the defended asset list, based on what capacity we have to defend? So those will all be considerations as we move forward in the future,” Burt said.

The post Space Force ‘days away’ from releasing its commercial strategy first appeared on Federal News Network.

• Only 10 days remain in 2023, at which time hundreds of federal correctional officers will lose pay incentives. Those officers at Federal Correctional Institution Thomson are about to lose 25% retention-based pay bonuses. The incentive cut will take effect in the new year, and it comes after staffing levels improved at the federal prison in Illinois. But the American Federation of Government Employees is urging the Bureau of Prisons to reverse its decision and continue to offer the incentive. If not, the union said it will lead to worsening staff attrition and workplace conditions.
  (Union warns of massive vacancies at federal prison if employee pay is cut - American Federation of Government Employees)
• Lawmakers are pushing the Central Intelligence Agency, and other members of the intelligence community, to recruit for specific skill sets. Congress is telling spy agencies to hire more analysts with financial intelligence and emerging technology expertise. The provision in the fiscal 2024 intelligence authorization act directs the intelligence community to come up with a plan for increasing that expertise by Jan. 1, 2025. The National Security Agency and other IC agencies are eyeing big recruiting targets in the coming years, as they look to hire the next generation of intelligence officers.
  (Congress wants spy agencies to hire more experts in financial intelligence, emerging technology - Federal News Network)
• Four years after being established, Commander of U.S. Space Command Gen. James Dickinson declared that SPACECOM has reached its full operational capability. Dickinson said the command now meets all the criteria to execute its mission and deliver capabilities required to counter threats in and from space. The criteria for being fully operational include having a skilled workforce to support the mission, building out the infrastructure and being able to set the conditions for the future fight. Since 2019, SPACECOM has been providing combatant commanders with a wide range of space capabilities needed to support their operations, including satellite communications, weather monitoring and missile warning.
  (SPACECOM reaches full operational capability - U.S. Space Command)
• A certain group of House and Senate lawmakers is pushing back on higher prices at the Post Office. USPS package prices are going up across the U.S. in January. But lawmakers said the price hikes are disproportionately higher for Alaska, Hawaii and U.S. territories than the lower 48 states. Sens. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) were the lead authors of a letter, along with eight House members, calling on the Postal Service’s regulator to reject the rate hike. Lawmakers said USPS is looking to set prices for Priority Mail Express, Priority Mail, and USPS Ground Advantage far higher than the rate of inflation.
  (Alaska delegation calls on Postal Regulatory Commission to reject unjust postal rate increase for Alaskans. - Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska))
• Veterans are a growing target for fraudsters, so the White House is assembling a team to deal with it. The Biden administration held its first meeting of its Veteran Scam and Fraud Evasion Task Force. It includes leaders from the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, and the IRS. The task force is working on a fraud prevention toolkit and a one-stop shop for veterans to seek help. The Federal Trade Commission received 163,000 fraud reports from veterans between 2015 and 2019.
  (White House Hosts Inaugural Veteran Scam and Fraud Evasion Task Force Meeting to Discuss Protecting Veterans and Service Members from Fraud - White House)
• Martin O’Malley has been officially sworn in as commissioner of the Social Security Administration. The former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor will be the first permanent leader of the agency in two-and-a-half years. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) conducted the swearing-in ceremony for O’Malley on Wednesday. The official move follows the Senate confirmation of O'Malley to the position on Monday, in a vote of 50-11. O'Malley's term as commissioner will expire in January 2025.
  (Martin J. O’Malley sworn in as commissioner of SSA - Social Security Administration)
• The Biden Administration is pressing ahead with new rules to require project labor agreements (PLA) on large federal construction contracts. The Office of Management and Budget issued guidance this week telling agencies those agreements are now mostly mandatory for contracts worth $35 million or more. A final rule amending the Federal Acquisition Regulation is scheduled for publication later this week. The White House argues the new rules will bring “stability” to construction projects. Some contractors argue the changes will drive up construction costs and discourage firms from bidding on federal projects. The new rules do allow federal contracting officers to waive the PLA requirement under some circumstances.
  (Memo for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies - OMB)
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is seeking feedback on its major technology security initiative. CISA this week issued a request for information on its “secure-by-design” white paper. The agency wants comments on how tech manufacturers can incorporate security early in the software development cycle, as well as the financial costs of adopting secure-by-design principles. The RFI also seeks feedback on barriers to eliminating recurring software bugs and how security can become a bigger focus in computer science education. The deadline to comment is February 20, 2024.
  (CISA issues request for information on secure by design software white paper - CISA)
• A new tool will allow Air Force leaders to move away from Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoints when making investment decisions. The Air Force is launching the first iteration of a decision advantage tool that will change the way financial decisions are made within the service. The tool will help senior leaders to understand the direct costs of a particular decision and the impact that decision could have on an entire program. If senior leaders decide to add an aircraft, the new platform will highlight both the price tag of the plane and what it would mean for aircraft availability or personnel. The first version of the tool is scheduled to come out next month.
  (New platform will allow Air Force leaders to make better investment decisions - Federal News Network)

The post Years flying at warp speed lands SPACECOM as fully operational on fourth anniversary first appeared on Federal News Network.

• A senior leader at the Genderal Services Administration is returning to the private sector. Sonny Hashmi, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at GSA, is leaving after three years. Hashmi’s last day will be December 29. FAS Deputy Commissioner Tom Howder will serve as acting commissioner until a new one is named. Hashmi will be heading back to the private sector, but it is unclear where he will land. In an email to staff, obtained by Federal News Network, Hashmi said that the timing is right to make the move as FAS made significant progress with several initiatives over the last several years.
  (GSA's Hashmi leaving at end of the month - Federal News Network)
• Feds teleworking overseas got a pay raise. Now the State Department is honoring an employee who made it happen. Domestic Employees Teleworking Overseas (DETOs) missed out on locality pay, but saw a pay boost to correct for that in the National Defense Authorization Act. Most DETOs are the spouses of military and Foreign Service officers. Michelle Neyland, a congressional adviser for the department’s Bureau of International Affairs, won this year’s Eleanor Dodson Tragen Award for her work bringing this pay issue to Congress. “Everybody who I introduced this pay inequity to across State Department, as soon as they learned more about it, immediately said, ‘Well, how can we fix that?'" she said.
  (Feds teleworking overseas got a pay raise. State Dept. honors an employee who made it happen - Federal News Network)
• The Air Force has disciplined 15 people for a massive leak of classified information by a member of the Massachusetts National Guard. Airman Jack Teixeira is already in custody awaiting trial for sharing secrets in online chat forums. But Air Force officials said more than a dozen other personnel – from staff sergeants to a colonel – failed to deal with suspicious behavior leading up to those illegal disclosures. An IG investigation also found members of Teixeira’s unit had wide latitude to access and print classified documents without any oversight.
  (Air Force disciplines 15 as IG finds security failures led to massive classified documents leak - Associated Press)
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is rolling out a new cybersecurity tool for agencies. CISA today unveiled new security standards for Gmail and other Google Workspace products. The idea is to prevent security incidents by using common configurations across widely used services. CISA has already published configurations for Microsoft 365 products. “With the addition of these baselines, we cover the vast majority of business collaboration suite of software as a service offerings that everyone uses and relies on to conduct their work every single day,” said Chad Poland, director of cyber shared services at CISA.
  (CISA releases new tools to help agencies secure Gmail, other Google applications - Federal News Network)
• Federal agencies saw real progress in fiscal 2023 in their goal to achieve zero emissions by 2030. The White House said agencies ordered over 54,000 zero-emission vehicles and began installing more than 26,000 charging ports last year. The 26,000 ports will add to the 7,000 already in use across government. With agreements in 16 states for federal facilities to use clean energy, the Energy Department began implementing a new clean electricity grid on 700,000 acres of agency land. The administration also said federal buildings have already cut emissions by more than 7% since 2020 and, as of 2022, have achieved a 39% overall reduction from 2008 levels.
  (Council on Environmental Quality updates progress on sustainability - White House)
• The Department of Health and Human Services is responding to an increase in cyber attacks targeting hospitals and healthcare systems. Under a new cybersecurity strategy, HHS will establish voluntary cybersecurity performance goals for the healthcare sector. The agency will also consider how to incorporate those goals into existing regulations and programs that will help inform the creation of enforceable cybersecurity standards. The agency also plans to work with Congress to increase funding to help hospitals adopt stronger cybersecurity measures.
  (Healthcare sector cybersecurity strategy - HHS)
• A thriving lunar economy might be landing over the next decade. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has a new study and is seeking input from 14 companies on what investments would be needed to have a booming economy on the Moon. Over the next seven months, DARPA and selected companies will work together to design new integrated system-level solutions, including communications, navigation and timing. The agency said the program will change how the civil space community thinks about commercial activity on and around the Moon.
  (DARPA selects 14 companies to study infrastructure needed for thriving lunar economy - DARPA)
• Agency chief data officers are getting more personnel to tackle their work. That is one of the takeaways from a survey led by a governmentwide council of federal CDOs. More than a quarter of respondents said their agency in 2023 had a central data team with up to five full-time employees. Less than a third of respondents said they had that kind of staffing in 2022. A majority of agency CDOs who took the survey said they have been in government for 10 years or longer.
  (2023 CDO Council survey results - CDO Council )
• The Small Business Administration is changing the way it decides which businesses qualify as small. SBA is proposing a new size standard methodology that plans to make two major changes. The first is using a disparity ratio between small business contract obligations and industry receipts to calculate the size standard. The second change would use data from the federal procurement data system to determine percentage industry factors as part of the size evaluations. SBA said these changes will refine and improve its analysis of federal contracting data used in the evaluation of industry size standards. Comments on the proposed changes are due by February 9.
  (SBA proposes new small business size standards - SBA)

The post DARPA kicks off its 10-year plan to create a ‘thriving lunar economy’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

As if pandemic, threats of nuclear war, and a lack of Tesla charging stations aren’t enough to worry about, there is always the possibility that an asteroid could hit the earth and wipe-out all of us. A team at NASA discovered a way to alter the path of an asteroid, should one come too close and they garnered the distinction of being finalists in this year’s Service to America Medals program, also known as the Sammies. For the details, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with two members of NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office: Program Manager Brian Key and Mission Manager Scott Bellamy.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin All right. You launched a rocket that crashed into an asteroid. And I guess my first question is this rocket was able to change somewhat the trajectory of that asteroid. I want to understand what the math calculus was. I mean, generally, how did you figure this out? Because an asteroid is very big. A rocket is very small. You could launch something as big as the asteroid. That’s not possible. But if you shot a marble at it, it wouldn’t make any difference. What was the process to figure out how you could do this? Scott.   

Scott Bellamy I think the easiest way to, you know, start that answer that question is realize that it’s not just Brian and I. There’s an entire team behind us. Here we sit and management position. But, you know, supporting this entire effort is a large group of scientists, engineers working at the Applied Physics Laboratory to help answer that.   

Tom Temin But tell us what the team did.   

Scott Bellamy So if you look at it like you’re playing billiards in space, you’re playing pool, galactic pool. So this is not dissimilar from how you described this scenario with the smaller spacecraft hitting the larger asteroid. But when you take the smaller spacecraft and you look at how fast is it flying, what is its mass relative to the object that its impacting, you determine how much kinetic energy has to be imparted from one body to the other to effect a change in its orbit. And so the scientists that have been working on the design of the mission came up with the parameters that needed to be adjusted in order to achieve the result of altering the orbit of the Dimorphos.   

Tom Temin All right. And what happened when you launched it? It hit the asteroid.   

Scott Bellamy Most definitely. That is actually the point of highest tension in this entire event is what happens when it hit the asteroid. It hit the asteroid. It’s, you know, a very high velocity. And the smaller asteroid Dimorphos is that we ended up with a lot of spacecraft confetti. We had a spacecraft that’s just a little over 1200 pounds in mass, you know, slightly larger than, you know, your typical refrigerator. And it hit at, you know, over 13,000, almost 13,500 miles per hour. So, you know, it was not just a glancing blow. It was a very precisely targeted impact with a certain spot on the surface of Dimorphos to achieve that perfect little amount of English on the spacecraft’s trajectory and bound to, you know, get that all to sink right into the core pocket the way they planned it.   

Tom Temin The speed is a big factor in this, almost like a hypersonic missile. It’s the impact of the wait times, the speed that is the power. It doesn’t even have to have an explosive.   

Scott Bellamy That’s the energy mass times velocity. You’re calculating the kinetic energy of the impact. And so with a known kinetic energy impacting an object that is traveling in its orbit at its certain velocity, you know, you take the velocity and you break it down into what you’re facing head on. And then  you know, what the mass is roughly that’s coming at you and you sized the spacecraft large enough to hopefully surpass what’s needed to change it, because you can get hit by a Volkswagen out on the interstate. And if you’re driving a huge SUV, it’s still going to affect your trajectory down the road.   

Tom Temin Yeah, it can flip you over if the angle is right, I guess.   

Scott Bellamy Yeah, that’s true.   

Tom Temin And Brian, you’re the program manager. How did you convince NASA? And I guess ultimately Congress, I mean, it sounds like a little bit science fiction. You know, you’ve seen cartoons of rockets landing in the moon’s eyeball, this kind of thing. How did you convince them that this was a worthwhile experiment?   

Brian Key It didn’t take much convincing. These ideas have been out there for quite a while. And the Science Mission Directorate at headquarters stood up a planetary defense office within the Planetary Science Office. And it was the planetary defense office that basically brought forward the idea. Once they selected the mission, we took over management of it. So it was Planetary Defense Office that actually brought it forward and said, Yeah, this is a good thing for us to try and do. And they went to APL and got a proposal of what it would take. Then they turned it over to us to implement it.   

Tom Temin The rocket itself was it just a rocket in the weight of its self? Was there. Was there lead weights in the front or anything to get it to that proper mass that you calculated it required?   

Scott Bellamy Well, first, let’s think about like this. It’s not the entire rocket. It’s just the spacecraft that the rocket is launching. So now everything on the spacecraft, the essential things to be able to fly it, you have to be able to have the items that control the trajectory of the spacecraft, point the solar arrays, solar arrays themselves, the optical instrument that has to be there to do the targeting. So the spacecraft in and of itself was literally what it needed to fit inside of the launch vehicle. The other fairing at the top, the enclosure and have enough mass to affect change. Now its weights are sometimes added to any spacecraft to get the balance where you want it to. But no, it wasn’t like a race car that’s carrying an extra 1500 pound of weight just to get to the mass where they want it. In this case, in most cases, it’s like, you know, if you have space left to play with, you prefer to put something usable in there for mission accomplished. But other than just dead weight.   

Tom Temin And it’s been, you know, a couple of eons, I guess, since an asteroid has hit the earth, 60, 65 million years, maybe a long time. Does NASA generally watch asteroids? And what is anyone’s best guess of the chances of being hit any time soon by another asteroid big enough to do damage to humanity? I guess we get hit by little meteorites all the time.   

Brian Key The last asteroid to hit was not 65 million years ago. We’ve had fairly good sized asteroids hit the earth more recent than that. Just not in the United States. I think the last one was over in Russia. We do have a sister mission that is in development right now that will put basically a camera up in orbit around the earth that will basically monitor the sky and collect data to determine where these asteroids are, what their trajectories are, whether they’re a danger to earth or not. That particular mission, I think, scheduled to launch in 2027. It’s called Neo Surveyor.   

Tom Temin Sure. And a couple of final questions. The asteroid that you did, this proof of concept on that you could change. What was its mass? And so what is the greatest mass that you think that a launch could actually affect?   

Scott Bellamy So the Didymos system is the target here for this test. Didymos is a binary asteroid. It has the larger primary and the smaller secondary moonlight that was targeted. This gave us an opportunity to actually be able to observe the change that we were hoping for. So the smaller asteroid is named Dimorphos. it has a mean diameter of 160 meters. And we don’t necessarily have a good mass estimate for either the primary or the secondary. I can pull something out to share with you, but it’s still just an estimate. The largest factor here was is that it’s in a stable orbit around its parent. It’s typically measured at a average plus or minus some seconds of 11.9 hours. And we know how big it is. So we can estimate the mass of it and use that information compared to the orbital dynamics between the two to understand how large the change might be. Now, usually, I mean, you were asking about how heavy one of these is. We usually talk about them in terms of how big they are in the mean diameter. Yeah, there’s some interesting data out there, you know, of asteroids that are roughly four meters and there could be 500 million of them out there that, you know, teasers in their orbits, those that are around 25 meters, you know, 5 million. But then you get up to the dinosaur killers, which are 10,000 meters roughly, and they think that they’re roughly only four of those hanging around out there in space. These are the ones that we have to worry about. They have orbits that cross Earth’s orbit periodically, or they can pose a potential earth crossing hazard. Now, there are a large number of asteroids out in the two belts, the one between Earth and Mars and the one further out past Pluto, there’s just, you know, LA 405 at 5o’clock rush hour that kind of looks like that.   

Tom Temin But you were able to change the trajectory of something that was 160 meters across. Could you change the trajectory of something that’s 10,000 meters across?   

Scott Bellamy My answer is yes. The answer depends on, what’s more important in this scenario is when you find it and how big it is and how soon it’s going to get here. So if you detect it early enough, you have time to put together the mission, get it built, get it launched to travel there. If you find it too late, yeah, you’re already behind playing catch up to generate the largest benefit from a mission like Dart. You want to find the asteroid when it’s as far away as possible? Sure. And be able to get to it as soon as possible. The further away the asteroid is, the smaller the change in its trajectory you have to make because a half degree change in its trajectory when it’s five years out will result in a really large missed distance once it finally gets to Earth.   

Tom Temin Is there the danger that it could accidentally be knocked into a better chance of hitting the earth?   

Scott Bellamy That’s a difficult question to answer, and I don’t even know if I want to try.     

The post This NASA team’s work means the whole world can sleep a little better first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Space Force is working on a new digital modeling strategy, the latest effort by the service to improve how it uses technology and work towards becoming more digital.

The Space Force is leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to help its Guardians work smarter and more efficiently. This upcoming digital modeling strategy is one piece of the service’s efforts to improve how it uses technology. Lisa Costa, the Space Force’s chief technology and innovation officer, said that the Space Force is working with others to develop standards and is also working on standards for digital twins.

“You would think with the use of digital twins by very large sectors of different industries that there would be commercial standards out there, but there’s not,” Costa said on Wednesday at an event at The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “They’re very bespoke, so we’re working toward at least an open standard where we can start to move models from concept. For example, from the Space Warfighter Analysis Center (SWAC), which does mission design, moving that over to our acquisition elements that do costing and analyses of alternatives and then moving that into our operational environment.”

This would help get feedback which could then be tweaked and put into the pipeline for training and testing.

The Space Force sees itself as the first digital service. To accomplish this vision, several things need to happen. Costa said the service is working on removing the tech debt it inherited from the Air Force and other military services and on modernizing its capabilities. She said that it is hard to build advanced technology like AI modeling or digital twins with old architecture. As a result, the foundation must be fixed, Guardians should be upskilled and the Space Force should utilize its Supra Coders, according to Costa.

“Supra Coders are critically important to the Space Force,” Costa said. “They are not just coders; I can buy coders. They are Guardians first, they have been trained usually in at least one operational area and they’re an expert in the operational area, but many of them have been cross trained in a number of different operational areas.”

Supra Coders are self-selected and go through several months of training and internships.

“Supra Coders are experts in space, they are experts in space operations and they are able to put hands on and make changes with other operators in a multidisciplinary team and make changes in real time and that’s really the critical differentiator for Supra Coders,” she said. “So, making a digital service is all about being fast. And having an organizational structure that allows innovation at the edge, bring that innovation into the enterprise, and then push out more capability to do that.”

The Space Force is utilizing a combination of bespoke and commercial technology. According to Costa, it is not changing the base code for its bespoke systems, but it can change and tweak the low-cost commercial systems and have them work with the bespoke systems.

“We are focused on ensuring that the right changes can be made in the right time to get actionable effects to the joint services,” Costa said.

The service is using modern, commercial coding languages and processes. For example, it has DevSecOps and a continuous improvement continuous delivery pipeline. Costa said that this enables the Space Force to bring in commercially trained talent.

“They just bring that capability right into the service, but then train our people in commercial ways,” she said. “So if they do leave the service, if they’re in military uniform, their skills transfer automatically. So I think this is really a great approach for us because it fundamentally reduces cost. We don’t have a bespoke software factory where we’re using some code base or agile process that others are not using.”

Another important element is recruitment. The Space Force is using models and simulation to help see what the force needs to look like in 20 years. She said as the service develops new systems and is developing the models, it also needs to look at the force structure needed to operate it. Furthermore, Space Force invests in its personnel and wants to keep them attached to the mission.

“Contributing to the mission is always a really important part of retention in the military,” Costa said. “I am not too worried about Guardians who will go into industry because they will then know what the Space Force needs and they will be able to develop products at the end of the day that we will be able to buy and that will satisfy our needs better.”

Data is critical to the Space Force. The Unified Data Library, which is where everything is in space and it has different classification levels. The service recently created 176 new requirements for its enhanced unified data library. Costa said it will use AI to cleanse data and she wants Guardians to be able to put data into the library themselves instead of having to go through a contractor. Costa also wants to reduce system backlogs.

“Those requirements are very focused on how you bring in data, process that data and then determine what information is required by an individual organization and what we need to send on that comms pipe,” Costa said.

Costa said that the goal is to make data discoverable at the most tactical edge and to not inundate Guardians and commanders with too much data.

The Space Force also wants to use data and AI for satellites, but there are several things it must consider.  For example, when should satellites automatically detect threats? And when should an operator be involved, and how involved should they be? However, there are several associated risks. Specifically, having a satellite maneuver based on what it perceives as a threat when in reality it was not a threat. Officials also need to consider how other nations are using technology.

“China is developing capabilities to determine in real time using AI whether something is a threat or not a threat to a satellite,” Costa said. “But it could be your own satellite, and so that’s a risk as well.”

Lastly, orbital debris, or space junk, is also a problem.

“You want to make sure that you’re not creating debris, and that’s absolutely critical for ensuring that space is usable for everyone” she said.

However, one way to mitigate some of these risks is to have a human in the loop, according to Costa. She said another way is to rank AIs based on the data its been trained on and how long its been trained and used to determine the trust level for the AI and how to leverage it.

She also pointed to the responsible use of AI as an important priority.

“The real key is who will implement reliable, secure and trustworthy AI,” Costa said. “We do have a program and there was an executive order that was put out last Monday articulating the need for responsible AI across the United States. So, we have a number of teams working in responsible AI areas. The key will be to understand when those limits are off, what could potentially happen and how our adversaries might use that.”

The post Space Force to create new digital modeling strategy first appeared on Federal News Network.

Everywhere you look in the world, you see the use of missiles in military operations. Some by good guys, some of it from bad guys. That is why defending against missiles is a chief mission for the Army. For the United States, missile defense and freedom to operate in space go hand-in-hand. At this week’s Association of the U.S. Army conference (AUSA) in Washington, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin got an in-person, one-on-one update from the Commander of the Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler.

Interview Transcript:  

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler One of my responsibilities, I have the 100th GMD Brigade, which our soldiers that are stationed in Colorado Springs, as well as Alaska, California and Fort Drum, New York. And those soldiers provide 24-7 365 protected North America against intercontinental ballistic missile attacks from North Korea and from Iran. What’s interesting about that formation, it’s a multi compo organization, so it is both active duty as well as Colorado and Alaska National Guard. And they do a fantastic job in keeping readiness, staying vigilant and responding to any kind of North Korea tests that might take place and staying vigilant on consoles. 24-7.

Tom Temin Yeah, that’s my question to as Iran, you know, unfortunately in North Korea, unfortunately and Lord knows who else, China, they’re always developing new capabilities and testing new types of missiles. What is the mechanism by which you can stay on top of what their offensive capabilities are? So the defensive capabilities here can keep up?

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Sure. Yeah. We stay very, very closely tied with the Missile Defense Agency. So as we see what the threat is doing out there and what our adversaries are doing with respect to their advances in offensive missile capabilities. The Missile Defense Agency is responsive to meeting those new requirements. And then they worked very they worked very closely with my operators. I mean, literally, we sit side by side with the engineers as we’re going through the different development, software development, etc., to make sure that the Missile Defense Agency doesn’t develop something then that the operators aren’t totally familiar with. And then that’s on the software side. And then Missile Defense Agency right now is going through the development of the next generation interceptor, which again, they involve our operators in as they go through developing the NGI.

Tom Temin Right and the interceptor program. Can that handle say, I mean, what’s the posture towards hypersonics, which are even developmental by the other nations, but that seems to be where people are headed.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Yes. So, again, MDA is working super hard on, first off, being able to detect hypersonics. If you can’t see it, you can’t shoot it. And so working with the HBTSS, the hypersonic ballistic, basically our space based layer that we have to be able to track hypersonics, then that will feed into the interceptor capabilities that we will that they will continue to work on developing and our operators will be the ones that employ it.

Tom Temin Yeah, it’s like the difference between a knuckleball and a hundred mile an hour fastball. Some better say they never see it go by, so you got to see it before you can swing at it.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Right? Right.

Tom Temin And you’re tied in closely with the space operation, the space apparatus for the military. How does that work?

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Yes. So I’m the Army service component command to General Jim Dickinson, the SpaceCom commander. We’ve been doing that since really since the advent of Space Command in 2019. And in that role I have for Space Brigade, we provide forces to space command and we work very closely with the Space Force as well as with the Navy and the Marine Corps in providing different service space capabilities to space command for operational employment. We use them in exercises. I have a little bit of convergence of space and missile defense. If I jump out of my space, the missile Defense Command commander responsibility into my joint functional component command for integrated missile defense, there’s also work that we’re doing IMD armed with Space Command, as you might be aware of in the latest unified command plan, it took the missile defense responsibility out from underneath strategic Command and its placed trans regional missile defense capability, mission responsibilities underneath U.S. Space Command, trans regional.

Tom Temin Coming from outside of the United States, basically, or.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Going from one AOR to another. Got it. And so it used to be global missile defense, which was not a very accurate description really, of what the mission said and what we were facing. It was trans regional missile defense. And in this made a lot of sense because General Dickinson in Space Command has responsibility, the global sensor manager. Well, many of our sensors that we have that we use for missile defense, they also are able to do space domain awareness. And so instead of arbitrating between STRATCOM and Space Command about use of these sensors, putting them all up underneath one combat command solves a unit of effort year command and makes me responsive then to just one combat command. Not that we ever had fistfights or anything between the two combat commanders, but it just makes it easier for us to put it up underneath one commander.

Tom Temin And the new term now is missile defeat as opposed to just missile defense. What is the difference in how do you envision that?

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Yeah, so how I envision a missile defeat is if you picture the traditional missile defense, where it’s active defense, where you see the Patriot and you see that or EGIS BMD ships that are doing that active defense piece, and there’s also some passive defense early warning that’s part of the traditional integrated air missile defense and even attack ops that’s traditional integrated air and missile defense. But then you take a look at what we’re doing for left of launch capabilities. So before that missile gets off, gets off the rails, gets off the tail, gets out of a silo that left of launch capability so we could deny and disrupt those capabilities before they launch altogether becomes a missile defeat. And what we’re trying to do is, is we’ve been working and through a couple of different exercises, establishing a missile to feed effects coordinator. So somebody who’s responsible for taking that that whole vision that I just told you about and an exercise in that. And so in a previous exercise with Space Command, we’ve been rolling out this missile defeat effects coordinator concept in and frankly, you know, test driving it a little bit.

Tom Temin Yeah. So to kill a missile that would ordinarily come within the airspace say and you have to defend against it to defeat it on the ground or originate that’s not really missile defense command. That would be somebody else that would shoot something at it.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Right in the missile defeat effects coordinator. That’s the one who identifies the threat and is able to then influence maybe another COCOM to say, hey, here’s where your targeting should be after. Maybe there’s not kinetic effects that we can apply to that solution.

Tom Temin Yeah. So that that’s where you get back to the need for the space view, because that’s where the original knowledge of such a launch would originate in the first place.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Likely, right?

Tom Temin I guess there are maybe people on the ground in some of the areas, but I mean something.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Yeah. And some of the geographical embankments we have that they have the intel and they they’re well aware of what the adversary missile order battle is. But again, a missile defeat effects coordinator can help work that really holistically across combat commands again, because it’s a Trans regional missile threat.

Tom Temin Yeah. So there’s really an update in doctrine and an update in command structure for you in recent times. What does that have? What’s the effect of that on workforce and what you need for talent?

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Yeah, so as we’re as we’re practicing these exercises this notion it’s it it’s really been it’s a good challenge because it’s a new approach. And as my IMD staff has been working with the Space.com staff, traditionally Space.com staff, you know, they really focus on, you know, space and on orbit and in the space capabilities. Well, now we’ve brought missile defense, Trans regional missile defense requirement into them. So it’s been a good opportunity for us to exercise and integrate with our staff in that new mission set for Space Command.

Tom Temin Yeah. And the concept of the Army astronaut, that has emerged, too, and that’s not a two words that you often hear conflated. But now, now it’s a thing.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Yeah, it sure is. We couldn’t be prouder of Frank Rubio, Lieutenant Colonel Promotable. Frank Rubio, one of my Army astronauts who just returned from the International Space Station. And, you know, he’s been in the news here quite a bit lately. He set the record for an American astronaut in space, 371 days.

Tom Temin That’s more than a year.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Ago. That’s more than he has. He spent more than a year in space and he returned safe and sound. I had a chance to chat with him and catch up with him this past weekend and ask him how he’s doing as recovering. Get used to gravity again.

Tom Temin And how’s this bone density?

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler His bone density is it’s getting there. You know, as you would expect, NASA runs an incredible number of tests on him. And he didn’t call himself the lab rat, but he’s kind of he’s a very good test case for NASA right now. But so as they do the testing on him and then rehabbing him to get him, you know, back to where he needs to be, you know, in the Earth’s environment. He’s in great spirits. He’s glad to be home. He missed a couple of key family events in that unexpected year. You know, that additional time.

Tom Temin The additional time was because of the failure of a launch to get to the space station.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler What happened was they had what they assumed was micrometeorites had damaged the cooling system on the recovery on the return vehicle. So NASA’s had to send out, Russia, sent up a replacement vehicle, but it took them six months to stay on station before he and his other his Russian crewmates could return. And so but like a good soldier, he soldiered on. You know, he was extended a lot of soldiers. He had extended on deployments. Frank was just a different type of extension on his deployment in a different domain.

Tom Temin Got it.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Super proud of him.

Tom Temin And you had three Army astronauts graduated from.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler From West Point. Yeah. So Drew Morgan, he’s the commander right now Kwajalein Atoll really at all. So I’m the senior commander responsible for KWAJ, which is out there in the South Pacific, does a lot of our strategic missions with space fence out there, does sports, all the testing for Reagan test site, for intercontinental ballistic missile tests and other missile defense tests that we do there. Drew has taken over command of that just this past summer. And then Ann McClain, who is in NASA right now. She just competed in the brigade command assessment program. She wants to go on and become an army brigade commander.

The post The man who’s helping protect Americans from missile attacks from anywhere first appeared on Federal News Network.

The scope of the changes the Air Force is examining is potentially enormous — ranging from its acquisition processes to recruiting to the management processes that deliver support services — but the review won’t take forever. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has told subordinates he wants the initial set of reform proposals within the next four months.

“It’s about looking at all aspects of how we organize, train and equip to support the combatant commanders and the joint force, and it’s a recognition, I think, by all of the senior leadership in the Department [of the Air Force] that we need to make some changes to be more competitive,” Kendall told reporters Monday afternoon. “They’re going to cut across pretty much everything we do. We’ll make some decisions at the end of January, roughly, and move forward with execution from there.”

The effort kicked off last week, when Kendall assigned five separate review teams to examine five broad areas:

• How the Air and Space Forces are organized
• The services’ acquisition and equipping processes
• Personnel systems, recruiting, training, retention and career management issues
• How the Air and Space Forces create, sustain and measure their readiness
• “Support” systems, including, for example, installations, processes for mobilizing individual units, and operational medicine

The teams will be made up of senior leaders at the headquarters level of both the Air and Space Forces, but also from the operational community, Kendall said.

He said the call for a sweeping, but nonetheless quick review came mainly from his observations in his first two years as the secretary of the Air Force over the past two years: Making good on the “operational imperatives” he identified early in his tenure was harder than it should have been, because the service didn’t have structures in place to support them.

“We have institutions that could do some of the activities we started under the operational imperatives, so we needed to create organizations to do work we should have already been able to do with existing organizations,” he said. “And then as I got to go around and get to know the force better, I also determined that we were not as deployable as I think we should be to support our operations plans. We can do it, of course, but it would require disruption.”

Disruptive, Kendall said, because the Air Force, as it’s structured today, doesn’t do a great job of evaluating how ready individual units are to deploy as “warfighting entities” that can move from one place to another on short notice.

“And as I talked to people about how we manage people and support functions around our bases, we basically have a situation where there’s a command that runs the base and a number of people associated with that, then there’s the command that’s the warfighting organization. But the two aren’t entirely separable,” he said. “So if you deploy, what do you actually send? We’ve got to go sort all that out, but the end state will be an organization that’s more aligned with dealing with the types of threats that are most of concern to us now.”

Overall, the initiative, which Kendall calls “reoptimization,” is meant to reset the Air Force from two main factors he thinks have pushed toward the organizational structures and processes it uses today.

One is a matter of where most of the Air Force’s operational attention has been over the past three decades: largely conflicts in places like Iraq and Afghanistan in which it hasn’t faced a serious competitor in the air or space domains. A second large factor, he said, is the chaotic decade-long period governed by the 2011 Budget Control Act that capped and arbitrarily cut Defense spending, pushing the Air Force to make efficiency-driven organizational decisions it wouldn’t otherwise have made.

That period of time also saw numerous changes on the acquisition policy front, many of which granted additional flexibility and agility to the Air Force and its sister services, including expanded authorities to use other transaction agreements and a new “middle-tier” of acquisition. The Air Force has also submitted proposed legislative language that would let DoD get started on the earliest stages of its acquisition programs without explicit congressional approval.

But the Air Force still sees opportunities for improvement in its procurement processes, hence the decision to make equipping one of the five pillars of the reoptimization effort, said Andrew Hunter, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics.

“In many cases when we’ve talked about acquisition reform, it’s more generically about, ‘How do we go faster?’ … between the three different priorities of cost, schedule and performance, sometimes the priority that takes center stage shifts,” he said. “I would say this is incredibly focused when we talk reoptimizing for great power competition. We know the capabilities that we have to develop and maintain in order to recapture competitive advantage with the pacing threat. We will be doing things that are directly tied to achieving those outcomes — organizationally, process and budgetarily — all on those specific goals. And right now speed is absolutely foremost.”

On the personnel front, Kendall signaled that the need for change may be more modest — at least when it comes to recruiting.

The active duty Air Force will likely fall about 10% short of its 2023 goal at the end of this fiscal year on Sept. 30, and the Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard will have even more disappointing recruiting numbers, he said. But he said those challenges are likely temporary and can be addressed with more funding.

“We put a lot less resources into recruiting than the other services do, and with a relatively modest increase in resources, I think we could do much better,” he said. “A lot of recruiting is face-to-face conversations, and the numbers of people you have out on the ground doing things matters … we’re doing some things on the information technology and automation side to help with the administrative part of it, so that our recruiters are out talking to people instead of at their computer trying to enter data, and that’s going to help quite a bit.”

The post Air Force launches wide-ranging review to ‘reoptimize’ itself for future fights first appeared on Federal News Network.

How fit are guardians, the service members in the U.S. Space Force? The Air Force would like to know. So the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) is running an experiment to find out what information wearable fitness devices might yield, and whether they will help increase the fitness of guardians. For details,  Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with Katharine Kelley, the Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Human Capital at the Space Force, and with James Christensen, a Product-Line Lead at the AFRL.

Interview Transcript:  

Tom Temin All right. So you’re doing a study. What are you trying to find out precisely here with wearable devices. And then we’ll get into, like, what the devices are.

Katharine Kelley Thanks, Tom. Let me jump in, if you don’t mind. We’re really excited about this. And AFRL Air Force Research Lab is doing the study on behalf of the Space Force. What I think is really, really interesting is what our conclusions will be and how people wear these devices and what they tell us about the health and wellness of our guardians. We’re really after getting away from this once a year, episodic testing that has been traditional in the DOD and trying to get to more purposeful physical activity for our guardians.

Tom Temin Because I think maybe the reputation or the assumption about guardians is simply that, well, because assets are out in space, they’re not in tanks, they’re not running exercises, it’s kind of a bunch of nerds operating joysticks. That’s probably not accurate. But is there much physical activity relative to, say, other service members for Space Force? And is that the reason you want to check this out?

Katharine Kelley Well, I think there’s a lot of reasons, Tom. First of all, I would say the most compelling for us is the fact that the cognition required to be an effective guardian to control and manage these assets that you just referenced is so significant that the overall health and wellness of this force is arguably just as critical, if not more so. Meaning you have got to be on your game if you are going to be controlling the types and levels of equipment and complexity in the space domain that we’re talking about. So the expectations for guardians are real, they’re high and they need to be fit, they need to be ready and they need to be at peak performance, quite frankly. Not just physical, but mental as well.

Tom Temin Yeah. So this is not flying a drone at the local football field. And Dr. Christensen, give us a sense of the types of wearables, the types of data that you are hoping to gather here, just as raw material.

James Christensen Absolutely. We’re using fitness watches that collect, how much, how hard do you work out from an aerobic fitness perspective? And also give us an estimate of your overall level of cardiorespiratory fitness. So the watch itself gets at regular purposeful physical fitness activity as well as your overall level of fitness. And then as part of the study, we’re collecting quite a bit of additional information from the guardians that speaks to their exercise motivations, their perceptions and concerns about using the fitness device rather than the annual test, and then also their utilization of medical services, any injuries that they may have experienced, you know, whether they sought medical attention or not. So that when we get towards the end of the study, we’ll be able to inform Space Force about how effective is this at maintaining the fitness of the members. And do we see changes in injuries, changes in some of the longer term health outcomes that would provide benefits to both the individual member as well as the overall force?

Tom Temin And Ms. Kelley indicated that there’s a connection between the mental capability of doing very painstaking work with expensive, precise gear that’s very far away and the physical condition of the body that’s housing that brain. And so how do you make that connection specifically? Because someone could, I don’t know, have great statistics, but they’re not mentally sharp and possibly vice versa. So can you maybe clarify that connection a little bit?

James Christensen Absolutely. So I think, you know, our guardians, you know, have the basic skills that they need to do their job well. But where the physical performance comes in is years of research that have shown that cardiorespiratory fitness supports a member’s resilience, their ability to deal with fatigue, with long term stress that comes with performing the kind of complex technical tasks that we’re asking them to do. So in that sense, they’re cardiorespiratory. Fitness is part of their overall health that supports their ability to do their mission.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Dr. James Christensen. He’s product line lead for the 711th Human Performance Wing at the Air Force Research Laboratory and with Katharine Kelley. She’s Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Human Capital at U.S. Space Force. Now, is this a voluntary thing by the guardians? How many people do you need to have attached, so to speak, in order to get the proper base of data that you need to evaluate all of this?

Katharine Kelley Tom it is guardian driven in the sense that it is voluntary. I’m very excited, though, Dr. Christensen. will share a little bit more about the volume of interest, but we’ve got over 6000 guardians that have volunteered already, which is the preponderance of our current guardians. So it’s a really exciting for us to see the level of interest. And I think that speaks to another aspect that I wanted to just share with your listeners. There’s a real propensity to use technology, especially for the younger generations and those that we’re trying to attract to the Space Force. And so this is part of an overall program for us to make sure that we are leveraging the best of breed and ways to think differently about achieving similar ends. I think this technology adoption, if it proves to be successful through the study, is going to really enable both interest in the Space Force and connect with our propensity to serve populations.

Tom Temin And what are some of the technical challenges here? I mean, I’ve got a Garmin watch on and there’s a Fitbit and there’s this one and that one. They all have different probably data formats, different mechanisms by which they measure what’s going on under the skin, this kind of thing. Tell us how you normalized all that for purposes of data analysis.

James Christensen The Air Force Research Lab routinely tests different off the shelf wearable fitness devices to evaluate not only the accuracy of the data that they provide and then the manner, the formats in which they provide it. But also looking at a broader perspective of the ease of integration with other systems, the privacy and security provisions that the manufacturer provides. So one thing that’s been exceptionally important to us throughout this process is ensuring that we’re protecting the privacy and the security of the individual member and the voluntary nature of the study. You know, this is this is in no way mandatory it. So it’s a free and open choice on the part of the member to participate and to provide their data. But, you know, we then accept the responsibility of ensuring that we’re protecting that. And it’s really only being used for the stated purpose of evaluating this approach and informing future Space Force policy. So in that sense, we’re giving members a direct voice into what the follow on program looks like by choosing to participate in the study.

Tom Temin Because there’s a couple of possible sticky wickets here. One is that all of these devices put data in the cloud. I mean, you know, every time I go out running it’s in the cloud somewhere, I don’t care if anyone takes it in China. But, you know, if someone could aggregate data, we know all about the U.S. Space Force here and their physical attributes, this kind of thing. One issue, the other issue is what if the data on an individual turns up, say, evidence of substance abuse or some other kind of behavior that you don’t want? You know, can you legitimately, in an experiment, study about the fitness of the population, you act on that particular piece of data?

James Christensen Yes. So in evaluating possible solutions for wearable fitness devices, we’ve extensively analyzed on the security of both the watch itself, the app that goes with it, and the cloud infrastructure that supports it. So we benefit from the availability of military cloud solutions such as Air Force Cloud One that we can utilize that come with a lot of the security provisions that we need in order to execute the study. Nevertheless, and that has been a huge concern and we’ve put substantial effort both on the part of Space Force and the Air Force Research Lab into analyzing and ensuring that we’ve got the right protections in place for our members data. Another aspect of that that you touched on is allowable uses of the data from the study. We very carefully restricted who has access to study data and what it may be used for, even going so far as to obtain what’s called a certificate of confidentiality that essentially protects us from being subpoenaed to turn over study data. So a member’s data cannot be used as any part of a criminal proceeding. That’s one of the things that’s important to us about ensuring that study data is really only used for the stated purpose of assessing their fitness and informing future policy.

Tom Temin And so, yeah, I was going to ask Ms. Kelley then the purpose of this is not to find out about individuals, but to find out about an aggregated force that you want to keep in top shape.

Katharine Kelley You’re exactly right, Tom. I think that’s what’s really, really potentially inspiring about this, because this is really a pathfinder for the DoD. This is really about how can you better assess continuously the true health and wellness of your force and not just know that one day a year they were able to run and do push ups and sit ups. And so being able to do that in a way that does protect guardian data and does protect the privacy of the individuals and then aggregate it such that policy is derived from a more informed position. I think that is what is so exciting about this. To see what we can learn from it and then develop that may also be in adoption across the department.

Tom Temin And by the same token, you could also get a dashboard that says to the commanders, you know, maybe, hey, folks, let’s all go out and run an extra half hour for the next month and see what happens.

Katharine Kelley What’s really, really interesting about this is when we embarked on the discussion, Tom, everybody was concerned that we were going to just be wearing a fitness watch. And there’s no such thing as physical training in the Space Force. And that is absolutely not the case. In fact, what we’ve seen is these devices inspire people in healthy competition. And so Unit PT is just like you would expect it to be. And commanders are out there running with their units and people are building their own little teams to compete against each other. And so there’s a real benefit here that is above and beyond to include esprit de corps.

The post Space Force tests out wearable device to track guardians’ fitness first appeared on Federal News Network.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.)  hold on Senate-confirmed Defense Department nominations will likely not end before Congress’ August recess. It’s a move that leaves not just nominees, but military and civilian DoD families in a state of limbo. The trickle-down effect means a hold on plans for family moves, school admittances and spouse employment.

Secure Families Initiative (SFI), a military family advocacy group, sent a petition to Tuberville and Senate leadership on Monday requesting the block be lifted. Members of the group delivered the petition with more than 550 signatures to the offices of Tuberville, as well as Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

“This issue affects every single one of us with a loved one in uniform because it’s politicizing an institution that we rely on for our safety. If we’re going to trust that our Senators are going to have our back and do what’s right, over more consequential decisions, over life and death, we’re not given a lot of confidence that can work when something that should be basic and nonpartisan can’t even go through,” Sarah Streyder, executive director of SFI told Federal News Network.

In a battle of dueling letters, a group of 5,000 conservative veterans and members of Congress wrote a letter to Schumer and McConnell supporting Tuberville’s confirmation block.

“The undersigned stand united in condemning this policy,” wrote the veterans. “This policy is not just illegal, it shamefully politicizes the military, circumvents the authority of Congress, and exceeds the authority of the Department of Defense.”

The block is a protest against a Pentagon rule that allows military members paid leave and travel expenses for reproductive health care if it is not available in the area where they are stationed. Streyder called the veterans’ letter an oversimplification of an issue that was meant to address reproductive health care as a whole.

“This isn’t a pro-life or pro-choice debate. The DoD policy is a travel and leave policy out of recognition of the fact that service members don’t get to choose where they live. And DoD is trying to make sure that folks either in uniform who need it or their immediate dependents can still access reproductive health care,” Streyder said.

Tuberville and his supporters maintain the travel allowances support service members who get abortions. He told The Hill that he has no plans to change his mind about the block before the recess.

Streyder said her group’s petition was non-partisan and meant to express support for the military families affected by the block.

“As a family member of someone who’s actively still in uniform, what I’m talking about is our day-to-day present and our day-to-day future. And I think that is an important stake in this situation that’s a bit distinct from our veteran colleagues. And so that’s why we felt it was important to inject military family voices into the conversation,” Streyder said.

Although the block only affects DoD military and civilian leadership nominated for a post that requires Senate confirmation, the hold-up means service members and Pentagon employees further down the chain of command face delays in moving to new jobs and uncertainty about where and when their next move will be. It affects families as they plan for enrolling children in school and spouses as they decide whether to quit their current jobs and look for new ones in anticipation of a move.

“There around 281 military families stuck in limbo right now, until their service member’s promotion clears, they’re having to make impossible choices about whether or not to move ahead of time and hope that they get reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses, or whether to stay and wait and delay a spouse’s ability to find the next job or their kids’ ability to plug-in with the next school,” Streyder said. “They’re obviously the folks most negatively impacted, then there’s that second level of folks who are stuck in their jobs because there’s no backfill left, or they’re unable to advance to the next job because someone’s still taking up space.”

Moving forward,  Streyder said SFI wants to see Senate use legislative means to resolve the dispute over the healthcare travel rules and end the block on promotions. The petition calls for Senate to “work together to resolve political and ideological disagreements outside the military space,” and “expeditiously confirm all blocked promotions and fill existing vacancies.”

Tuberville’s hold on nominations could overcome if the Senate were to vote individually on the nominations, a process that could take months. Military leaders have said the block not only hurts military families, but also hurts recruiting and retention. They predict the number of unconfirmed positions will pass 600 by the end of the year.

“In addition to the senior officers, there’s a whole chain of events that goes down to our more junior officers. It has an impact — it has an impact on their progression in their career field, potentially because if one doesn’t get promoted or move on, then they’re blocking a spot for someone else,” said Air Force General C.Q. Brown at his July 11 Senate nominating hearing to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Brown, in addition to nominees for chiefs of staff for the service branches, currently have acting chiefs because of the hold on nominations.

The post Military families request end to Senate hold on DoD nominations first appeared on Federal News Network.

Eric White got the chance to speak to someone who was among the first technology experts in the U.S. Space Force. Preston Dunlap was the first chief technology officer and chief architect officer of the U.S. Space Force and Air Force. He’s now an independent director on corporate boards and advisor for companies such SOSi. Here is that interview.

Interview Transcript: 

Preston Dunlap I had the privilege of being part of getting two tech startups off the ground in the commercial world and working for four secretaries of defense. Most of the time spent running the Pentagon’s equivalent of an investment committee and diligence teams on how to effectively spend wisely about $700 billion a year in five years for pictures. And then most recently had the privilege of being the first chief technology officer and chief architect for the U.S. Space Force and Air Force after working national security programs for Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. And now I founded Arkenstone Ventures to be able to provide consulting and strategic advice to tech companies that are growing and trying to create real change in the tech world with a lot of emphasis on space and other deep technology areas, as well as work with private equity firms to increase investments in this still underserved area, but a real area of promise.

Eric White What goes into, and forgive me for making it sound so simple, but what goes into being the CTO and chief architect officer of the Space Force and Air Force?  I imagine a lot of technology needs are are pretty high up there in the realm of things. But what can you tell me about that position?

Preston Dunlap Yeah, I really credit the secretary at the time who was overseeing the department at the time was just Air Force. And you might recall that the president decided to create and stand up the Space Force at the time, a second service inside the same department. And the secretary recognized that the way the government often manages programs and development  is as if there were sort of individual islands of themselves. And so although the there weren’t necessarily technologists that were running the department at the time, they recognized that there was something that didn’t feel right about simply having a thousand sort of flowers moving and blooming and instead ought to think about technology more as an integrated approach like a successful company might. So you want to not just have a bunch of widgets that you sell or produce, but you want to be able to have a coherent strategy that reinforces each other and some application of the technology development as an enterprise approach across your whole set of product lines. And so to begin to think about the military and the Defense Department intelligence community as not simply a series of individual activities, but a coherent plan to achieve perhaps some of the most strategic and critical objectives for our country and those around the world makes a lot of sense to be able to set up a teams of people, to be able to think about how to build products and capability more quickly and how to do so thinking about them as a collective whole, because we use our capabilities together. And so not just fighters or submarines, but we bring them together to deter and if necessary, take action. And so you want to be able to build that in from the beginning and to think about a coherent technology strategy. And part of that is being able to bring in things like commercial technology for many elements that are critical to the military but are not as organically grown by the military like they used to be. That’s the chief technology aspect. The chief architect side of the coin was another great idea, which is to be able to ensure that the engineering across in our department about $74 billion of research, development and procurement activities are actually done in a way that works together from the beginning and experimented and tested and evaluated and deployed together as family of systems or families of capability. So great honor to be able to do that for just over three years.

Eric White How far along from your perspective, has space technology come in the U.S. from a defense standpoint? Everybody knows about the great movements that satellites have have upgraded to themselves. But from a defense standpoint, what have you seen over the years in those positions and now in the commercial sector?

Preston Dunlap Yeah, this is sort of near and dear to my heart. Back when I was working as an executive at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, I was having some conversations with the White House senior staff at the time. This would be 2015, 2016 timeframe. And the the thesis that I was sort of making was that there is a tectonic shift that’s about to happen and maybe even is happening at the time, which was a rapid trend towards less so having government preponderance in space and more so having the preponderant player be commercial and other ecosystems up in space. And so you’re you’re right to note that change in trajectory that but that necessitated a new thinking inside the government and that new thinking caused myself and a team to then run for Vice President Biden at the time, and then a second set of activities for Vice President Pence, exercises with the cabinet and the vice president chairing those activities. And what became known as the National Space Council that President Trump and VP Pence stood up. But in the backdrop of all those more public forums, we were looking at what it looks like to have policy and programs that would need to be developed. And you saw activities come out of that like the stand up and focus of US Space Command, a military command oriented on the domain of space that started in 2018 and formalized in 2019. We have others that are geographic focused, like Pacific or Europe or and so on. But this recreated a focus specifically on space. So there was that’s the operational side of the house, the users. At the same time, there was another public debate on the Space Force establishment that also got established in December 2018, and that was to then organize, train and equip programs, people and processes to be able to then enable and support military and other capabilities in space and a large emphasis, an increasing percentage of emphasis on either adopting commercial technologies or relying on commercial companies. And so we see a more clear need to do that as aggressive actions have happened in space from others. And so we want to make sure that we have a stable and secure space economy just as we ensure that we have a stable and secure maritime domain and other locations around the world and hand in hand in glove with our partners across the globe.

Eric White A nice segue into my next question, which is is the space economy, the U.S. space economy and international space economy up to the task of providing those needs that the government has? Or are there still some gaps of where there’s whether it’s a lack of competition or lack of innovation that the defense side and the intelligence agencies have needs that are not necessarily being met?

Preston Dunlap Yeah, there’s two ways to think about that question, Eric. So one is from an investment perspective, so there’s a significant amount of money, an increasingly amount of money goes into building space capabilities across the globe, about a portion of that. So let’s see, two years ago was about $250 billion investment in space, but 90 of that across governments, about 55 billion of that 92 from the U.S. government and about half of that sort of split roughly between Space Force or Space Force and the NASA. That that that dollar amount is large by most of sort of our standards, however very small relative to significant technology domains in other areas or sectors like enterprise software and so on, if you sort of add up the aggregate. So it’s a good number, but it’s not sufficient to be able to address all the commercial the day to day needs that are needed from phones and GPS to imagery and agriculture. And so what you need to do then from a government perspective is focus those dollars on systems and capabilities that you need specifically or uniquely for defense and intelligence missions, and then leverage the vast investments out there in the private sector, building products for commercial entities that we can dual track. Some people call it dual use. I prefer the term dual track so that you’re not distracting from the commercial business case, but a dual track into the government case where we can you rely on that an increasing way. Not simply, originally the argument I think was for resilience and redundancy, to be able to have multiple pathways of information and the but now I think we’re seeing companies be sophisticated enough that they can actually sort of be hand-in-glove and be integrated into algorithms that create insights and leveraging of machine learning and AI to be able to pull not simply one type of image or one type of information together from space, but actually have a very strong fabric or a collective whole that is that sort of makes one screen, if you will, not on a commercial screen that you’re looking at in a government screen, but one that’s blending the two together. And we’re always going to see specialized capabilities or needs that the government is going to have in that, both in space, space for space as well as space to earth. I don’t think that’s going to change. Same thing with with missile systems or aircraft. There’s not a lot of commercial need for, say, a hypersonic weapon, but a lot of military needs, those kind of things. It’s a nice, clear example of something that may not be a commercialized product, or at least I hope it isn’t, but it’s something that the government would need. And there’s moral equivalence of that in space.

Eric White Yeah, the space race is back on between the U.S. and its near-peer competitors. I just want to gather your thoughts on what you think about U.S. companies being able to maybe work with other other countries who have those same needs as well. Where does their allegiance lie? And as a former CTO, what were you hearing from the Space executives when this topic came up?

Preston Dunlap Well, we’re seeing a large, I think, increasing trend for countries around the globe to be more interested in getting into space. The really the flexible point or the pivot point that happened to enable new entrants into the space is the dramatic reduction of things like launch costs. Where it was something like 25, $50,000 a kilogram back on space shuttle days all the way down to 2000 a kilogram for Falcon nine. And if Starship Bay gets off the ground, literally, that could be much, much, much reduced. And so those those create opportunities to be able to and reduce barriers for others to be able to enter. And so I think we’re looking at lots of partnership conversations across the landscape, countries thinking about whether they want to have their own sovereign capabilities versus leverage others. And I think from a United States perspective, we’re we are doing very well in the space domain. And a lot of companies want to come here and work or be part of the US ecosystem for good reason. Got a lot of great technical talents, a good focus on this and and an environment and government structure that’s very supportive of increasing commercial companies. And so I think we’re going to continue to see companies doing that, not simply for a first, it’s going to be in looking, I’ll call it space to space to Earth, but Earth observation and other more obvious categories. But as communications are built and transportations and our costs are reduced both to get to low-Earth orbit, but then eventually here we’re going to see beyond low-Earth orbit, you’ll see more and more companies and governments working together to be able to have things like taxi systems in space and potentially other interesting businesses that could be established on top of this foundation. And so all the more reason why there’s good economic reason for it, good commercial reason for it. And to be able to support that, you want to make sure that you’ve got a stable and secure environment with rules of the road to be able to operate together as an ecosystem from country to country and company to company.

Eric White Yeah, finishing up here and you provide another great segway to this question, which is which is where is this all going and where do you see this all going? Are we going to see you mentioned those taxi services, are we going to have planes that are going to be flirting with that line between low-Earth orbit and and actually being considered on earth or what what are some of the things in the pipeline that you can foresee as somebody who’s been in this industry, an area for so long?

Preston Dunlap Yeah. So there’s a lot of potential and you could do a lot of dreaming about what in space activities can look like and then space activities that support what’s what’s happening down here on Earth, the road to be able to get there if you want to build it or the bridge from today, it’s tomorrow.  We started with the changing the way launch happens, both in terms of the weight and where you can go and what the costs are. I think the next thing that’s interesting is then the communications to be able to then support that. By that I mean how do you talk to people or things at great distances and to set up the communications infrastructure to be able to support movement out and beyond and pathways to do that? And once you’ve got communications set up, allows greater autonomy and systems to work together, which create an environment that allows things to be built and to work together out in space. And I think we’ve got a somewhat of a it’s not a blank canvas, but I think there’s a lot of creative opportunities here for those that are are investing or looking in the potential of once a few of these things lock into place to create that that bridge. That could be a very fascinating future in space and that there could be not simply things like civilization or people living places, which we often talk about or people think about. And there’s certainly the possibility of that. But there’s also various things in space that are useful as well, and not just for economic advantages, but to be able to help make make life better here and more productive, more useful, more stable. So I think we’re going to see a lot of creativity, opportunities for companies and governments that are trying to do that and want to rely on on countries to then make good policy and good rules to be able ensure that folks play well together and reinforce each other in a way that’s stable and fair to support that flourishing for companies and let the let those companies be creative and take bold steps with how they use their dollars time and talents to be able to to make that future actually be realized. I think spaces is something that we often take for granted. It’s in our cars and our phones, on our computers. And every every day that goes by, space is going to be a more integral element in our daily lives. Often if we do that right, we may not even notice that that trend is happening. But what that means is you’re able to have a more globally connected set of communities across the world, which creates a new opportunities to partner and understand others better and work together more collaboratively. So whether that’s for location services or agriculture, the maritime issues or just talking to each other let alone the opportunities up in space, there’s whether we see it or not, or recognize or not space is going to be a part of almost everyone’s life at some point here in the in the coming future. And I think that’s that’s a good future to go into. And we should do it wisely and thoughtfully and support those who are making bold more choices and investments to be able to help get us there safely and securely.

The post The future of DoD and space technology first appeared on Federal News Network.

A new report from the Mitchell Institute’s Charles Galbreath highlighted the Space Force’s weaknesses in counterspace deterrence, and called for a faster acquisition process to get the tools needed to increase the service’s ability to defend against the threat. A counterspace attack could disable satellites, communications and command and control capabilities. The report said the service does not currently have the resources to counter those threats.

“I don’t think any of us are satisfied that what we have resourced and fielded is adequate for the task — not our Guardians themselves or the capabilities that were given to them,”  Maj. Gen. David Miller, the service’s director of operations, training and force development said during an event the Mitchell Institute hosted Monday.

Galbreath’s report said weapons developed by China can disrupt U.S. space systems. It’s a threat model that Miller said Guardians need to be trained to confront, but it will require a new type of training, and a shift in the developmental model for leadership. Because intelligence analysts tend to put the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in the timeframe of 2027, the Space Force sees that as the deadline for modernizing their counterspace capabilities.

“It speaks to an as-yet defined integration model where we are taking those commercial industry advances as quickly as they come and innovating and then putting them into our operating concepts to fill the gaps. There’s been some progress in this so far,” Miller said. “But I think we have a way to go because we still do not have the baseline testing and training infrastructure we need to develop.”

The technologies required to effectively counter adversaries mounting a counterspace attack are in development, but the Space Force needs to communicate more with industry to get direction on the best ways to move forward.

“The Space Force could make more of a concerted effort to really work with industry so they can point out what that roadmap is and we can appropriately invest our thoughts and energy and dollars to develop the technology that’s required. That would be very helpful,” said Robert Atkin, a vice president at General Atomics.

Fast-tracking new defensive capabilities will also require some risk-taking. Atkin said companies like SpaceX are willing to accept significant failure before achieving success, and that the Space Force needs to change its culture to make risk more acceptable, particularly in the acquisition of new technology.

“We have to change the paradigm to take acceptable risk, to understand the risks and try to make quantum leaps in disruptive capabilities, as opposed to evolutionary changes. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to get there as fast as we can. But we need to have a cultural shift to get those in acquisition to understand that’s what has to happen,” Atkins said.

He warned against a tendency of the individual services to develop technology in parallel and said partnerships would speed the development of new technologies. Personnel exchanges between the services and joint training will help avoid stove-piping technology development, he said.

Guardians will need more in-depth training on the specific equipment used to defend against counterspace activities. Miller said where past training focused on more general knowledge, the future model needs to go deeper into specific technologies. He said it takes Guardians about a year to learn the skills needed for a new position, and until then, they are not effective enough to manage a counterspace threat.

“This is an entire leader development model that the Space Force is changing. And I think that you’ve started to see some of the investments needed. You’re starting to see some of the first development changes needed in order to ensure that we can do it,” he said.

The post Space Force not ready to face counterspace threat first appeared on Federal News Network.