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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://spacecoast.afceachapters.org/

Interview Transcript: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric White  No, I have not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Broader application than just the Army

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

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

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

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

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

Shift toward data-centricity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grants QSMO aims to speed acquisition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two common drivers of grants modernization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview Transcript: 

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

Charity Weeden Hi. How are you doing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Temin Called gravity?

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

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

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

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

Charity Weeden Correct.

Tom Temin And then that renders them into debris.

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

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

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

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

Charity Weeden Thanks for having me.

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

The post NASA’s worries are not just about space, but about space sustainability first appeared on Federal News Network.

Through the pandemic, the IRS learned it can move with urgency. And now that the emergency has subsided, Nancy Sieger, the former IRS chief information officer, believes that lesson isn’t going to waste.

Sieger, who will retire on June 1 after more than 40 years of federal service, including the last one as the Treasury chief technology officer, said IRS is building on the IT modernization lessons learned over the past few years.

“I think technologists saved the day during the pandemic. As the IRS CIO, I had the opportunity to lead IRS efforts to ensure that services to the public were handled in the most efficient way possible. If you think back to that time, businesses shut down, cities were practically shut down, and our economy was suffering and human beings were suffering. IRS focused really hard to issue three rounds of Economic Impact Payments. I am most proud of how IRS leadership and employees rallied to get money to the people in this country who needed it the most,” Sieger said during an “exit” interview on Ask the CIO. “We had a principle that any new technology would be built in a modernized way. We were really good at relying on the older systems and delivering fast. One of the opportunities we had with the Economic Impact Payments, looking to the future, feeling like IRS might be called upon again to do something similar. We had to challenge ourselves to say that may be easy and fast to build upon old operations, but how do we do this in a modernized way so that it’s repeatable? There were three rounds of payments, each round of payments came faster and faster, culminating within 24 hours. The Economic Impact Payments and that processing were built using new tools, new testing methods, new quality assurance processes and built in a modernized way. If IRS has to do that again, the strong foundation will be there.”

Sieger said it took constant reminders to build the confidence of the developers and engineers to the point where she and then-IRS Deputy CIO Kaschit Pandya, who is now the agency’s CTO, met daily with the technology workers who were writing code and analyzing it.

“We often had to say to our folks, ‘no, no, you have my permission to do it this way. Not [the old] way. It was risky. We managed those risks,” she said. “But ultimately, it resulted in little-to-no rework. I would say to you, on behalf of Kaschit and myself, the hours we spent with a team doing this the way it needed to be done was very fulfilling.”

IRS can accept, manage risks

That experience has helped the IRS continue to launch modern services, such as the direct file application, launched in March across 12 states. The IRS said the direct file pilot helped more than 140,000 citizens file their taxes online and for free.

There are plenty more opportunities for the technology development lessons learned from the pandemic to continue to spread across the IRS. Commissioner Danny Werfel told lawmakers in April that the tax agency needs $104 billion for a multi-year modernization effort.

Sieger said the experience over the last three-plus years taught the IRS it can accept and manage risks differently than before.

“We took a lot of risks. We weighed those risks. We said, ‘the worst thing that could happen is this. What are we going to do when that happens?’” she said. “I think our greatest opportunity is not forgetting how we did that, and bringing that forward into future operations. I’m trying not to say don’t be risk averse, but I’m going to say it. Don’t be risk averse and accept measured risk; know what could happen, know how you’ll adapt, but let’s face it, in our personal lives, especially in the technology space, how many of us get an update on our smartphone that didn’t work. But we know the next day it will be updated and fixed. Now I am not suggesting something so aggressive in government. But I am suggesting that we look back to how the government served this country during the pandemic and bring some of those skills and learnings forward to be even more effective and efficient in government service.”

One of the biggest reasons for the IRS’ success, beyond the urgency of the moment, was the top-cover leaders gave the developers. Sieger said helping employees reduce the fear of failure and ensuring they know they are not going to be left behind should something go wrong was a huge factor in the agency’s success.

“At the time, it was Commissioner Charles Rettig who was constantly keeping his hand on the pulse of the employees, working with Treasury to ensure that we were delivering the payments and processing tax returns and the IT workforce knew they had support. They were constantly asked, ‘What do you need?’ Sometimes they would tell us what they needed. Sometimes, I saw what they needed, and they wouldn’t ask. There was a particular weekend where the team was working really hard,” she said. “This was not a case of the workforce being hesitant to do new things. This was a case of the workforce having the skills they needed to do this in the most elegant way, and once leadership let them know — from Commissioner Rettig through the different deputy commissioners to myself and all the front line executives at the IRS who helped them — they were able to get things done and help the country. It was an example of coming together at the right time in the right way for the right outcome.”

The post How the pandemic changed IRS technology for good first appeared on Federal News Network.

The State Department’s intelligence arm is vowing to take better advantage of publicly accessible information and commercial data under a new strategy that calls for meeting diplomats’ demand for more unclassified assessments.

State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) today released an “Open Source Intelligence Strategy” to guide its OSINT efforts over the next two years.

Brett Holmgren, assistant secretary of State for intelligence and research, said the strategy is driven by the need to “harness” a growing body of commercially and publicly available information about world events. And it’s also intended to meet the demand inside the State Department for more unclassified assessments that can be accessed securely by diplomats anywhere in the world, Holmgren added.

In addition to delivering more timely information to U.S. diplomats,  Holmgren said the use of OSINT could also help INR and the State Department expand its partnerships with foreign countries, especially those outside of the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing alliance.

“So for us, when it comes to the future of OSINT, the stakes could not be higher,” Holmgren said in an interview.

The new strategy also comes on the heels of an intelligence community-wide OSINT strategy released earlier this spring.

Holmgren said the bureau’s strategy complements the IC-wide effort, but also reflects INR’s “unique role in the intelligence community as the only element that’s focused exclusively on providing intelligence to support American diplomacy,” Holmgren said.

He described how State’s analysts have relied on OSINT dating back to World War II, when INR’s forerunner, the research and analysis section in the Office of Strategic Services,  used news reports, government statistics and economic outlooks to create long-range assessment of the Axis powers.

“INR’s long standing embrace of OSINT continues to this day where many of our analysts turn to OSINT as their first source of information in the morning, and then they turn to classified cables and intelligence reports to determine what’s significant, what warrants an assessment, what needs to be flagged for policymakers,” Holmgren said.

The INR unit, a smaller component within the intelligence community, has been feted for its efforts to use OSINT rather than relying on highly classified sources. But Holmgren acknowledged that even INR’s analysts can struggle to produce unclassified assessments based entirely on open-source data.

“The challenge is balancing our desire to produce more products at the unclassified level with the need to ensure that these classified insights that our analysts have acquired, due to their access to classified information, is appropriately protected,” Holmgren said.

The Bureau of INR is working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on policy guidance on the use of OSINT in intelligence reports.

“I’m confident we’ll find a reasonable solution that allows us to better serve our diplomats while still safeguarding that classified information,” Holmgren said.

The bureau last year also established an Open Source Coordination Unit to better organize its OSINT efforts. After delays due to an initial lack of funding, Holmgren said the new office is now “staffed and resourced for the long term.”

The bureau’s new strategy highlights the importance of training and education on OSINT. “We are in the process of developing our own internal training that our folks will be able to access later this year,” Holmgren said.

He also said ODNI’s forthcoming guidance will be crucial as INR and other intelligence agencies navigate the challenges of ensuring open-source data isn’t tainted by disinformation.

“There will be unique differences between some of the OSINT tradecraft, in terms of how people are reviewing information to assess its reliability and credibility, to make sure that we are able to identify and detect and remove disinformation and other things that foreign adversaries may try to inject in the open source space,” Holmgren said. “But especially when it comes to conducting analysis, there will be many similarities with the existing analytic tradecraft processes and standards.”

Role for generative AI

The bureau’s new strategy also calls for investing in OSINT data and tools.

Like many intelligence agencies, Holmgren said INR has taken advantage of a recent increase in commercially available satellite imagery. The intelligence community famously used such imagery to issue public warnings about Russia’s impending invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

But INR’s analysts also rely on foreign leader speeches, panel discussions at conferences, government reports and other data that’s increasingly available over the internet. And in many cases, the relatively small bureau does not have enough analysts to sift through and analyze all that information.

Holmgren said that’s an area where tools like generative artificial intelligence could help.

“We think there’s real potential for things like generative AI to really help summarize and synthesize the key takeaways from this growing body of open source information, government information that’s out there,” Holmgren said.

Meanwhile, the intelligence community’s OSINT strategy calls for coordinating open-source data acquisition and expanding the sharing of such data across the IC. Holmgren called that a “game changer” for smaller components like INR.

“Frankly, our ability to acquire tools or licenses, in many cases is cost prohibitive for us because we just don’t have the resources,” Holmgren said. “And so what the DNI is doing on both cataloging the different tools and capabilities that are out there in the first instance, and then figuring out cost efficient ways for the taxpayer to make those available to the rest of the intelligence community is going to allow smaller agencies like us to take advantage of things that right now, for the most part, only bigger agencies can afford to acquire and deploy at scale.”

Mobile capabilities in development

One of INR’s major priorities during Holmgren’s tenure has been IT modernization. In addition to moving into top-secret cloud environments, INR has also sought to expand access to its unclassified work through new digital platforms.

Last year, the bureau released “Tempo,” an internal website on the State Department’s unclassified network. Holmgren said ambassadors and diplomats around the world can use Tempo to access a variety of unclassified INR products, including foreign public opinion polling data, humanitarian graphics and maps and analytical summaries.

Holmgren said INR is now developing a mobile application so State Department employees can access Tempo from their phones, wherever they might be in the world.

“In the future, what I believe will be essential to INR’s relevance and our ability to engage more with our customers, but also do enable intelligence diplomacy in a more consistent way, will be sharing unclassified level assessments based entirely on open source data, but still enriched with the expert analysis and expert insights that our analysts possess.”

The post State’s OSINT strategy aims to serve diplomats’ demand for unclassified assessments first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Marine Corps is close to testing out a key piece to its upcoming Fighting Smart concept.

As part of its goal to create an integrated mission and data fabric, the Marines will pilot an application programming interface (API) standard to better connect and share data no matter where it resides.

“Really over the next 12 months, we hope to have the autonomous piece of this API connection implemented in our environment in what we call the common management plane that allows us to execute enterprise data governance where we can then use the capabilities rather than the native capabilities within our environment to develop those data catalogs, to tag data, to track the data from its lineage from creation all the way to sharing and destruction within our environment and outside of our environment,” said Dr. Colin Crosby, the service data officer for the Marine Corps, on Ask the CIO. “We’re working with what we call the functional area managers and their leads on the data that they own because this is all new in how we’re operating. I need them to help me execute this agenda so that we can then create that API connection.”

Like many organizations, mission areas own and manage the data, but sharing because of culture, technology and/or policy can be difficult.

Crosby said the API connection can help overcome many of these challenges.

“Our first marker is to have a working API connection on test data. Once that happens, then we’re going to start accelerating the work that we’re doing,” he said. “We’re using logistics data so what we’re doing is using a dummy data, and we’re going to pull that data into our common management plane, and then from that CMP, we want to push that data to what we call the  online database gateway. Then, by pulling that into the OTG, we can then push it into the Azure Office 365 environment, where we can then use that data using our PowerBI capabilities within our environment.”

Testing the API before production

Once the API connection proves out, Crosby said the goal is to push data into the Marine Corps’ Bolt platform, which runs on the Advana Jupiter platform.

He said there is a lot of excitement from logistics and other mission areas around the Marine Corps to prove this API connection technology.

“As we get more comfortable moving forward, then we will bring on the next, what we call, coalition of the willing. As of now, we have a line because we have other organizations now that are like, ‘we want to be a part of this,’” Crosby said. “The training and education command is ready to go. So we’re excited about it because now I don’t have to work that hard to get people on board and now I have people knocking on my doors saying they are ready to go.”

Crosby added that before the API connection goes live with each new organization, his team will run similar tests using dummy data. He said building that repeatable process and bringing in some automation capabilities will help decrease the time it takes to turn on the API tools for live data.

Without these new capabilities, Crosby said it takes weeks to pull CSV files, thus delaying the ability of leaders to make decisions.

“With the API, we’re going to near-real time type of pull and push, which is speeding up the decision cycle,” he said. “Then there are opportunities to expand on that by building applications that will aggregate data and then being able to look at data to check the maintenance on equipment, and then it’d be a little bit easier to understand what we need and when. The goal is to shrink that decision cycle a little bit.”

The API connection tool is one piece to the bigger Marine Corps effort to create an integrated mission and data fabric. Crosby said that initiative also relies on the unification of the Marine Corps enterprise network to bring the business side and the tactical side together into one environment.

“The fabric is a framework and approach of our environment today and how we want to connect our environment in an autonomous fashion using APIs, so that we can pull data and we can share data, regardless of the cloud environment that it’s in, regardless of whatever database structure the data resides in,” Crosby said. “It allows us to be flexible. It allows us to scale and to really push data and pull data at a speed that we’ve never done before. What I love about the fabric is it really gets to that decision making. It allows our commanders to make sense and act within real or near real time.”

The post The Marine Corps’ plan to further breakdown data siloes first appeared on Federal News Network.

Demands for the healthcare industry to adopt new technology and enhance customer experience remain high. What strategies have proven successful and what are the priorities for the future?

During this webinar, you will gain the unique perspective of top federal healthcare IT experts:

• John Rancourt, Deputy Director, Office of Technology, Office of The National Coordinator for Health IT
• Jennifer Wendel, Acting Chief Information Officer, Department of Health and Human Services
• Dr. Neil Evans, Acting Program Executive Director, Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office, Veterans Health Administration
• Tim Waters, Senior Manager, Federal SLED and Healthcare and Life Sciences, Equinix
• Dr. Thomas Osborne, Federal Chief Medical Officer, Microsoft
• Gary Lynch, Global Practice Leader, Chief Technology Officer, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Verizon
• Moderator: Luke McCormack, Host of the Federal Executive Forum

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

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

Over the last decade, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website became bloated, making information hard to find.

An 18-month long effort, called Clean Slate, helped the CDC cut the digital fat by 65%.

Carol Crawford, the director for digital media at the CDC, said the agency used a customer-first approach to modernize its website, which relaunched yesterday.

“It was a complete overhaul of the whole user experience, and of course, a new look and feel,” Crawford said on Ask the CIO. “Coming out of the pandemic, we really looked at what we wanted to improve and what we wanted to do different. This went also along with CDC’s moving forward effort and, combining that, we launched what we call ‘Clean Slate’ and a big cornerstone of that project was starting over with a clean slate for CDC.gov. So that meant we were able to reduce about 65% of our content, which gave us more time and more energy to put toward improving the content that we had. We made a number of other updates that we thought would better improve the experience on CDC.gov.”

Crawford said some of changes to the website are basic like ensuring consistency in formats on all pages. Other changes are focused on the user such as CDC added page summaries to the top of every page so the citizen can quickly see if the page meets their needs.

“We’ve also really streamlined the navigation. We call it content first navigation that will guide a user through the journey of the content that they’re looking for,” she said. “ We organize the content by three primary audiences just to make it a little easier to spot the content that is just for just for you, or just for what you you’re looking for. And of course, we worked on the readability and the scanability of the pages on your desktop, mobile, iPad device. We’ve improved the fonts, for example, to make it easier to skim, kept our page length shorter, so that you can read quickly, and there is so much more.”

No IT upgrades needed

One factor that made the website revamp a little easier was the CDC didn’t have to upgrade the underlying technology.

Crawford said this let the CDC improve the existing technology stack, adding functionality like using metadata to automate pages where they used to manually update pages.

“We’ve expanded our application programming interface (API) use. We’ve expanded our data functionality and data visualizations,” she said. “We’re thinking about using AI, machine learning, natural language processing and some generative AI to really think about how to improve the quality of our content.”

Through a series of surveys and other feedback approaches, the CDC found that citizens and other users were “overwhelmed” by the amount of information on the website. Crawford said that stopped users from finding what they needed.

“We evaluated are these pieces of content that a user needs or ever looks for, are these old content and a number of other criteria, and really, it allowed us to just keep our highest performing content and the content that people really need each day,” she said. “We really looked across our site to see where we could improve on duplicate content. We definitely looked at what people were getting from other servers or sites, but we also looked internally, like many people, we also had duplicate content that we wanted to fold together and make it easier for people to find it all in one place on our site.”

The CDC’s website revamp comes as the Office of Management and Budget is emphasizing specific improvements across all agencies. Just recently, OMB said the Digital Experience Council completed the first federal website inventory and found more than 10,000 across the government. Clare Martorana, the federal chief information officer, said recently through this inventory, agencies will have a better idea of their entire ecosystem and what they need to do to secure it and improve the user experience.

The inventory is part of a bigger effort to improve the digital experience of users through the requirements laid out in OMB’s September memo and the 21^st Century IDEA Act.

OMB also recently issued new guidance for how agencies should improve accessibility under Section 508 requirements. The December memo, the first from OMB in more than a decade, requires agencies to design and develop “accessible digital experiences,” by taking a number of steps.

CDC kept users front, center

Crawford said CDC used the U.S. Web Design System standards and leaned into human centered design tactics.

“We worked together across all of our communicators at CDC. The entire group in my digital media division worked on this project along with our CDC.gov web council,” she said. “Human Centered Design was absolutely the cornerstone of what we’re doing. We made every decision thinking about what the users needed. We did extensive research on our audience needs. We included many steps during the process to collect information from our audiences. This included surveys, lots of user testing, things like a new rate this page feature. We also introduced a beta preview so that we could get lots of feedback from users and all in all we received about input from about 6,000 users so evolving, the audience was central to what we did.”

Like all agencies, the CDC had to take steps to make sure it was serving its diverse customer base. Crawford said that meant narrowing down their content around three particular audience areas:

• The general public
• Healthcare providers
• Public health professionals

“We’ve tested specifically with those groups, and then with a lot of diversity within those groups,” Crawford said. “We had to work across every content type CDC had and create ways that we knew would work for people. This meant engaging with people in the programs, the needs for audiences around flu might be different than the needs around audience around an injury topic, so we had to really work collectively. They have done the hard work of rewriting and reformatting content based on these best practices and the results of our testing.”

Going forward, Crawford said CDC will continue user testing and collecting user feedback. She said the agency is considering at least quarterly user testing with real people on the site as well as pop-up and email surveys.

The post CDC cuts the digital fat as part of its website redesign first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Department of the Air Force’s chief information officer’s strategy to increase the capabilities of its airmen and women and guardians is centered on increasing the use of cloud services.

Venice Goodwine, the Air Force’s CIO, said the cloud cannot be thought of as just for business applications. The lines between the back office and the tactical edge have blurred, she said.

“I’m expanding the cloud from NIPERNet [unclassified network] to SIPRNet [classified network] and also having all those capabilities as well in that cloud on both sides. As we think about the different classifications, how do we get there with those same human-to-human capabilities are important?” said Goodwine said at the recent AFCEA NOVA Air Force IT Day, an excerpt of which was played on Ask the CIO. “The other thing when I’m thinking of the cloud, it’s an investment. But I’m also going to create the transparency that we haven’t seen before in the cloud. Now when I think financial operations in the cloud, I now can talk to my system owners about their investment in the cloud, tell them when to pay for reserve instances. I could talk to them about how can they make adjustments in their investment based on the usage or their computing and storage? I didn’t have that visibility before.”

The Air Force is planning to have a single tenet for Office 365 on the secret side, which is different than what the service did with its unclassified version, which had multiple tenets

Several other military services and agencies also have rolled out O365 on the secret side recently.

“What’s important for my cloud strategy is making sure that I have cloud at the tactical edge. That’s my reliance on commercial cloud services at the edge because if I’m going to have decision advantage, I have to make sure that the data is available. The data needs to be where the warfighter is and the data needs to be in the cloud,” Goodwine said. “I don’t intend to put the data in the continental United States (CONUS) when I’m fighting in INDOPACOM. I need the data there. But then I also need the cloud at the edge. I need the data at the edge. I need artificial intelligence to make sense of the data. And it needs to be trusted. So all the attributes, you talk about data, I need all of that there. So it’s not just enterprise IT. It is it for the warfighter. That’s my mantra and you’ll hear me say that all the time and my team speak that same language.”

Air Force expanding virtual environment

The Air Force continues to mature its approach to buying cloud services. Goodwine, who became the CIO in August, said the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) remains the first option of where to buy cloud services, especially for new workloads. But, she said, those workloads and applications will remain in the CloudOne platform.

The Air Force is working on a new solicitation for CloudOne, called CloudOne Next.

The Air Force released its request for information for CloudOne Next in September and just in March, it offered more details on its acquisition strategy.

The Air Force expects to release three solicitations for CloudOne Next in the third quarter of 2024 and make the award in the fourth quarter of this year. It will be three single-award blanket purchase agreements on top of the schedules program run by the General Services Administration.

As part of this cloud expansion, Goodwine said the Air Force is developing a virtual environment to make it easier to access applications in a secure way.

“If you’re on your home computer, you have a Mac, you can go to portal.apps.mil and you can access your O365.You can be as productive as you need to be. There is no need for you to VPN in and you can use your home network,” she said. “You want to be able to access your OneDrive, all your apps and email, you can do that today. You only VPN in because you’re trying to get to some shared drives that we’re going to shut down eventually anyway. So really, those are the things that we already have in play that we should take advantage of, especially now that we’re in a hybrid environment. As we move forward, yes, understanding the work that’s done, the hours required to do that work so that we can make better investment decisions about the technology that we want to use, so I do think there’s a connection between technology and people hours.”

Additionally, Goodwine said the Air Force will expand its “Desktop Anywhere” initiative beyond just the Air Force Reserve Command.

“It now has an Impact Level 5 authority to operate, and we’re going to move it [off-premise] so we’re expanding that. We’ll have the ability to do more of these virtualized environments,” she said. “From a cybersecurity perspective, it’s a great idea because I just reduced my attack surface and from a productivity perspective, it’s absolutely faster, better, cheaper, and it now really allows you to be mobile, which is what I want my workforce to be the airmen and guardians.”

The post Air Force increasing cloud capabilities for the warfighter first appeared on Federal News Network.

On this episode of A Deeper Look, host Joe Paiva speaks to Matisha Montgomery, chief learning officer for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The post A Deeper Look at the Department of Housing and Urban Development first appeared on Federal News Network.

So we’re trying to send folks back to the Moon and potentially Mars. However, the longer people are out there, the longer they could potentially come down with something. Yes much like the fisherman and pioneers back in the day, even the most simple of conditions can become dangerous when you’re far away from home. So obviously technology will be needed to help prevent, diagnose and treat anything crew members could potentially come down with. To help spark some innovation, the Canadian Space Agency recently wrapped up it’s Deep Space Healthcare Challenge, in which the winner got $500,000 in grant funding. To learn more about the ideas brought forth during the contest, I spoke to Annie Martin, she’s the Health Beyond Portfolio Manager for the CSA.

Interview Transcript:

Annie Martin The deep space health care challenge that was first initiated to ask our innovators in Canada to develop, new, medical technologies for, diagnostic and detection of, for health care. And it was driven by the need to better understand what will be required for deep space mission. So, when we will, set up a settlement on the lunar surface for prolonged time, and when we’ll fly to Mars, the crew will need to be more autonomous in the way they manage their health. And mainly because of the challenge, like communication delays going from a couple of second on the moon to, 20 minutes one way on the surface of Mars. So that drives the need for a solution that will empower them to manage their health. And right now, just as a piece of information on the International Space Station, the crew has real time access to, flight surgeon on the ground and all the experts. So that’s why we need that paradigm shift. And innovation, you know, is moving fast. And we know that, you know, globally, but also in Canada, there are a lot of companies that are developing new approach to facilitate the work of healthcare practitioners. So, we decided to use a challenge price approach to simulate innovation and to have novel solution proposed to us. So, this challenge started about a bit less than two years ago, I would say, and we had more than 100 organizations who registered, proposed their concept. And then we had semifinalists that were asked to do a proof of concept. And from that list of 20 semifinalists, there were five finalists that were invited to do a demonstration of their, solution to our jury. And, we just announced, couple a couple of weeks ago, the grand winner and application and who won the big prize. So, these are all, all our, semifinalist, solution, were really designed to help diagnose or detect, health problem with a particular aspect of being applicable, here on Earth. So, the way we crafted our challenge that it needed to address immediate need on Earth and be applicable in a time frame of 5 to 10 years for space, we know that there is urgent need here, for a remote, remote healthcare, solutions, and the challenge are similar. If we think of northern Canada, where they don’t have access to expert, emergency evacuation or difficult. So, solution can help them address, just like it will support astronauts, in space.

Eric White So correct me if I’m wrong. You just called North Canada. Mars. Is that?

Annie Martin Well, I’m not saying they are Martian. Not at all. But there are lots of synergies between some of the challenges that they are ongoing. And, you know, when we invest in technologies, we are very mindful in terms of, you know, doing meaningful investment that can also benefit Canadian. And we specifically target those similarities in the challenges. And at the same time, you know, there’s a much bigger market on Earth. If you think of the number of astronauts for now. Yes, at some point we’ll democratize space and, more people will fly to space. But for now, since there’s a limited number of people flying into space, we’re conscious of the need for those companies to expand their markets here on Earth.

Eric White You mentioned the winners were MD applications for the Easy Resource Solution. Was that something that they had already invented prior to this challenge, using it in those scenarios that you had mentioned, or did they come up with this just for this challenge and now it’s being applied everywhere else?

Annie Martin It’s something that they already started to develop. So, the idea of the easy resource application, it’s to support, health care practitioners that, you know, in the moment of an emergency, need to focus on the patient for resuscitation. But at the same time, there’s so many things happening around they need to calculate the dose for the medication and all the process, the processes that they need to perform. So, their idea was to facilitate resuscitation for and health care providers. And so, they started to develop that. And when they saw the challenge they thought of, oh, it applies well for the challenge. So that, you know, it was kind of, a stimuli for them to invest more time and money to really develop that. So, they developed their application for terrestrial health care, and it is used globally. Now. They have, I think, more than 5000 users. So, so it, scaled up, quite rapidly. And the challenge, the health care challenge was an occasion for them to really get to it and get it done. And which was a good thing because, the grand prize was, $500,000 in grant funding.

Eric White Was that sort of the trend you saw with some of the other semifinalists that it was a particular technology that they already had, or where a lot of folks, you know, saying, okay, challenge accepted. Let’s try and create something specifically tailored for space.

Annie Martin I would say for the first stage, when we got more than 100 applicants, it was a mix of both. So, we had people that really wanted to solve a problem and let it go and do the challenge. But the semifinalist and it was solution that, you know, was already at a certain stage of maturity, not necessarily commercially available, but at least that the proof of concept was already done. And identify their market opportunity in order to, to make the to bring their technology, to market.

Eric White And let’s not leave out those who should get an honorable mention, which are those who are the semifinalists. I’m not going to make you go through the litany of them, but were there any, you know, 1 or 2 that had similar, technologies that, you know, didn’t win but still had something impressive to show you all?

Annie Martin Yes. And maybe if you allow me to maybe focus on the five, the finalists. So, in addition to, issued visas, by application. And there was an AI solution for tele robotic surgery, by the center for Surgical Invention and Innovation. They are building a solution that can do autonomous biopsy. And it’s all the idea to bring some, diagnostic capabilities to areas where experts are not located, necessarily. And, we know, Canada’s expertise in space robotics and their solutions is also, you know, derived from the work that has been done for and the Canadarm. So, it’s really interesting to see the application of some of those space technologies for, for health care. There was also another company called Indigenous Tech AI, for dermatology. So, the idea with a nap, you know, and to take a picture and, with artificial intelligence, you know, it helps identify, if the skin condition requires, a specialized dermatologist to, look at it. So, there’s that telemedicine connection as well. So, the expert who is located remotely can look at it. And, you know, we can say that this is also an important application, when there’s no dermatologist that travel northern of Canada or number of indigenous community, but with a technology that you can provide timely diagnosis and ensure that, you know, it can get treated, more rapidly. Because just to make a parallel, you know, if any one of us living in an urban center, you know, we see, something on our skin, you know, we could say, it’s nothing. Let’s just wait. But, you know, we could more easily access an expert if we need to. If you’re remotely, you know, you know, it’s something that may tend to drag more because the access to a physician is so rare. So that’s why such a solution can really help the health care practitioner there, whether a nurse or a physician, any specialist. So, so these are interesting. And then there was another one looking at virtual reality, Sonic with their sievert cardiac to help a remote expert support diagnosis and monitoring of cardiovascular disease. So, the expert wearing, the virtual reality goggle or helmet, you know? Can see the same thing as the person who’s okay with the local. And then better assist the person, you know, because expertise and training are a concern. You know, when we think of rural, remote site here on Earth. Mainly because, you know, there’s, you know, there’s no experts first that are, you know, there on the permanent basis and you know that the population is there’s less population. So, a physician who’s there, maybe they’re on rotation or may not see specific spatial cases frequently. So, when something new come up, it’s not necessarily easy to go back and to you when you learn those skills, you know, years ago. So, with virtual reality, it’s possible to easily access an expert and get, you know, proper health management and support the patient. That’s what health care practitioners want to do in rural and remote communities, to be able to support the patient without necessarily having an emergency evacuation, because this is something that we often see. If there’s a doubt in the health care practitioner’s mind about the health care condition, you don’t want to risk waiting. And it kind of degenerate. So, then the person would fly. But there’s lots of consequences in flying. Someone in an urban center does the isolation from the family being alone, being far away. So, there’s, you know, that philosophy of, you know, aging at home and that’s good for urban center or remote center, but how to ensure care is appropriately, provided locally and technology can support that. And the last and the last final is, was neuroscientists. So, they are building a solution to manage neuro vestibular and sensory motor, disruption. So, you know, when you feel imbalance or when there are any, any type of issue that comes from the inner ear. And when we think of space in microgravity, the neuro vestibular system is impacted because, there’s rapidly there’s the liquid in the ear and there is hair. When the liquid move, it sends signal to the brain to give information to the brain. How the head is positioned in space, in, in the environment, I would say. And in space, the liquid, you know, there’s no gravity. So, then the brain cannot take the signal from the ear. So, when astronauts come back on Earth, then suddenly the brain is receiving those, those inputs from the neural vestibular system, and it caused them to feel, to, to lose balance. And that’s why we see astronaut, you know, unable to walk straight when they come back on Earth because, you know, all these new signals that come to their brain, you know, kind of oversee. It’s all there’s overstimulation. So, the neural vest and there are also disease or health problem on Earth that also affect the equilibrium. So, this type of solution can help. Correct. And it was interesting because one of my colleagues wore the device during their, demonstration. And it was interesting the, the stimulation and how, how it works. So all different finalists, all different technologies, but all addressing specific health problems that are relevant for both space and the and also for.

Eric White On those demonstrations that you just mentioned. You know, those are all impressive, pieces of technology to come up with, you know, space or using them in space or on Earth. What went into the decision to award MD applications the top prize? I imagine it was a tough decision.

Annie Martin I can tell you it was really tough decision. And, and so the jury have that tough, tough choice to make from stage one. So, looking at the 100 more and plus application and then, and then define the, the winner, it was it was really hard. But, you know, they were looking at what the technology can do in terms of improving access to health care. How is it solving the problem of, remote communities, but also looking at how innovative is this, you know, what’s the innovation behind, what’s the market? You know, so to answer that, it’s also solving a problem here on Earth, this usability as well. How is it design, how is it used. So as much as, you know, practical aspect of how to use the technology, how could it really deliver on the benefit for both space and, remote, communities? And they were good debate. I can tell you I was part of the I wasn’t I was not a jury member. But I can tell you that there were lots of, interesting debate because all the tech, you know, and even when we were getting to the final. So, with the 20 semifinalists, you know, we discovered, great technologies, here in Canada.

Eric White Final question here. And I feel free to brush me off if this doesn’t fall under your expertise. But in your research, what are some of the most common diagnoses given to astronauts who are, you know, up their long term on the International Space Station or taking long trips to, you know, the moon? Did you find anything in your research for, what is the most common illness or medical condition that is diagnosed up in the space realm?

Annie Martin So, when we think of the International Space Station, you know, we send crew members that are very healthy. So, the screening is really, intense to make sure that the astronaut when they are selected, don’t present risk for a condition, that could lead to, important problem in space. So, they have, strict, selection criteria for selecting astronaut. And then when they are selected for a mission, they are also qualified for flight in terms of their health condition, to ensure that there’s no problem. I’ll give you an example. If they had a minor surgery. You know, pending on where it is, this could be a problem for future flight mission. So that’s why they need to be, qualified so that when they fly, they are, very healthy. So, what we are observing in terms of health condition, it’s very minor. On the space station, because of, we managed your risk alert, prior to spaceflight. But the effect of microgravity, you know, make them nauseous when they are in space can make headache, because when you find space that there’s no gravity. So, the blood tends to, accumulate more, and we say they have a puffy face. So, so this this is, so, you know, they would take the same medication as we would take, here on there because, you know, it’s based on, evidence-based medicine here on Earth, how we treat the astronaut in space. We also know that they lose bone, bone mass, when they’re in space. So, there’s always a risk for, renal stone. They’ve not been big case, but we’re very careful about that. They were some mild symptoms of cold. You know, because, you know, there’s always the risk of a late latent virus, you know, that maybe doesn’t manifest when you’re, you know, in the present time, but then would emerge, at a later time. So that’s something that we’re very careful. But again, you know, it would be, it’s pretty minor. In the first era of human spaceflight in low-Earth orbit. There were some, condition of tooth problem. And it’s also related to the bone, the bone loss, as well. So, nothing major. But it’s because of that risk. But when we think of Mars mission, a three-year mission with important dose of radiation, and we know radiation can be very harmful. So, there’s a new there’s a notion of risk that just open in front of us. And we need, to be prepared, for that. So, you know, we are preparing for risk of infection, a potential cardiac problem. It’s a complex system. There’s always risk of, you know, if there’s a system malfunction and there’s an electrocution or something like that. You know, there will be potentially DNA mutation on the Mars mission. But, but, you know, would we start, chemo in space and there’s lots of questions about the risks. So here are the risks. And which one do we choose to? To care for. And, you know, a space vehicle is limited in space or right now. So, you can see that I’m going in every direction. But I mean, there’s not a specific list. You know, with NASA, there has been the publication of a list of 100 and something condition that could happen in space. If there’s an international effort in terms of quantifying the risk and identifying, okay, considering mass volume, what will we bring? For that? So, so, you know, the cardiac, issue that we need to monitor, any infection that could, that could emerge because of, you know, all the surface and, you know, because everything floats in space. So, it’s not like if it’s settled, like here on Earth, you know, so it can, it can, you know, go into respiratory system and all that. So, getting ready for every type of infection, a urinary tract infection is something as well. And then an interesting question in the community, is also the, you know, the risk of appendicitis because that you have no sign and there’s no genetic, you know, you can have it and that it could be problematic. So, this is not answering your question. There’s one thing we’re looking at is how can we monitor so that we can have kind of early warning or early prediction so that we can see who is going somewhere? We see that there’s a, the change there’s a trend in some of the health parameters. How can we act before a medical condition becomes to a point that we’re unable to treat it? So, and then maybe one condition that is important that we should not forget. I only talked about physical health, but there’s also all the mental health, a three-year mission to Mars being away from home. You know, there will need to be, you know, strategies to cope with, with ensuring that they are mentally, healthy in space.

Eric White Yeah. The list of risks is long. It would definitely be a bad time to develop a food allergy. So, on that note, you know, since there are so many different risks that you’re trying to counteract and account for before they get off the ground, what is the future plans? Are you going to be running more challenges like this, looking at different aspects of diagnostics or, medical preparation that can, like you said, get you as ready as someone can for a three-year trip off of the Earth.

Annie Martin So the challenge approach that we use, is, is one of the many ways that Canada is, asking innovators to come up with new ideas. So, we are currently looking at what could be the potential, challenges. But there are also other means of, we have the Space Technology Development program in Canada to fund Canadian organization, to do, research and development. You know, we some we sometimes have directed, contracts, you know, a year and a half ago, we launched a connected care medical module contract where we asked innovators to create a medical system, and shipping containers. So, there’s different way, but I can really speak for that. The, the benefit of, running a challenge in terms of the incentive to innovators and, and the, the outcomes that we take. So, I hope that the Canadian Space Agency will, we’ll have more challenge. And there’s one that just closed on a water on the moon. There was one that we announced the winner for a food production in space. So, Canada has an interesting model for running challenge, so looking forward to seeing more of that.

Eric White Annie Martin is health Beyond portfolio manager for the Canadian Space Agency.

The post Canadian Space Agency hosts challenge for new tech in astronaut healthcare first appeared on Federal News Network.

The concept of nuclear power kind of makes sense for space travel doesn’t it? Taking a small amount of material and being able to harness energy from it to create a vast amount of heat, electricity, and power. I’m not breaking any news with that thought, as there have been and are currently a lot of smarter people that are trying to make that idea a reality. One of them is Robert O’Brien, who was recently appointed as the Director of the Center for Space Nuclear Research with the Universities Space Research Association. I got the chance to ask him about where things currently stand and how nuclear power could become more prevalent in the space field.

Interview Transcript: 

Robert O’Brien I’m just stepping into the role of director of the center for Space Nuclear Research, which is a Universities Space research association or USRA’s institute. The institute, or the CSNR, was formed in 2004, in partnership with the Department of Energy. We’re focused on working with the talent pipeline, developing a future workforce for the space nuclear industry, which is a very, very focused but strategically important work force that we need to develop for the nation. But in addition to focusing on the town pipeline, we’re also engaged in the development of national programs. And, and really doing all of the above for development of advanced technologies in space, nuclear power and propulsion.

Eric White Yeah. You know, the melding of space and nuclear. It’s not something that my that wasn’t the first place my head went to. Where do things currently stand as far as the use of nuclear energy? Is it to actually power spacecraft or is it used for other methods in space currently, or are you guys still looking into that?

Robert O’Brien So, you know, let’s go back to the origins of the space industry. Wernher von Braun knew that we needed high energy density, power, and propulsion in order to explore the outer solar system. Even to go to Mars. We were looking at, nuclear fission systems to be able to enable human exploration. It’s also an incredibly important technology that you have to explore robotically as well. Being able to close missions in the lifetime of a principal investigator, which normally is unheard of to do 2 or 3 missions in the career lifespan of a P.I., but with the engagement of nuclear technology being able to maneuver faster than ever before, we’ll be able to close those missions and get, you know, a seasoned experience into the science community and, and closing missions that were normally once in a lifetime. And so, this is not a new technology area. This is very much an area that’s been looked at since the dawn of the space age. What we’re doing now is really refining those technologies and stepping out from what we would describe as 1950s and 60s technologies. Which is primarily driven by radioisotope decay, for our nuclear systems to date, the world has changed. The ability to generate enough fuel for those radioisotope systems is proving to be challenging as all the programs closed out and facilities were closed. We’re now looking at systems that are perhaps more storable, being able to assemble technologies that can sit on the shelf and be ready for flagship class missions, and also can be used by the commercial space industry, which is really an exciting new chapter for, for the space sector. Looking at commercial spaceflight both to the moon and beyond. And I think as we look at, exploring systems from a commercial perspective, we’re also looking at prospecting for minerals and materials that we can use for in-space manufacturing and even bringing materials back to Earth to help enrich human life here on Earth, as well. And all of this is going to be possible, using high energy density systems, systems that use nuclear fission for both generation of electricity process heat and propulsion as well. Being able to maneuver without regret. Being agile, and, you know, really enabling new trajectories for spacecraft, that, couldn’t be closed easily or affordably with chemical propulsion. So, a very exciting, chapter, I think, ahead of us using this, this technology. But the main takeaway is we’ve really used nuclear energy already done that successfully since the 1950s for spaceflight. And, you know, we’re now looking at, the next chapter, which is, you know, very safe, efficient systems, that enable human and robotic missions.

Eric White Yeah. You mentioned that term high density. It seems as if. Yeah, it makes sense. Nuclear power is almost tailor made for space because that you get a lot out of a little bit of, fuel. What are some of the drawbacks of, using nuclear power in space? And you had mentioned some of the challenges that you all are running into. As far as getting an efficient and consistent, power source from these, sorts of materials.

Robert O’Brien So as we move into, you know, the next chapter where we’re looking at, technology. Is that robust. We’re looking at materials that can endure at very high temperatures to be efficient. One of the biggest challenges that we face when we’re generating electricity, as one example, is being able to remove the waste heat. And what waste heat means is on the outside or the rejection side of any kind of, cycle. Or if you think about a power conversion cycle like Brayton power or a Stirling engine, some of the most early types of heat engine, you put heat in, but you also do work and have to reject heat. And it’s that heat rejection that is the biggest challenge in terms of mass penalties as we face being able to close a mission design that doesn’t spiral out of control when it comes to mass and mass penalty. So, in order to overcome all of these challenges with rejecting waste heat, instead of using a lot of dead mass, which is essentially a radiator panel, that radiates heat to space. What we have to do is minimize that mass. We have to do that, using the Stefan Boltzmann law, which there’s that term temperature, the power of four. So, in other words, if you can increase the temperature significantly, you can dramatically increase the efficiency of the overall radiator technology and the ability to radiate to space. All of that reject heat. And there were some legacy programs that looked at fission systems. Those systems, looked at, you know, pretty low temperature radiator technology. It was the best that was at hand back, even up through the 1990s through the early 2000. Those temperatures may have been around 500 Kelvin, 525 Kelvin. With some of the legacy programs and those the challenges there is that you need hundreds to kilometers of, square, you know, square area that, that you need to reject heat from. And so, if we can bring temperature up to in the realm of 900 Kelvin to even in the future 1200 Kelvin, where that could be a sweet spot where we’re in the meter squared, not thousands of meters squared. That is really interesting and very exciting because every meter squared has mass attributed to it. And so, if we can keep the square meter down, then we can keep the mass down of the overall system. And remember that that that mass doesn’t do anything but push heat to space. So, it takes away the amount of useful payload that we can put on a spacecraft, instrumentation, even people and essentials for life support so that that’s what we can bring back to a mission if we can bring temperature up. So that means development of new radiated materials and potentially new fuel systems, and even new reactor technologies that work in the realm of 3000 Kelvin. So, lots of exciting work on materials manufacturing side. All of this to say that we need people to solve those problems, and we need the facilities and infrastructure across the nation to, to really develop those new technologies.

Eric White Yeah, we’ll get into the talent aspect of this, in just a second. But I do want to ask, you know, what sorts of research efforts are looking into those things? How do you how do you experiment with this? You know, it’s pretty finicky technology already here on Earth. I can’t imagine, you know, having to conduct sort of these experimental works in space, you know, are there any research efforts that you’re currently involved in, or you have been involved with in the past that look into trying to address those challenges?

Robert O’Brien Absolutely, yes. This is this is where the programmatic side, of the, the technology areas is really, starting to, to pick up a lot of momentum and getting a lot of great results already. If we think about the NASA Space Nuclear Propulsion project, which is run out of the STMD directorate at NASA, this is, a really exciting program that’s been going for several years now, making immense progress with respect to developing new fuels that perform incredibly well at 3000 Kelvin for the nuclear propulsion side, we’re looking at nuclear thermal propulsion and nuclear electric propulsion. One aspect is generating electric to be able to power, thrusters like whole thrusters, ion drives, even technologies like VASIMR where the future looking being able to be very efficient, looking at different power levels. Everything from the kilowatts, megawatts. We’re making great progress, across the industry sectors as well as, within the NASA centers and the Department of Energy, all working together to solve materials problems at those high temperatures. And, you know, 3000 Kelvin for fuel, is over 2500 Kelvin more than, we’re doing today on Earth for fuel systems that, that are looking at, fission technologies and, existing fleet of reactors like the pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors across the country. So those technologies are a very robust well understood. And they operate in a very safe and low temperature areas. We’re looking at temperatures now that are pushing the boundaries for space exploration, that are pushing the boundaries of the physical or the solid state, if you like. We’re on the verge of melting fuel when it comes to nuclear thermal propulsion, but we do that because we have a robust matrix to encapsulate the fuel. So, we’re looking at technologies like ceramic matrices and ceramic metallic matrices. The matrix itself holds everything together. It maintains a cool geometry as we take the fuel up to 3000 Kelvin. And the fissile material, the fuel itself is embedded in that matrix. Being able to make that material is an area we’ve made immense progress over the last decade in partnership with industry and the national lab capabilities across the country.

Eric White And so, yeah, as you mentioned, this is a huge undertaking, and you are in need of the people and the researchers to do this work. You know, being a nuclear engineer is hard enough. There’s probably not a lot of them to go around. How do you attract a nuclear engineer to say, hey, you know, why don’t you look above the stars for once and instead of focusing on nuclear power here on Earth?

Robert O’Brien Yeah, talking to stars. You know, it’s like there has to be alignment of three stars. We have to align the people. We have to align the infrastructure and capabilities, and we have to align the national priorities, the programmatic strengths. In other words, the budget to be able to resolve and develop the technology and accelerate it to beyond where it was in the 1960s, to where we’re going over the next decade. And so those three things have to be hand in hand. How do you attract people to an industry? Well, there has to be definitely demonstrated evidence. There are jobs on the outside of participating and engaging in a in an education program that will lead to that job. So, in other words, taking a nuclear engineering degree, taking the specialty course credits, or taking the specialty training that allows you to align with, being able to close some of our gaps that we have in the space nuclear powered propulsion arena. That’s really important. So, as we see more and more active programs, companies hiring companies, looking at bidding on programmatic effort for the country, I think this is a really good signal to the future talent pipeline that the area is healthy. It is definitely needed from, both a science and strategic perspective for the nation. And there are places that they can get jobs. And so, now what we have to do, demonstrating the evidence that there’s a job ahead of them, is we have to connect the dots. And that’s where the Center for Space Nuclear Research can really help both on the industry side, the national labs side, the NASA side, but also on the academic side as well. We are an arena that, allows collaboration and affordable collaboration. That’s the other part to say as well, we’re trying to develop people and develop capabilities. We have to and the low TRL sense to that in an affordable way and not, not cost the Earth because these technologies are expensive. The, you know, the real cost of flying, efficient system in space is, you know, is high. However, the return on that investment, the, the long standing, infrastructure, and capabilities and quite frankly, the national leadership that we gain from, from enabling that technology in space is immense. And so, the benefits completely outweigh the cost. So, I think by developing people, alongside the technologies, we’re really going to help push the nation forward. From a leadership perspective.

Eric White Yeah. And bringing the focus back to yourself, you’ve been at this for a while now, in this role, as you know, returning to the Center for Space Nuclear Research. Do you see yourself more as now a facilitator? And rather than being on the actual front lines of research? And, you know, also, if we could get into, you know, what made you want to go towards the space arena when you first got interested in nuclear engineering?

Robert O’Brien So, so I started, actually in the space sector, essentially, I always wanted to support the development of technology for space exploration. I wanted to be part of the space industry or the academic world that was exploring space, trying to develop science and return science to Earth and adding value and enriching life on Earth with, with space technology. I’ve always enjoyed the talent pipeline aspects as well. Growing others and collaborating with others. And I think that’s what’s exciting about this, this role, as I return to it, what brought me into then, space nuclear was really solving a problem that the general science community had. And we were looking at a mission. I was at the University of Leicester collaborate. Rating with a number of schools, including the University of Bristol in the UK and the British Antarctic Survey. We were looking at performing an experiment in Lake Vostok and, in, in, the Antarctic, and we were looking at trying to deploy a system that could be used on Europa to be able to explore the ice under the icy moon, for example. And really that that challenge was, was really compounded with the amount of energy that we can take to enable that mission. And, you know, we’re using chemical energy storage, like even the best technology, like lithium-ion battery technology is, is really, really challenged by temperature. And as you go to very cold or even cryogenic temperatures, the capacity of batteries, the best battery you can build, it’s roughly 30% of its maximum capacity at room temperature. So that was one challenge. So, you have to have large amounts of energy storage in a mission. And essentially the battery can just displace all of the science. So, I was faced with that problem and developing a technology at the University of Leicester that would work in that arena. And, you know, very quickly concluded that the only way to do this would be for nuclear energy. And so, I began studying ways that we could empower, a small robotic system in Europa and, looking for an isotope source that made sense for the UK. And, the UK faced a lot of challenges, in the 90s and early 2000, doing the same thing that we did here in the US, which was demolition and destruction, reduction of capabilities and actual capabilities. Being able to produce isotopes was difficult. What the UK had was the mock stores with americium 241, and I think the community’s going to hear a lot more about americium, and its ability to power space missions in the future with the work that’s ongoing at the University of Leicester and that, you know, we’re interested in supporting commercially here for the US industry needs as well as international needs as well, so that that real problem solving got me into, trying to trying to look for, for sources that that could help us enable space exploration using nuclear power. And, you know, I soon realized that to do big things, we need a lot of power. And so, radio isotopes worked really well at low power, up to about 100W electric. But as soon as we get into the Kilowatts electric, to be able to do that today here in 2024, with current capabilities to produce isotope materials and the commercial, supply chain for radio isotopes, we’re really looking at kilowatts and above as fission and sub kilowatt is enabled with radio isotopes today. And so, both have a bright future ahead. I think both have, a great, set of solutions that they can close, and, yeah, really, really looking forward to, how my experiences can grow other people’s capabilities and interests in this field and then, ultimately support the, the national programs to come.

Eric White Robert O’Brien is the newly appointed director of the center for Space Nuclear Research, part of the University Space Research Association.

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