NASA is likely to postpone the start of its Earth System Explorer program, which is one of the recommended lines of missions in the 2018 Earth science decadal survey, due to budget constraints, SpaceNews reported Monday.
Sandra Cauffman, acting director of NASA’s Earth science division, said the agency hopes to issue the first solicitation for the Earth System Explorer program this year.
“But given the appropriations we got in ’20 and the look out that we have for ’21, it doesn’t look promising that we can do it next year or even ’22,” she said. “We’ll just have to keep a watch on the budget developments.”
Earth System Explorer is a line of medium-class missions that would be competed and focus on studies in seven Earth science areas. Under the program, NASA will pick the first set of proposals before selecting one from the initial set to transition to full-scale development.
Related Articles
Gregory Barbaccia, federal chief information officer and a 2025 Wash100 awardee, has shared his insights on how the federal government should advance digital transformation. “I notice a lot of the government considers itself to be ‘digital,’ but in reality, we’ve only digitized, not transformed. Sure we went 0-1, but that should have just been the beginning,” Barbaccia wrote in a LinkedIn post. He noted the lack of automation and that workflows remain unchanged despite the replacement of paper ledgers with spreadsheets. “Files are shared over email instead of through real-time collaboration tools,” he added. Advancing Digital Transformation in Federal Government
The Federal Communications Commission has adopted new rules that seek to eliminate unnecessary paperwork and address regulatory barriers to the ground-station-as-a-service, or GSaaS, business model as part of efforts to drive innovation in the U.S. space economy. FCC said Thursday the new rules establish a process for ground station operators to secure a baseline license without first identifying a satellite point of communication. A simple FCC notification will be required for each new point of communication. According to FCC, the change would eliminate nearly half of earth station modification applications. “Making the smallest change to a satellite system or earth
The General Services Administration has announced a OneGov agreement with Amazon Web Services that will provide up to $1 billion in direct incentive credits to federal civilian agencies. According to GSA, the direct incentive credits, aggregated across the agencies, will include savings on core AWS cloud services through AWS credits, infrastructure and application technologies modernization through AWS modernization credits, access to AWS training and certification through training credits and a streamlined engagement model with greater savings for direct contracts through direct partnerships. Advancing America’s AI Leadership The agreement is expected to accelerate large-scale IT transformation and boost AI innovation across