A bipartisan group of seven House and Senate lawmakers proposed a bill allowing $21 billion for projects to revitalize four U.S. Navy shipyards and another $4 billion for the modernization of private facilities used to build or repair military ships.

The Supplying Help to Infrastructure in Ports, Yards, and America’s Repair Docks Act of 2021 seeks to help the military branch address public shipyard asset improvement, maintenance, and expansion requirements, according to a press release posted Wednesday. 

SHIPYARD Act would also give the Navy secretary more flexibility to award contracts under the Defense Production Act.

Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine; Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Tim Kaine, D-Va.,; Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.; and Angus King, I-Maine, introduced the bill with Reps. Rob Wittman, R-Va,; Mike Gallagher, R-Wis.

Join Potomac Officers Club’s 2021 Navy Forum to hear notable industry and federal leaders discuss the initiatives, efficiencies and solutions that will enable the Navy to become more effective in warfare.  

Check out the Potomac Officers Club's (POC) 2021 Navy Forum coming up on May 12th. Click here to register.

NASA expects to soon conduct the Mars helicopter's fourth flight, having demonstrated the spacecraft's ability to fly on the red planet. The Ingenuity helicopter will fly on Thursday from a Mars airfield dubbed the Wright Brothers Field, NASA said Thursday.

“From millions of miles away, Ingenuity checked all the technical boxes we had at NASA about the possibility of powered, controlled flight at the Red Planet,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. 

The team in charge of the Mars helicopter was tasked to demonstrate controlled flight in a simulator chamber six years ago, marking the spacecraft's first flight objective. 

The second flight took place on April 19th when Ingenuity flew on Martian surface for the first time. The helicopter then demonstrated a down-range flight of 164 feet with a top speed of 6.6 feet per second during the third and most recent flight, which occurred on April 25.

The upcoming fourth test will have Ingenuity elevate to a 16-foot altitude, then collect surface imagery as it flies southward. The helicopter will then hover while capturing colored images.

“Future Mars exploration missions can now confidently consider the added capability an aerial exploration may bring to a science mission," Glaze said.

 Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has moved the launch date of an upcoming geosynchronous orbit satellite from 2022 to 2023 due to a rideshare scheduling issue, Space News reported Wednesday. The NTS-3 satellite is designed to provide positioning, navigation and timing for U.S. military operations. 

United Launch Alliance (ULA) will launch the satellite through the National Security Space Launch program's USSF-106 mission, which is a rideshare arrangement with other U.S. Space Force users.

NTS-3's production and evaluation are progressing on schedule, as the delay is not associated with the satellite's development. Brig. Gen. Heather Pringle, AFRL commander, said the laboratory will use the delay as an opportunity to put more work into NTS-3.

Beth Killoran, deputy chief information officer at the General Services Administration (GSA), said the agency wants to use cloud technology in new ways that would require a modular environment. 

She said at the IT Modernization Summit that the plug-and-play approach would help agencies better accommodate work-from-home arrangements, FedScoop reported Wednesday.

Adopting a distributed, flexible cloud approach will help government agencies prevent cloud lock, as not all forms of cloud function the same way, the deputy CIO added.

“And so I think we’re going to start seeing some cloud brokerage and some cloud distribution so that we can utilize the best capabilities of cloud environments," she said.

A hypersonics research proposal from the Naval Research Laboratory has been selected by the Department of Defense to receive a $45 million grant under the DOD”s Applied Research for Advancement of Science and Technology Priorities program.

DOD said Wednesday that the NRL-run Naval Center for Space Technology pitched its “Surface Morphing and Adaptive Structures for Hypersonics” project to the DOD S&T Executive Committee as part of the ARAP competition.

“We appreciate the initiative, originality and collaborative effort that each team displayed in developing a high-quality proposal, especially during the pandemic,” said JihFen Lei, chair of ExCom and acting director of research and engineering for research and technology at DOD.

NCST’s winning proposal, which beat 16 other submissions reviewed by the panel, will explore materials and approaches to boost the performance of hypersonic weapons.

The three-year effort will see NRL lead a group composed of Air Force and Army research laboratories, the Missile Defense Agency and 20 academic entities.

Eighty government scientists and engineers and at least 20 new graduate students will support the initiative to help the department build defensive and offensive hypersonic platforms, DOD noted.

The department holds the ARAP award competition among its components every year to address technology and capability gaps within the defense enterprise.

Vaughn Noga, chief information officer of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has talked about EPA's goals of creating a cybersecurity-aware culture and decreasing hindrances to deployment and operation of new applications and systems. 

Speaking at Federal News Network's Federal Drive with Tom Temin segment, Noga cited the need to prioritize the agency's approach to fielding systems and getting them through the extract, transform and load process.

"[It is] a long way of saying we need to make it easier for our state agency stakeholders… And quite frankly, we need to reduce the barrier and the burden on our stakeholders, so they can be productive much quicker," he added.

To develop a cybersecurity-aware culture, Noga said EPA must educate its workforce on system requirements for defending against malicious cyber attacks.

“And part and parcel of that are working with them to understand what their role is in protecting the IT systems and the data and the assets of the EPA,” he continued.

Noga also discussed his office's efforts to ensure accessibility of data to inform the decision-making process. He cited how EPA moved paperless activities to digital to enable employees to work from anywhere.

Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Michael Gilday has shared the U.S. Navy's plan of transferring the operations of its 13 satellites to the Space Force and assured that the process will be easy due to both military service branches' connection to Space Command, Military.com reported Wednesday.

Gilday made the remarks at a Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA)-hosted virtual forum.

The CNO also talked about the Navy's decision to continue doing space-related work at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), where space research offices, including the Space Science Division and the Naval Center for Space Technology, are located.

"The decision has been made to maintain our Navy capability within those labs and keep it in the Navy for the sole reason that … in a Navy research lab, there's a lot of cross-cutting work that goes on across a number of different disciplines," said Gilday.

The service branch also looks to provide the Space Force with more authority over NRL work through memorandums of agreement that are currently being developed.

The Leidos Partnership for Defense Health today announced it successfully delivered the MHS GENESIS electronic health record to an additional 10,000 clinicians and other providers as part of its most recent Wave deployment with locations in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.

"We are gaining momentum and improved efficiency with each Wave deployment," said Liz Porter, Leidos Health Group president. "Our team continues to be impressed by the hard work and dedication demonstrated by the staff at each of these locations. They are the driving force behind our success to date."  

The Leidos Partnership for Defense Health (LPDH) developed MHS GENESIS, the Military Health System's new electronic health record, and has been providing program management and technical expertise to the Program Executive Office Defense Healthcare Management Systems (PEO DHMS) since 2015.

"The staff at these locations worked tirelessly to adopt a new electronic health record system, while continuing to battle a global pandemic," said Holly Joers, acting PEO DHMS. "We applaud their focus on the mission and partnership in this important transformation."   

The General Services Administration (GSA) has identified 22 federal employee-proposed projects that will be provided with phased funding under a Technology Transformation Services division-hosted investment program for enhancing technology uses in support of government priorities.

Some of the proposals under the 10x initiative are about enforcing climate and environmental justice and expanding minority-owned government contracting businesses, GSA said Tuesday.

10x's selection focuses on public trust and civic life; public lands and environment; and equity in delivery themes. Topics include public engagement in policymaking, environmental footprint monitoring for climate change effect mitigation, support for individuals reentering society and dissemination of civil rights information to the public.

“10x practices a unique approach for investing in government technology through a phased approach with iterative funding," said Dave Zvenyach, director of TTS. He added that the approach has led to the development and deployment of government-wide platforms. 

10x received and reviewed 250 proposals from employees at 34 agencies. The program is established in 2015 to solicit ideas from the federal workforce to help improve government services. 

Dave Zvenyach recently served as a keynote speaker during GovConWire Events' Modernizing Federal Acquisition Forum on April 15th. If you didn't have the chance to join GovConWire for the Forum to hear notable industry and federal leaders discuss the new modernization priorities, innovative solutions and future plans for acquisition, you can check out the event by clicking here.