NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) signed a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) to foster commercial space transportation capabilities, including commercial crew and cargo activities, NASA reported on Friday. 

“Our partnership with the FAA will support the growth of American commercial aerospace capabilities that will benefit NASA, the nation, and the entire world,” said NASA administrator and 2019 Wash100 Award recipient, Jim Bridenstine. 

The NASA-FAA MOU follows the success of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 launch, the first crewed mission from American soil to be licensed by the FAA. The new agreement will support the transportation of government and non-government passengers, cargo and other payloads for orbital and suborbital space missions. 

The partnership will work to drive safe and cost-effective transportation, as well as streamline spaceflight standards and requirements. NASA and the FAA will develop a framework for private industry to follow for commercial launch and re-entry. 

Additionally, the agencies will create an approach for sharing safety data with the public to enhance understanding of the known risks of commercial space travel. NASA also will work with the FAA to license orbital and suborbital flights, develop new space technologies and research opportunities and advance point-to-point commercial suborbital pilot programs. 

“The partnership between the FAA and NASA is vital to continue the growth, innovation and safety of commercial space operations, and maintain the pre-eminence of U.S. leadership in the aerospace sector,” said FAA administrator Steve Dickson.

NASA is currently working with the FAA on commercial suborbital spaceflight activities through the Commercial Crew Program’s Suborbital Crew (SubC) efforts to extend suborbital space transportation capabilities for NASA astronauts and other NASA personnel.

Teledyne Paradise Datacom, part of the Teledyne Defense Electronics Group, has received certification for two of its modems, QFlex-400 and Q-Lite Compact Modem Card, for use in the Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) system, the company reported on Thursday. 

“The WGS certification process is one of the most stringent and demanding certifications for any satcom manufacturer to successfully complete,” said Mike Towner, senior director of Sales, Marketing. “This certification is testament to the secure foundation of Paradise modem technology that we have long delivered for mission-critical applications.”

Teledyne Paradise Datacom modems have been approved for use on WGS satellites by the U.S. Army Forces Strategic Command (ARSTRAT). Both of the company’s software-defined modems are versatile, configurable and field-proven, featuring enhanced security. 

The modems have helped to ensure uninterrupted data transmission. WGS users will deploy the Paradise modems as datalinks for voice, data, video and internet data transfer for secure government communications over the WGS satellite constellation.

The company’s QFlex-400 has integrated features that support bandwidth-saving technologies, including DVB-S2X and IP features, including Adaptive Code Modulation acceleration and header and payload compression.

The Q-Lite Compact Modem Card is a single-board, comms-on-the-move modem designed for simple mechanical integration into OEM products. It also features low power consumption and a very small physical footprint. It is compatible for use with the QFlex-400 modem.

About Teledyne Paradise Datacom

Part of the Teledyne Defense Electronics Group, Teledyne Paradise Datacom designs, manufactures and sells satellite modems, solid state power amplifiers (SSPA), low noise amplifiers (LNA), block up converters (BUC) and associated redundancy subsystems. We deliver satellite communications products around the world and have unparalleled experience in amplifier and modem technology.

A Federal News Network survey has found that 48 percent of federal contractors and employees said they would like to telework on a daily basis and 35 percent said they would choose to work remotely three to four days each week if they had no restrictions post-pandemic, FNN reported Wednesday.

FNN conducted an online survey of 2,023 federal employees, contractors and readers from Dec. 8 to 21 about their views on the future of telework in government and found that most survey respondents said their productivity has either improved or remained the same since the COVID-19 pandemic started in March.

The survey also showed that 53 percent of respondents said they believe their agencies’ support for telecommuting will increase after the health crisis, while 16 percent said they were not sure how their organizations might support or adopt remote work after the pandemic.

“Our organization used to be against telework, but productivity increased so much they could not ignore that and are now embracing it,” said one respondent. “Established teams are being given the option to continue teleworking with in-person meetings at least once per week so any new team members can put a face to a name and integrate easier. The face-to-face meetings will only happen once the pandemic ends.”

Most federal employees said they believe the use of mobile devices and other physical equipment and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom would continue even after the pandemic. Others said their agencies would depend more on cloud-based platforms to perform their work.

Some respondents said they expect file sharing, electronic signature, virtual training, conferences and on-boarding to persist beyond the pandemic.

“The ways in which we leverage technology to connect with internal and external stakeholders [may change],” one respondent said. “We have become more efficient with less in-person interaction. Limited travel budgets can also be maximized through advancements in communications technology. Overall, we have learned to become more efficient with less. It’s really the elephant in the room.” 

The Department of Defense (DoD) has released a new strategy to establish a framework for addressing and countering small unmanned aircraft systems.

The DoD Counter-sUAS Strategy calls for department stakeholders to work together to meet three strategic objectives and one of those is the need to improve the Joint Force through collaboration and innovation to protect defense personnel, facilities and assets in the U.S., host countries and contingency locations.

The strategy also calls for the development of materiel and nonmateriel platforms that facilitate secure and safe implementation of DoD missions and development and expansion of relationships with partners and allies to protect the country’s interests at home and overseas.

Ready the Force, Defend the Force and Build the Team are the strategy’s three lines of effort. To prepare the force, actions include the development of threat assessments that can inform future and current joint capability requirements and efforts to accelerate the development of joint C-sUAS technologies.

The second line of effort calls for the development of operational concepts and doctrine to enhance the Joint Force’s competitive edge and establishment of joint training standards.

Building the team calls for stakeholders to strengthen and sustain interoperability with allies and partner nations and advance partnerships with the national security innovation base and other nonfederal entities to advance the rapid development of joint capabilities to defeat and deter hostile sUAS.

Army Research Laboratory (ARL), part of the service's Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC), has developed a new application that may help warfighters use augmented reality (AR) in bright light daytime scenarios. 

The new AR technique uses low contrast dimming highlights to address excessive brightness that hinders AR display quality, the U.S. Army said Tuesday. ARL researchers said this development presents opportunities in the outdoor use of head-up display technology, including in the commercial sector. 

“We knew that AR displays work well indoors, but outdoors, the icons disappear because the displays have limited brightness,” said Chou Hung, a neuroscience researcher with ARL.

Hung said his team's proposed system has exhibited high resilience against strong light changes.

“Our discovery paves the way towards enabling that use, including in challenging desert, snow, marine and dense urban environments," Hung added.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has developed a predictive model designed to identify improper grant payments, and may share it with other agencies that award grants, Federal News Network reported Wednesday.

NSF’s payments and analytics branch has been experimenting with predictive analytics and produced an open-source model that eventually received the Association of Government Accountants’ (AGA) recognition. The agency studied how audit data, combined with other input, can inform predictive analytics.

“What we wanted to try to do is determine a subset of variables that we could use to accurately forecast whether one of these auditees would have a question cost," Jesse Simons, NSF branch chief, told Federal News Network.

The branch plans to deploy dashboards that would augment the agency's real-time data visualization.