Col. Eric Felt, director of the space vehicles directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), said the lab's next major project in space will focus on “nontraditional orbits,” including very low-Earth orbits and those near the Moon, Breaking Defense reported Friday.

“We in AFRL are working on technologies to expand space domain awareness above the GEO belt — so from the GEO belt all the way to the Moon and even a little bit beyond,” Felt said Friday at a webinar. “It’s what we call the xGEO, or the cislunar, area of operations. And as commercial people move there, and our adversaries move there, that becomes an area where we need to know what’s going on up there.”

Felt said the lab intends to equip LEO satellites with a Link 16 tactical data link to broaden connectivity across domains as part of the XVI project and plans to test a prototype by March.

“You would basically have a Link 16 capability everywhere, all the time, all over the world, and that is pretty powerful enabler to our warfighters,” he said of the XVI project.

Federal officials said agencies should consider modifying their solicitations under the $50 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract to meet their telecommunications and other information technology requirements during the coronavirus pandemic, FedScoop reported Friday. 

“This is a chance for the agencies to take a look and see where there might be gaps in what they were rolling out and look to expand their EIS solicitations,” Laura Stanton, incoming acting assistant commissioner of information technology category at the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, said Thursday at an AFFIRM webinar. “Agencies were in different places and were affected differently by COVID-19.”

Mike Maiorana, senior vice president of federal public sector sales at Verizon and a previous Wash100 Award winner, said agencies are making some changes to their solicitations and those include boosting bandwidth for data and voice networks to support telework, distance learning and telemedicine; cloud-based collaboration platforms for workforce productivity; and security support to safeguard against cyber threats.

“We have seen certain agencies delay EIS deadlines and/or decisions to focus more on the urgent matters at hand,” Maiorana said. “We have seen other agencies accelerate solicitations to use EIS as an enabler of technologies to assist their COVID-19 responses.”

The U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has reorganized its Special Operations Forces for acquisition, technology and logistics to create a new program executive office for software and digital services, C4ISRnet reported Saturday.

The PEO for SOF Digital Applications, formally launched on June 1, will serve as a one-stop shop for software-defined capabilities and artificial intelligence applications. Work under the PEO will take place at the SOF’s original location in Tampa, Fla., as well as satellite locations in Virginia, according to the report.

Col. Paul Weizer, head of PEO SDA, told the publication that he expects the new PEO to achieve initial operating capability within 60 to 90 days. He also said that he seeks to work with nontraditional contractors who have been “successful in software and really wants to help out the SOF community.”

Programs that fall under PEO SDA encompass applications such as special operations mission planning and execution, SOF digital ecosystem capabilities and the SOF Distributed Common Ground System.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has said that quantum technology could significantly help the military in a range of applications such as sensor-based navigation and communication.

GAO said in a blog post published Thursday that sensors built on quantum physics—the behavior of the smallest particles of matter or energy—could be used to improve the precision of aircraft navigation systems. Such systems enable pilots to identify the speed and location of other aircraft if an adversary blocks their GPS signals, GAO noted.

In addition, quantum technology can be used for secure communications through a feature called superposition which allows particles to be in multiple states simultaneously. Superposition enables quantum computers to rapidly solve equations to support advanced encryption techniques, the watchdog noted.

However, GAO noted that quantum research poses challenges such as the need for extreme environments with near-absolute zero temperatures to maintain units of data called qubits.

“Once these are overcome, we still won’t understand how small particles do things that seem impossible,” the agency said. “But we will have used these impossible behaviors to build practical—and potentially transformative—technologies.”

Col. Eric Felt, head of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) Space Vehicles Directorate, has said that the Department of Defense (DoD) should adopt NASA’s business model for commercial crew programs, SpaceNews reported Thursday.

Felt told the publication that AFRL plans to implement the model for programs such as the planned hybrid architecture of 266 industry-developed remote-sensing satellites and national platforms.

He noted that public-private partnerships can also drive the U.S. Space Force’s space domain awareness initiatives and support a “space commodities exchange” in partnership with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and AFRL.

“It opens up the financial engine to optimize the price and the quality, where you establish certain quality standards for what you’re going to need,” said Felt. “The space domain awareness data might be a great example of the kinds of things that the Space Force could purchase through a space commodities exchange.”

AFRL is slated to send a cube satellite known as Link 16 to orbit as part of an experimental effort to utilize encrypted radio frequency capabilities for U.S. and NATO vehicles.

The U.S. Army intends to select a contractor for the production of robotic mules that will work to assist light infantry units in transporting warfighter equipment. The service branch said Thursday that it envisions the robotic mules to operate up to 60 miles in 72 hours and carry 1,000 pounds of cargo as part of the Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport program.

Two infantry brigades from the 101st Airborne Division and the 10th Mountain Division tested 80 prototypes from four companies within six months. Col. Christopher Barnwell, director of the Joint Modernization Command’s field experimentation division, said the soldiers' feedback pushed the Army to update the planned system's mobility and carrying capacity requirements.

The Army expects to procure 624 robotic mules by 2024 and has unveiled plans to deploy S-MET systems in the second quarter of fiscal year 2021. The military service has also issued requests for information to seek inputs on modular mission payload technologies.