Officials of the Export-Import Bank of the United States said they are extending help to U.S. space companies facing competition from firms backed by the Chinese government, SpaceNews reported Thursday.

David Trulio, a senior vice president at Ex-Im, said the bank has received a congressional mandate to offer help to the space industry and exporters through the Program on China and Transformational Exports.

‘It’s a crucial mandate that we’re working to operationalize,” Trulio said Thursday at a virtual forum.

The Ex-Im program offers loans to foreign entities buying U.S. goods and services and Congress directed the bank to earmark at least 20 percent, or approximately $27 billion, of its financing authority for the program.

Judith Pryor, board member of Ex-Im, said the bank, which had offered $5 billion worth of loans to U.S. satellite and launch services buyers 10 years before it lost its congressional authorization, has “seen an uptick in non-geostationary satellite requests.”

Those include the rising demand for funding for low-Earth orbit satellites used for remote sensing and Earth observation missions and for in-orbit servicing.

Lt. Gen. Warren Berry, deputy chief of staff for logistics, engineering and force protection at the U.S. Air Force, said the service is looking at the U.S. Army’s Future Vertical Lift program as an option to meet the need for carrying out agile airlift operations in a time of war, Defense News reported Thursday.

“That’s something that we’ll certainly look at, but we know that we need to do lift in a different way,” Berry said of the FVL program at a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies-hosted event Thursday.

Another option Berry mentioned is Agility Prime, an initiative that seeks to explore the capability of “flying cars” that could be used to transport troops and perform logistics and search-and-rescue missions. He said the Air Force is working with the joint counter-small unmanned aircraft systems office led by the Army to protect U.S. military bases from small drones.

“That’s going to be a demand signal on this force moving forward that we’re going to have to really think through and make sure that we have them [airmen] resourced appropriately to execute that part of the air base air defense mission as well,” Berry added.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has established mobile emergency response support units to ensure the availability of multiple communications systems for disaster response, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

The units operate under FEMA’s Disaster Emergency Communications segment and deploy vehicles that house various radio equipment, microwave systems for data transmission and satellite systems for video, data and voice communications.

“We are constantly monitoring chat software and collaboration software to ensure that we are producing consistent messaging. And the information flows both ways,” said Steve Goldstein, liaison of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to FEMA, in an interview with the publication.

Goldstein’s comments come after FEMA released its 2018-2022 strategic plan which details the agency's need for “redundant communication systems” to ensure uninterrupted transmission in disaster scenarios.

“There are inherent risks to relying heavily on these communications systems. We must understand their interdependencies and the potential cascading impacts that a failure could cause,” the plan states. “FEMA must work with our partners to assess the mission impacts of losing the ability to reliably communicate and prioritize meeting all-hazards communications needs.”

The U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) has completed critical design review activities for the control and planning segment (CAPS) of a Northrop Grumman-developed satellite communications system over the North Pole.

SMC said Wednesday the review, which took place on June 24 and 25, follows more than three months of critical baseline assessments for the Enhanced Polar System Recapitalization (EPS-R) CAPS concept.

Northrop secured an $87 million contract to develop EPS-R CAPS in 2019 and will now help SMC test and integrate CAPS before working on command and control capabilities for other EPS/EPS-R payloads.

EPS-R serves as a follow-on effort to EPS and includes two eXtended Data Rate payloads intended for encrypted coverage ahead of the delivery of protected tactical and strategic satcom polar variants.

EPS is designed to handle satcom operations over the polar region to support various applications including homeland defense, wartime, humanitarian assistance and contingency support.

The system includes two Extremely High Frequency (EHF) communications payloads, CAPS, a Global Information Grid, a gateway and modified Advanced EHF terminals.