NASA engineers have developed a new high-pressure ventilator to treat COVID-19 patients and it has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for under the ventilator Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), the administration announced on Friday.

"This FDA authorization is a key milestone in a process that exemplifies the best of what government can do in a time of crisis," said NASA Administrator and 2019 Wash100 Award recipient, Jim Bridenstine. "This ventilator is one of countless examples of how taxpayer investments in space exploration – the skills, expertise and knowledge collected over decades of pushing boundaries and achieving firsts for humanity – translate into advancements that improve life on Earth."

Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally (VITAL) was developed by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California to lift the nation's limited supply of traditional ventilators so they may be used on patients with the most severe COVID-19 symptoms.

The Office of Technology Transfer and Corporate Partnerships at Caltech will offer a free license for VITAL and will out to the commercial medical industry to find manufacturers for the device.

The EUA will enable device use for COVID-19 patients to address the acute demand for ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic. VITAL will require patients to be sedated and have an oxygen tube inserted into their airway to breathe.

Prior to the FDA's review, the VITAL prototype passed a critical test at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. VITAL poses several benefits in the national response to COVID-19. 

It can be built faster than a traditional ventilator and is composed of far fewer parts that are currently available to potential manufacturers through existing supply chains. Its flexible design can be modified for use in field hospitals being set up in convention centers, hotels and other high-capacity facilities. The new device wouldn't replace current hospital ventilators.

"It's been exhilarating coming up with VITAL's design," said Michelle Easter, a mechatronics engineer at JPL who worked on developing the device. "Now that we have FDA approval, we're looking forward to seeing companies license this technology and share it with the rest of the world."

About NASA

NASA's legacy of human space exploration, research and technology development has yielded countless innovations that prove the direct and profound impact of taxpayer investment in America's space program on our quality of life on Earth, including improved technologies for water purification, air filtration, kidney dialysis and tele-medicine, as well as research that has led to improved vaccines, drug therapies, and mitigations for bone loss. 

We can only speculate as to the breadth of transformative benefits that will come from America's return to the Moon through NASA's Artemis program and our efforts to put the first humans on Mars.

The Air Force Research Laboratory's aerospace systems directorate secured a patent for a method of safely airdropping packages from a high altitude to military troops on the ground.

The approach uses a low-drag drogue parachute to stabilize the package following its release from aircraft and prior to the deployment of a high-drag chute, the directorate said Thursday.

AFRL’s ballistic airdrop system is designed to exploit wind field calculation to offer a fall path in a useful manner.

"After the packages exit the aircraft, our method of timing of the transition from drogue to main parachute, allows for some ability to shape the distribution of the impact of packages on the ground," said David Doman, principal aerospace engineer at the lab's aerospace systems directorate.

Doman added that his team developed algorithms that works to compute transition altitudes and facilitate  package clustering in intended ground destinations.

Ellen Lord, undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment at the Department of Defense and a 2020 Wash100 Award winner, said DoD has seen an increase in the number of defense-related companies that have shut down and reopened since the coronavirus pandemic started, Defense News reported Thursday.

The number of firms that have reopened rose by 73 since April 20 and Lord said the improved figures could be attributed to companies’ proactive measures to come up with hygienic work spaces, shared experiences from other firms and some states that seem to have reached their peak in COVID-19 cases.

She also expressed concerns about the flow of cash into small businesses that are most at risk during this pandemic and called for transparency among companies over relief funds.

“I believe that the major primes are flowing down, they’ve committed. But I always like to trust, yet verify,” Lord said. “So I encourage all of those companies to be as transparent and forthcoming as they can be because we have a responsibility to the taxpayer, as well as the mid-tiers and the small companies, to make sure actions we take at the prime level do go down all the way through the chain."

About The Wash100

This year represents our sixth annual Wash100 Award selection. The Wash100 is the premier group of private and public sector leaders selected by Executive Mosaic’s organizational and editorial leadership as the most influential leaders in the GovCon sector. These leaders demonstrate skills in leadership, innovation, achievement, and vision.

Visit the Wash100 site to learn about the other 99 winners of the 2020 Wash100 Award. On the site, you can submit your 10 votes for the GovCon executives of consequence that you believe will have the most significant impact in 2020.

The Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate is pursuing an effort to boost the safety of borders and protect migrants from environmental dangers.

DHS S&T is helping U.S. Customs and Border Protection execute the Missing Migrants Program that aims to address the safety hazards surrounding migrants wanting to enter the country, the department said Wednesday.

“The primary objective of the Missing Migrants Program is to improve our ability to save the lives of migrants that are attempting to enter the U.S. between the ports of entry at our southwest border or circumvent our immigration checkpoints,” said Lorraine Castillo, program manager at DHS S&T.

Migrants lack resources and are exposed to temperatures uncommon to them, reducing their survivability in the border environment.

CBP has stationed rescue beacons and 911 placards across the southwest border to notify border patrol agents when help is needed. The beacons send notification signals to patrol agents and the placards contain contact information on emergency services.

The beacons and placards, however, have technical limitations due to factors like physical terrain and reliance on cellular connectivity.

The program developed an interactive dashboard and an analysis playbook to address these limitations. The dashboard uses geospatial data and allows agents to determine where to strategically place beacons and placards. The playbook provides guidance to other entities that might need to adopt a similar dashboard.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is testing the use of artificial intelligence for human-machine teaming operations for various applications such as ship identification, Defense One reported Wednesday.

Terry Busch, technical director for DIA’s Machine-Assisted Analytic Rapid-Repository System segment, said at a recent viewcast that the agency launched the experimental effort earlier this year to train analysts on leveraging AI-driven quantitative workflows to support national security missions.

As part of the experiment, DIA tested AI systems’ capacity to establish ship identification methodologies. Researchers then assessed the technology’s efficiency with less data, removing feed from the navigation infrastructure’s Automatic Identification System.

The end goal is to establish a machine-intelligence complementary system to human analysts, according to Busch.

“Once we began to take away sources, everyone was left with the same source material — which was numerous reports, generally social media, open source kinds of things, or references to the ship being in the United States — so everyone had access to the same data,” he said. “The difference was that the machine, and those responsible for doing the machine learning, took far less risk — in confidence — than the humans did.”

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued an audit stating that NASA’s acquisition management procedures are under the former's "high risk" list due to potential program delays and cost increases for the third consecutive year.

GAO said in the report released Wednesday that NASA’s project costs reached 31 percent over the baseline since May 2019 and that “delays are likely” for the Artemis I deep-space exploration mission.

GAO also found that NASA “underreported cost growth” for the Artemis mission's Space Launch System and Orion crew capsule programs last year, according to the recent audit.

NASA has since announced plans to implement broader project management strategies and update its cost estimates throughout the acquisition procedures of its major programs.

The report serves as GAO’s 12th annual “Quick Look” audit on major NASA projects.