Vice Adm. Robert Sharp, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and a 2019 Wash100 Award recipient, told C4ISRNET in an interview published Wednesday about adopting his predecessor’s NGA strategy, which focuses on people, partnerships, mission today and mission tomorrow. Sharp discussed how NGA leverages commercial sources and international partners and how the agency works with GEOINT startups.

“We need to be able to help them to demystify the process they know and look for ways that we can interact with smaller companies so that they can get involved in bringing solutions to bare,” he said. “We’ve done so successfully in a number of ways where we’ve even leveraged some of the larger companies where they broker for us, making sure that these smaller companies understand some of the challenges that we have and then reward them and those other companies help them through the contracting and some of the bureaucracy associated with U.S. government.”

He shared his insights on three commercial study contracts the National Reconnaissance Office awarded in June to evaluate companies’ capability to provide imagery to NGA and how Esri’s slogan “see what others can’t” applies to the agency’s work. Sharp also discussed how NGA addresses issues with its civilian workforce through “people summits.”

The Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday passed by a voice vote a NASA authorization bill that would extend the operation of the International Space Station from 2024 to 2030, SpaceNews reported.

The proposed NASA Authorization Act of 2019 seeks to advance a “stepping stone” strategy to human exploration and includes several amendments, including studies of a space weather center of excellence and space resources institute and an update to the agency’s Space Grant program.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the committee’s space subpanel, introduced the bill with Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).

“Continuing the operation of the ISS through 2030 will help grow our already burgeoning space economy,” Cruz said of the bill.

The full Senate is set to tackle the bill, while the House has yet to propose its version of the measure.

Government officials discussed logistics, research and development with industry partners at the 4th Annual Defense Logistics Agency R&D Industry Day. The event, which took place Thursday at the McNamara Headquarters Complex in Virginia, the DLA said Tuesday.

Adarryl Roberts, program executive officer at the DLA, spoke about the issue of obsolescence in equipment procurement. “We don’t get a new tank every five to ten years. We keep our ships, tanks and planes for 30, 40, 50, and in some cases, 60 years,” he said. “We need somebody to make those parts.”

DLA chief information officer George Duchak emphasized the importance of information technology and spoke about the agency’s operations, saying that the DLA issued 9K contracts everyday. He also highlighted logistics research and development, manufacturing technology and subsistence as the agency’s three main areas of research.

According to Koch, the 4th Annual R&D Industry Day had the highest number of attendees compared to previous years.

NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration will jointly host an industry workshop on unmanned aircraft system traffic management this Dec. 9. The workshop supports phase two of the UAS Traffic Management Pilot Program or UPP and will feature new technologies such as remote identification, FAA said Tuesday.

UPP aims to regulate drone operations in the country’s airspace and requires industrial support to attain needed services. FAA and NASA will provide in-depth information on UPP’s second phase with coverage on use concepts, requirements, architecture and a programmatic timeline.

The agencies will require participants to have the capacity for high-density airspace operations, flight information transmission due to off-nominal events, remote identification, public safety operations and UAS volume reservations.

U.S. citizens may apply for the workshop through Nov. 25. The event will take place at NASA’s Ames Conference Center in Mountain View, Calif.

Learning Machine Technologies has secured $159K in funding from the Department of Homeland Security’s science and technology directorate through the Silicon Valley Innovation Program, to build a blockchain security product that will mitigate forgery of credentials.

The company will use a commercial offering based on the open-source Blockcerts blockchain standard to develop an approach that will allow decentralized identifiers and users to access and control their credentials, the agency said Tuesday.

DHS noted that S&T plans to implement distributed ledger and blockchain technologies to optimize interoperability and security features in the issuance of digital credentials.

“By adapting their existing platform to build support for emerging W3C global standards, Learning Machine will enable organizations to deploy solutions without vendor or platform lock-in concerns,” said Anil John, SVIP technical director at DHS S&T.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is slated to hold a competition that will task the participants to field autonomous ground and aerial systems that can map, validate and report artifacts within designated courses.

Participating teams under the Subterranean Challenge Urban Circuit event are required to search a carbon dioxide emitting device and a supply register within an urban environment, DARPA said Tuesday. The top competitor among self-funded teams will receive $500K in cash, while second and third place winners will secure $250K and $100K respectively.

Interested teams may submit their qualification requirements until Dec. 3. Finalists from the competition’s cave, tunnel and urban circuits will compete in a final event in August 2021.