Judith Zawatsky, assistant commissioner in the office of systems management at General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, told Federal News Network in an interview posted Thursday about the efforts of GSA’s information technology team to address the issues following the transition from FedBizOpps to the cloud-based System for Award Management beta website.

Vendors and other users encountered infrastructure problems, slow load times and other issues during the first few days of the betaSAM.gov portal’s launch. To address such concerns, Zawatsky said GSA “had pre-positioned a team offsite of the operational team, the product owners, the product managers, our technical team with GSA IT and our customer service [experts] … They worked and went through the system constantly. They brought in some extra engineers, GSA IT was fabulous.”

Despite the initial issues, she noted that more than 20K users visited the new portal in the first week, while agencies used the platform to post over 2K business opportunities.

Zawatsky said she and Dave Shive, chief information officer at GSA, will work with operational and technical teams to conduct a retrospective of the beta’s launch to figure out the causes of the problems and address potential concerns for future migrations.

The Federal Protective Service, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, has used automation technologies to reduce time costs in the creation of threat assessment reports, GCN reported Wednesday.

FPS produces these reports as part of its mission to secure federal employees and activities at approximately 9.5K U.S. facilities. The agency conducts threat assessments via a Modified Infrastructure Survey Tool and bases reports on standards promoted by the Interagency Security Committee.

Argonne National Laboratory helped FPS automate a large part of the data gathering and analysis processes, reducing the amount of manual work needed to construct the reports.

The automated process gathers data from agent-submitted threat information, building vulnerability inspectors and a facility’s documents on countermeasures. Additional sources would include crime stats, census data and the FBI.

Jeffrey Levine, an FPS special agent, said the automation helped the agency accelerate process-related activities and recognize portfolio items that may not have been initially identified.

Tom Cremins, associate administrator for strategy and plans at NASA, said the agency plans to issue a request for information on a next-generation lunar rover “in the coming weeks,” Space News reported Wednesday.

Cremins told attendees at the SpaceCom Expo in Houston that the unpressurized rover will be used to support astronauts for Artemis moon missions. NASA’s Johnson Space Center will lead the effort, which is focused on establishing partnerships with industry.

Last month, NASA Administrator and 2019 Wash100 winner Jim Bridenstine announced that the agency plans to use a commercial lander for the $250M Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover project that seeks to traverse the moon’s south pole in 2022.

NASA is in the process of evaluating input on the Human Landing Systems program focused on deploying commercial approaches to lander development. The agency is also continuing work on the proposed lunar gateway to support the 2024 moon landing as well as other future space efforts.