Derek Tournear, acting director of the Space Development Agency, told Defense News in an interview published Sunday that SDA received technical data when it issued in July a request for information on the planned transport layer for its proposed architecture of satellite constellations.

“That will allow us to customize when we actually put out solicitations,” he said of the responses to the RFI. “A lot of that had to do with exactly what orbits, and the number of satellites, we needed to be able to field for different missions.”

Tournear said the agency expects to release a solicitation on a transport demo, which will involve “two optical cross-links talking amongst two satellites and also down to the ground.”

He also discussed some of the changes to the planned satellite architecture and SDA’s reprogramming request.

The Department of Homeland Security has revived a program to identify airliners’ risks to cyber attacks, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. DHS teamed up with the departments of Transportation and Defense on the reconstituted cybersecurity program, which will involve limited aircraft testing.

The U.S. Air Force plans to conduct its own initiative to look at the cybersecurity posture of commercial aviation systems. The service runs more than 5,300 aircraft, including converted commercial planes, and has mobilized internal teams to identify cyber vulnerabilities in its systems.

Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics and a 2019 Wash100 Award winner, said he wants the military branch to take an urgent approach to finding potential weaknesses in aircraft. “If we don’t probe first, our adversaries will,” Roper said in an interview. “We’ve been a little complacent in not trying to attack all of the parts of the airplane.”

The U.S. Air Force is looking for technology development concepts to support its 2030 science and technology strategy. The service branch said Thursday that it will select participants from the government, industry and academic sectors who will receive awards worth up to $2 million as part of the Air Force Explore initiative.

According to the service, teams must address S&T priorities encompassing information sharing, persistent awareness and other areas for achieving combat dominance. Challenges may involve imagery-based vehicle tracking, personnel recovery equipment delivery and in-flight refueling and re-arming operations.

“Our goal is to establish partnerships that develop capability ideas and mature them into opportunity spaces for the Air Force,” said Reid Melville, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s lead for Air Force Explore program.

Interested parties may submit applications through Nov. 11 ahead of the service’s plans to release funding invitations by March 2020.

The Senate Appropriations Committee recommends the Federal Aviation Administration to augment the agency’s method to streamline commercial launch policy, Space News reported Thursday. The committee approved a bill that boosts FAA’s funds for commercial launch licensing, but also urges the agency to create another draft on associated policy.

The agency’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation would receive $26 million via the bill, in contrast to the House’s $24.9 million proposal. A recent committee-issued report notes several concerns in FAA’s draft policy. 

The existing draft provides unnecessary entry barriers for newer firms, limits cost efficiency and does not address the policy’s effects to future space ports, according to the report. The committee urges FAA to revise launch licensing requirements and provide a supplemental rulemaking proposal notice before the release of a final policy.

The Department of Veterans Affairs unveiled a new scheduling capability in support of the agency’s plans to modernize its appointment system, Nextgov reported Thursday. Jointly built by Lockheed Martin’s Systems Made Simple subsidiary and Epic, the Medical Appointment Scheduling System has been fielded at the Chalmers. P. Wylie Ambulatory Care Center in Ohio until June 2020.

According to the report, the center features an updated framework and a specialized team that can accommodate the scheduling tool. John Windom, executive director of the Office of Electronic Health Record Modernization at VA, said the agency will transition to the Cerner Scheduling System and the Cerner Millenium EHR tool as part of the modernization initiative.

U.S. Special Operations Command is working to develop artificial intelligence technologies to help the military identify personnel who best suit certain tasks, Military.com reported Thursday.

SOCOM officials have collected and studied data on potential members for the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command. The information covers a very wide range and only excludes privacy-protected content, David Spirk, SOCOM’s chief data officer, told Military.com

“In the next six months, we’ll have a minimal viable product that we can begin using to use machine learning to identify who would be a good Marine Raider,” he said. If its successful, SOCOM will implement the approach across the special forces application process, Spirk noted.