NASA Administrator and 2019 Wash100 Award winner Jim Bridenstine is scheduled to announce the selection of the Alabama-based Marshall Space Flight Center as the headquarters for its human lunar lander program on Friday to bring astronauts to the moon by 2024, Reuters reported Friday. Sources said NASA will also make the Johnson Space Center in Houston responsible for the development of a spacecraft to be used to launch astronauts off the lunar surface to the Gateway platform.

According to the report, Rep. Brian Babin and Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn wrote a letter to Bridenstine on Thursday, urging him to reassess the decision on the Marshall facility. They argued that the Johnson Space Center should house the lunar landing program.

Lockheed Martin, SpaceX and Blue Origin are working on various components of the lander as NASA plans to issue a solicitation later this year.

The Department of Homeland Security is letting the Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection and other component agencies to advance the adoption of cloud platforms, Federal News Network reported Thursday. 

“They’re way out in front of headquarters. Headquarters is playing catch-up, but there’s an opportunity when you’re playing catch-up, when you’re not the first mover,” Kshemendra Paul, cloud action officer at DHS’ office of the chief information officer, said of the department’s component agencies. “We get to learn from the early adopters. We get to leverage their investment, and that’s key to what we’re doing.”

Paul cited the department’s move to set up a cloud steering group, develop its cloud policy and establish the cloud center of excellence. Paul also discussed how the workforce, acquisition and security aspects of the cloud smart strategy guide DHS’ cloud adoption as well as the department’s commitment to a multi-cloud platform.

“That CCoE is coalescing our capabilities, Cloud Factory, [and] other activities, to build a couple of landing zones within the cloud and figure out how to better operate and migrate as a group that portfolio in headquarters to the cloud,” he said Wednesday at FCW’s cloud smart summit in Washington.

“We’re not going to pick one cloud. There will be multiple clouds, but that doesn’t mean an unlimited number of clouds,” he added. “Part of the conversation that we’re having internally and we’ll have with industry through an RFP process is what is the optimal configuration that balances scale, manageability, innovation [and] capability?”

Vice Adm. Jon Hill, director of the Missile Defense Agency, said he’s not in favor of a plan to transition the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system to the U.S. Army, Defense News reported Wednesday.

“Why would we hand that off to the Army or Air Force, that sort of transfer to a service where it won’t be prioritized? They have many other priorities,” he told the publication in an interview at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Ala. “I don’t like organizational experiments on programs that are delivering more fighting capability.”

Hill noted that THAAD is part of wider integrated missile defense platform and that the “transfer of services” should be clearly defined.

“It gets suspicious when we don’t have a fully defined term because all it really results in is fracturing of a program during a time where it’s most critical to have those programs stable and taking care of the war fighter,” he said. “There’s been a lot of discussion about the THAAD and the SM-3 [missile] transfer to the services. What does that mean?”

Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has launched a toolkit to help individuals prevent cyber attacks, Fifth Domain reported Wednesday. CISA released the toolkit on Aug. 14 as build up for the National Cybersecurity Awareness Month celebrated in October.

The toolkit features cybersecurity and regulation guidelines regarding public wifi usage, log-in credential security, social media and apps. The agency worked with the National Cyber Security Alliance to develop the toolkit.