Laura Stanton, deputy assistant commissioner for category management at the General Services Administration, said a plan to field an e-marketplace platform seeks to provide GSA and other agencies better visibility into their spending, Federal Times reported Friday. Earlier this month, GSA started soliciting e-commerce platforms to demonstrate a proof-of-concept meant to facilitate purchases in the federal government.

“What we’re doing with the proof-of-concept isn’t intended to change buying from the Multiple Award Schedule or the Global Supply Program or the other things agencies use for above micro-purchase,” Stanton told the publication. “But this is intended to target that $6 billion that agencies are spending under the micro-purchase [threshold] on these items. And if we can do that really efficiently, then that does free up people’s time and gives us the access to that data in a way that we just don’t have today.”

Stanton said about six to eight agencies have expressed plans to take part in the proof-of-concept and GSA intends to award a contract by the end of the first quarter of fiscal 2020 with plans to launch the program in calendar year 2020. Responses to the request for proposals are due Nov. 1.

NASA is evaluating five mockups representative of proposed designs for facilities of Gateway, the space agency’s future outpost for manned lunar missions, Reuters reported Thursday. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corp. and Bigelow Aerospace each submitted outpost prototypes with funds from a $65 million allotment.

Mike Gernhardt, principal investigator for testing the prototypes, told Reuters the mockups feature a small kitchen, sleep stations with noise cancelling, exercising equipment and a toilet strategically located to prevent cross-contamination with food and scientific activities.

NASA will use the prototyping’s results to develop Gateway’s blueprint. The space agency proposed to allot $500 million for Gateway’s initial development under fiscal year 2020.

Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford, chief information officer/G-6 of the U.S. Army, said the service branch’s upcoming data strategy will focus on security, Fifth Domain reported Wednesday.

The new strategy will significantly involve the service’s Artificial Intelligence Task Force, a unit currently developing AI-driven target recognition technology. Crawford said the task force awaits the strategy to establish a common foundation for applying AI technologies.

“If you don’t have security baked-in from the beginning in a DevSecOps-like environment, then [first] you’re not going to be protected and secure, and [second] you’re going to spend a lot of resources individually trying to attack the security problem,” Crawford told C4ISRNet Wednesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s conference.

The new strategy would also address the lack of security guidance of the Army’s previous 2016 strategy.