Ellen Lord, undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment at the Department of Defense, has said she thinks DoD should collaborate with launch service providers to ensure the availability of services to bring small and large satellites to space on short notice, SpaceNews reported Monday.

“I think we need to look at launch service capability for small sats as well as large,” she said Monday at the Pentagon.

Lord told reporters about DoD’s partnership with Virgin Orbit, a small satellite launch startup that spun out of Virgin Galactic.

Virgin Orbit received a contract in November 2017 to demonstrate its air-launched rocket system, LauncherOne, through DoD’s Space Test Program.

LauncherOne is set to launch in 2019 a small satellite for DoD through a Boeing 747 aircraft variant.

Lord also mentioned that the Defense Innovation Unit also works with Virgin Orbit’s Vox Space subsidiary, which offers engineering and mission management support services to government clients.

The Department of Defense has started to declassify space traffic data as part of the U.S. government’s effort to advance space commercialization and safety, Popular Mechanics reported Thursday.

“This is us being transparent, leaning forward and trying to enhance that spaceflight safety through data sharing,” Col. Scott Brodeur, director of the Combined Space Operation Center, told the publication.

Diana McKissock, head of space situational awareness sharing at the 18th space control squadron, said the government recently declassified two-line element sets for at least 500 man-made space objects with plans to release more data.

Those objects are part of a catalog that DoD manages and can be publicly accessed through the space-track.org website.

TLEs work to encode the probable orbital movement and position of a space object.

McKissock said the U.S. needs to expand its space traffic management initiative as more companies send satellites into space.

“We’re looking forward to working with our civil counterparts on how we can better support the global community as space becomes more contested and congested,” McKissock noted.

Officials at U.S. Strategic Command said the declassification move aligns with the Space Policy Directive-3, which directs the Department of Commerce to publicly disclose space traffic information.
 

McAleese & Associates reports the U.S. Navy’s Super Hornet aircraft has achieved a mission-capable-rate of 66 percent. By end of 2019, the Navy is confident it will meet Secretary of Defense James Mattis’ mandate of 80 percent mission-capable.

During the recent “Navy/USMC Readiness” hearing, Richard Spencer, secretary of the Navy, shared the same optimism to reach the goal of 80 percent. Spencer revealed an increase of 40 percent in the last two months. In a statement for the hearing, the panel declared business process reform to be a top priority for civilian, military leadership and is a continuous learning enterprise.

“We’ve embraced lessons from commercial airline heavy-maintenance practices and their data-driven approach to improve naval aviation’s maintenance processes,” Spencer said. “This will be the foundation of the Navy Sustainment System. Fleet Readiness Centers are an example of this kind of partnership, focused on reducing a significant backlog in aviation component repair parts.”

Bill Moran, the vice chief of naval operations, confirmed the mission-capable-rate continues to rise from 66 percent. He also reiterated the Navy’s public shipyard recapitalization is a crucial development for 2019, but the Navy is planning to send a handful of Los Angeles attack submarines outside of the Navy’s public shipyards.

Spencer mentioned Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., is very vocal about the demand for Los Angeles attack submarine “maintenance-availability” work with GD Electric Boats because it would ramp-up the 1st 2021 Columbia-class order and improve the GD Marine sector operating margin.

John Pendleton, director of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, didn’t express the same confidence that the Navy could reach Sec. Mattis’ objective of 80 percent. He said sustaining F-35 planes and reaching this benchmark would be “difficult to achieve.” However, Pendleton reiterated that everyone is working towards the same objective.

The Government Accountability Office has issued a report that divides into four categories 26 long-range threats to U.S. national security identified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and State.

Those categories are dual-use technologies; weapons; events and demographic changes; and political and military advancements of adversaries, GAO said Thursday.

GAO listed the global expansion of Russia and China, military developments in North Korea and Iran, terrorism and information operations as some of the emerging threats under the adversaries’ military and political advancement category.

For the dual-use tech category, the congressional watchdog considered artificial intelligence, internet of things, quantum information system and unmanned systems as threats.

The events and demographic change category includes infectious diseases, climate change and international and international migration, while the weapons category covers hypersonics, cyber weapons, electronic warfare, missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

The report is based on GAO’s content analysis of questionnaire responses from 45 government organizations and assessment of documents and national security strategies provided by the four federal agencies.
 

The Department of Defense continues to make progress transferring the authority to process security clearances from the Office of Personnel Management to the agency. An official noted that the Pentagon is working with interagency partners to transfer the functions, personnel and resources of OPM’s National Background Investigations Bureau to the Defense Security Service, according to a statement posted Friday. 

Garry Reid, director for defense intelligence at the DoD, and Charles Phalen Jr., director of NBIB, told lawmakers the Pentagon and OPM have already implemented changes in background investigations to speed up clearance procedures. 

“Overall, these new measures have helped reduce the inventory of DoD investigations by almost 18 percent over the past four months,” Reid said. “We will build on this work in the coming months – continuing to focus on backlog reduction as we develop detailed plans for the transfer and transition,” he added. 

Phalen said NBIB has reduced the clearance backlog by 3,000 to 4,000 cases every week, with the figure falling from 725,000 in April to 605,000 to date. The DoD plans to establish a Personnel Vetting Transformation Office as part of the transition to help process security clearances. 

The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Federal Trade Commission renewed an agreement to address acts of fraud against military servicemen, veterans and their dependents on education benefits and services.

The renewed agreement presents a cooperative framework to guide investigations and actions against organizations attempting to deceive servicemen with false education advertising, FTC said Friday. The agreement lays out how the VA’s director of education service would issue referrals to the FTC for investigations. The director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection would then assess the referral and decide on what action to take.

Upon the need for investigation, a team of FTC-based investigators would evaluate referred institutions and submit preliminary findings to the VA.