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Aerospace Corporation Exec John Plumb Nominated for DOD Space Policy Role
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Aerospace Corporation Exec John Plumb Nominated for DOD Space Policy Role

John Plumb, principal director and chief of government relations at the Aerospace Corporation, has been nominated to serve as the assistant secretary of defense for space policy, the Senate Armed Services Committee said Thursday.

He testified before SASC including Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who chairs the committee. SASC recorded a video of the meeting.

“I would like to thank President Biden, Secretary Austin and Deputy Secretary Hicks for their trust in me and in my ability to continue serving the nation if confirmed as the first Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy,” Plumb said.

The nominee also serves as a commanding officer for the U.S. Navy Reserve, where he supports the Commander, Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet or COMSUBPAC’s Undersea Warfare Operations Headquarters.

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NASA to Deploy SpaceX Resupply Craft from ISS with Experimental Data Onboard
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NASA to Deploy SpaceX Resupply Craft from ISS with Experimental Data Onboard

NASA is deploying a SpaceX Dragon resupply craft from the International Space Station on Friday, Jan. 21, bringing with it scientific experiments fostered in the station’s microgravity environment.

The spacecraft will touch down off the coast of Florida, so as to enable the expeditious transport of the experimental cargo to NASA’s Space Station Processing Facility at the agency’s Florida-based Kennedy Space Center. Doing so will expose the experiments to a minimal amount of Earth’s gravity, aiding the data collection process.

At 10:40 a.m. on Friday, Dragon will undock from the space-facing port of ISS’s Harmony module and fire its thrusters to create ample distance between itself and the launch site.

After a deorbit burn, the craft is scheduled to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere, and make  a splashdown via parachute at approximately 4:25 p.m. on Saturday, Jan 22.

There will be an estimated 4,900+ pounds of supplies and scientific investigations onboard the spacecraft. Notably among them is the Light Microscopy Module (LMM), a light imaging microscope that has been on the station for 12 years doing colloid research, plant studies and thermophysics experiments.

Also included in the Dragon’s cargo will be an InSPACE-4 physics study that is returning samples containing information about harnessing nanoparticles to fabricate and construct new materials such as medical diagnostics and thermal shields.

Additionally, the Kennedy Space Center will be receiving an investigation called Cytoskeleton. Administered by the European Space Agency, this experiment looks at how the human body responds to microgravity, potentially contributing to health measures for astronaut crew members on future missions.

A year ago, in January 2021, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft brought upwards of 5,200 pounds of scientific materials to the Space Station Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center. The load included the experiments Space Organogenesis, Cardinal Heart, Sextant Navigation, and Rodent Research-23.

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Air Force Names Wright-Patterson’s Hangar 18 as Newest Software Factory
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Air Force Names Wright-Patterson’s Hangar 18 as Newest Software Factory

Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio has been designated as the 17th software factory of the Department of the Air Force.

Even before the new designation, Hangar 18 is already full of digital teams and assets from across the service branch that work together to provide warfighters with software and data capabilities, the Air Force Research Laboratory said Thursday.

Matthew Jacobsen, director of Hangar 18, explained that his organization hosting the collaborative team of AFRL, Department of the Air Force and Air Force Institute of Technology opens access to broader contract vehicles and funding opportunities for starting digital modernization projects.

Jacobsen added that the newly designated software factory also serves as a communications hub to avoid redundancy of software programs and partners with technology companies to accelerate the deployment of digital capabilities.

“We have multiple tools and environments in our portfolio, we have multiple areas of specialty between our teams, and, ultimately, you can see that our mission is to use these assets to solve real problems and create pathways to success for teams struggling in the data and software space,” explained the official.

Software factories, spurred into creation by the Air Force Science and Technology Strategy for 2030, fall in line with the digital engineering initiative of former service acquisition chief and 2020 Wash100 Award recipient Will Roper.

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Pentagon Designates Senior Climate Adviser Joe Bryan as Sustainability Chief
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Pentagon Designates Senior Climate Adviser Joe Bryan as Sustainability Chief

Joe Bryan, senior adviser on climate at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, has been appointed the Department of Defense’s chief sustainability officer responsible for enforcing federal sustainment requirements.

The Pentagon said Thursday Bryan will represent its interests on sustainability-related matters and report to the White House on its efforts to achieve federal goals.

The redesignation moves the CSO role away from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment to better enable the agency to meet current and future sustainability objectives.

The position was mandated into creation by the White House through Executive Order 14057 on Catalyzing Clean Energy Industries and Jobs Through Federal Sustainability and preceding executive orders.

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House Lawmakers Request Info From CISA Over Multifactor Authentication Implementation
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House Lawmakers Request Info From CISA Over Multifactor Authentication Implementation

Reps. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., and Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., have asked the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to provide information on efforts to further advance the adoption of multifactor authentication to protect federal networks from security threats.

The lawmakers requested information as Congress seeks to understand the failure of some agencies to comply with the November 2021 deadline to implement MFA requirements, which they said could help reduce the risk of phishing attacks, Clarke’s office said Wednesday.

“As previous efforts to implement multi-factor authentication across the executive branch have clearly not achieved their intended goals, it is important that we work together to ensure that this mandate is implemented effectively in a timely fashion,” Clarke and Torres wrote in a letter addressed to CISA Director Jen Easterly.

CISA should respond to the lawmakers’ request no later than Feb. 4.

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Raj Iyer on Army’s Cloud Initiatives in 2022
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Raj Iyer on Army’s Cloud Initiatives in 2022

Raj Iyer, chief information officer of the U.S. Army and a 2021 Wash100 Award winner, said one of the service’s top priorities this fiscal year is delivering cloud and data capabilities to warfighters at the tactical edge, C4ISRNET reported Thursday.

“As we start to do more exercises this year, we’re going to start to integrate more and more of the cloud capability and the capacity,” Iyer said at an event Thurday.

He noted that the military branch plans to accelerate cloud initiatives in 2022 as part of efforts to make the service more expeditionary and one of those initiatives is through a web-enabled system – Command Post Computing Environment – that will eventually bring together into a single operating picture large data workloads from multiple classification levels.

“We are now actively working with units where we are allowing them to now experiment mission threats and operational scenarios using the capacity in the cloud and on the platforms that we have established,” Iyer said.

He said implementation of the service’s first cloud outside the country is now underway. The cloud will operate in the Indo-Pacific region with the involvement of the Army Pacific, the service’s Multi-Domain Task Force and the I Corps.

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GDIT CISO Michael Baker Speaks on Impact of Log4j Crisis
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GDIT CISO Michael Baker Speaks on Impact of Log4j Crisis

Log4j is popular Java-based software intended to assemble a log to troubleshoot problems or record data. In November 2021, users noticed that there was an error in the program, which impacted almost a third of the world’s web servers. Organizations such as Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, and more were reportedly made vulnerable by the system flaw.

4 million hacking attempts were made in a matter of weeks as a result of the error, posing a crisis-level threat. Microsoft reported that state-based hackers from China, Iran, Turkey, and North Korea made attempts to exploit the error. U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly called it “the most serious security breach ever.”

Michael Baker, chief information security officer at General Dynamics Information Technology, spoke to John Cofrancesco of Fortress Information Security about the implications of the breach, noting that while the IT community knows the places where the error has been reported so far, “we’re under no delusions that that’s the only place it’s going to rear its ugly head.”

Baker stressed what an all-consuming task it is cleaning up the mess caused by the breach. His role at GDIT entails cyber operations, vulnerability and risk management and architecture.

In referencing President Joe Biden’s May 2021 “Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity,” Baker said, “it was aggressive but it was necessary,” citing the fact that the log4j error comes almost exactly one year after the SolarWinds breach of 2020, another significant software error that negatively impacted federal government data.

One element of President Biden’s executive order Baker honed in on as important was the “Software Bill of Materials,” which necessitates that developers provide customers with a list of details and supply chain relationships of elements used for the construction of each product by making it available on a public website.

Baker concluded that the breach should prompt an inquiry into how organizations use and consume open-source software, but that risk is going to be inherent to the IT world absent some sweeping changes or putting serious constraints on conducting business.

“We must have hard discussions around open source and freeware software – but it’s not like that’s the only place where the problem exists. It exists in off the shelf software as well. Risk is risk is risk; you accept it, you buy it down or you transfer it,” said Baker.

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Naval Research Office Taps UC San Diego for Ocean Sampling System Improvements
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Naval Research Office Taps UC San Diego for Ocean Sampling System Improvements

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has awarded the University of California San Diego a $20.34 million contract to continue developing improvements on unmanned systems and in situ ocean sampling systems.

The Marine Robotics Testbed contract calls for experiments aimed at identifying best practices in sampling oceanographic parameters for practical scientific applications, the Department of Defense said Wednesday.

The university team will perform the work in San Diego, California, and Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and must be finished after 60 months on Jan. 11, 2027.

ONL used fiscal 2021 U.S. Navy research, development, test and evaluation funds to fully finance the competitive cost-plus-fixed-fee contract.

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FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel Issues Notice of Customer Data Breach Reporting Rule Changes
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FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel Issues Notice of Customer Data Breach Reporting Rule Changes

Jessica Rosenworcel, chairwoman of the Federal Telecommunications Commission, has circulated a notice of proposed changes to how telecommunications carriers report customer proprietary network information breaches to their clients.

The proposal aims to adapt current FCC rules to keep up with evolving cybersecurity threats to telecommunications companies and federal and state data breach laws involving other sectors, the commission said Wednesday.

Among the suggestions are the removal of the seven-business-day mandatory waiting period before informing clients of a breach and the requirement for carriers to now notify the commission of any reportable security infringement.

“But these rules need updating to fully reflect the evolving nature of data breaches and the real-time threat they pose to affected consumers,” noted Rosenworcel of current FCC regulations.

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NOAA to Work With BOEM for Offshore Wind Energy Tech Development; Rick Spinrad Quoted
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NOAA to Work With BOEM for Offshore Wind Energy Tech Development; Rick Spinrad Quoted

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has partnered with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to help advance offshore wind energy technologies that do not harm underwater biodiversity and promote cooperative ocean use.

The team will combine their expertise and connections to create a framework for future agreements that will tackle relevant areas around the Biden administration’s wind energy goals, NOAA said Wednesday.

Under their new memorandum, the agencies will work together to support a federal government target of 30 gigawatts of wind energy production capacity deployed offshore by 2030.

“It will help ensure coordination, collaboration, and alignment by NOAA and BOEM at key decision points in support of the Administration’s offshore wind energy goal,” explained NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad.

Amanda Lefton, BOEM director, pointed out that interagency efforts will assist in addressing climate change-related problems while introducing new job opportunities in the U.S.

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