Page 10 - FCW, October 2016

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FAA mulls space traffic role
The House passed a bill in September by a vote of 425-0 to study what role the Federal Aviation Administration might play in directing commercial and foreign space traffic.
Currently, the Defense Department is responsible for alerting satellite operators about potential collisions, and Congress would need to approve a change in authority.
However, with an expected increase in privately operated
satellite activity on
the horizon, FAA
29,000 orders were placed though SEWP in fiscal 2016, totaling $3.1 billion
Agreement reached on wider DUNS use
officials are prepar-
ing to take over non-
military responsibili-
ties of space traffic
control, said George
Nield, the FAA’s
associate administrator for commer- cial space transportation, at a recent conference.
Transitioning commercial satellite safety to the FAA would allow DOD to focus on military satellites and nation- al security concerns, while the FAA, a regulatory civilian agency within the Transportation Department, addresses private operations.
“We are in a better position to talk about norms of behavior from a safety perspective rather than having it fil- tered through the military,” Nield said.
There is support for such a transi- tion at the Pentagon as well. During a presentation delivered in April, Depu- ty Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Douglas Loverro said, “The FAA really should be in charge of managing what’s going on in space.”
If it were to direct commercial space traffic, Nield said the FAA would want immunity from lawsuits against the information it communicates to sat- ellite operators, “just like DOD has today.”
Under a new deal between the Gen- eral Services Administration and Dun and Bradstreet, federal agencies and the public will have wider access to the data generated via the proprietary business identifier used in government procurement.
The government has relied on the company’s Data Universal Number- ing System (DUNS) as a unique and proprietary identifier for years to track spending. The new arrange- ment applies to GSA’s current deal with D&B, which runs through June 2018. The government is paying $26 million for the expanded use of the DUNS data, according to D&B, but historical data linked to DUNS identi- fiers will be maintained by the govern- ment and not returned to D&B as was previously the case.
The use of a proprietary identifier has irked many in the open-government community. The issue came to a head at the close of fiscal 2014, when the
government lost five years of spending data on Recovery.gov because a DUNS license expired.
Previously, the collected data could be used only for a narrowly defined acquisition purpose, said Kevin Youel Page, deputy commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service. But the renegotiated contract eliminates bar- riers to use within the government for DUNS-sourced data distributed by Inte- grated Award Environment systems, which seek to improve administrative and operational support for federal financial assistance such as grants, loans, contracts and intergovernmen- tal transactions.
The agreement also gives the gov- ernment perpetual access to DUNS data, even if D&B is replaced in its sup- port role, Youel Page said. In addition, the new terms allow third parties to access a subset of the DUNS data for commercial use.
— Mark Rockwell
George Nield
INK TANK
8 October 2016 FCW.COM
— Chase Gunter
FAA.GOV