 At NCST, which is Naval Central Space Technology, at NRL, we are looking at communications, advanced communication techniques, techniques for ISR, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. At the same time, we're doing work in autonomy and robotics. We have to do some of these things autonomously, as the problems that changes and adversary changes. The basic fundamental research has to be done to stay abreast of that and be able to make sure the Navy has that technical edge going forward. NRL's history with GPS started well before there was a GPS. Back in the late 50s, on the Vanguard program, where Roger Easton developed a system that was going to be used to track Vanguard and was used to track Vanguard as well as Sputnik. He started figuring you could take clocks, put them in orbit and use those satellites to provide positioning and navigation and a timing service on the ground. So he filed the first patents through NRL for the technologies that eventually became GPS. A lot of the other work that NRL did made GPS look like what it does today. FEMOC, which stands for the Virtual Mission Operations Center, is a web-based mission management application, and the idea behind it is to provide a common set of features that space missions need in order to maintain their satellite once it's in orbit. Specifically, it provides scheduling capabilities, and these mission schedules help support the warfighter by making it possible for satellites to provide things like battle space awareness, technical intelligence, or just any kind of general mission support. When you think of space research at NRL, there are really three major components. There's experimentation that's done in space or ground-based experiments like high-power radio waves, etc. There's theory and modeling where theorists try to understand observations that were made by the space experimentalists or make predictions about what's going to be measured, and there's computational modeling that goes along with that. But our part of this research is to do laboratory validation with real plasma where we can scale the conditions to what they see in space and then test the theory and modeling to try to benchmark it so that it can be applied to the space results with greater confidence. The primary focus of free space optics has been to develop resilient communication systems for different regimes of communications, be it land, sea, airborne, and space. And a lot of our focus here has been on developing resiliency at the communications level. As lasers propagate through the atmosphere, they suffer from scintillation and fades, and so we've developed testbeds, tool sets, and systems that mitigate the impact of the atmosphere on the optical channel. Navy has to have an understanding of the environment that it operates in. You have to be able to predict it, you have to be able to model it, exploit it, hide in it, and in order to do that, you have to have an understanding of it. The sun drives the weather on the earth. It is driven by the sun at the end of the day. So while we have gotten really good in the last century or so in forecasting what the weather will be like here on the ground, we are not very good at forecasting what space weather is going to be like in the next day or two days or three days. And it basically involves raising up the high altitudes of the currently existing operational weather forecasting models. So I work with weather in the upper atmosphere. Your day-to-day, you want to know what the weather is doing down in the lower atmosphere. There are a number of different ways to do the wear, what you're going to do later, all those different things. And that's what we're focused on in the upper atmosphere. We want to know the same types of things. We want to know the temperature. We want to know the winds. We want to know the density. All these things affect where your satellite is at any one point in times, whether or not you'd be able to talk to another satellite or another ship. Specifically, we do this using the same types of instruments that are used in the lower atmosphere, namely modeling. And one of the projects here that we've worked on and are continuing to work on and develop is a whole atmosphere model called NEPTU that will go from the ground to space, not only predict lower atmosphere weather, but upper atmosphere weather. So the Sun Grazer project is remarkable in a number of ways. But I think one of the most amazing aspects of it is that to date we've discovered it is over 3,600 new comets near the sun. And just to kind of put that in perspective, throughout history, we've only got around, I think, two and a half to 3,000 comets on record other than the Soho one. So basically, Soho is more than double the number of known comets in history just in the past 20 or so years of observations from that spacecraft. I've been working in the spacecraft engineering department and our mission is to boldly fly what never has flown before. And we do that in many areas, whether it's the transmission of energy, power beaming, whether it's space robotics, whether it's any of a range of different technologies for thermal control, for propulsion. We have been on the forefront of investigating new technologies and figuring out what makes sense, what needs to be developed further, and what will serve our country. So being able to do satellite command and control is important not just for the Navy Marine Corps, but for the entirety of the Department of Defense. Obviously, being able to talk to troops in the field, for them to be able to talk to one another and to be able to receive new orders or new intelligence, that's how we get the job done. And for the Navy Marine Corps in particular, where it's not like you can run a long line from ship back to shore to be able to receive your latest internet updates or whatever it else is you might need to accomplish the mission. So having that ability to look up to the heavens and connect with the satellite is that much more in periods. Today, NREL is the only place in the DOD and when the few places left in the nation that can do a conceived design, build, assemble, integrate, test, and operate spacecraft all from a single roof. We have antennas around the US and around the globe to be able to do that. In the systems that we try to conceive, design, build, and operate, it had to be breaking new ground. There's new knowledge that has to be implemented and put in operational use, and we put that on the Space Base platform.