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Welcome to the Monday Morning Kick Off post from got geoint? As always, we hope you had a restful weekend and a charged up and ready for a productive work week. What is that? Not feeling all that charged up right now? Well, fret no more. We have compiled all the actionable news — as we do every Monday — that you need to kick start your week. This week, we offer a mixed bag of news stories including an article about Boeing and Lockheed voicing skepticism about the revamp of NASA, a story about the former DNI talking about Intelligence reform and Google Earth hits the high seas. As we always say, fire up that second cup of coffee and read on.

Aerospace Business Has Its Doubts About Plans to Revamp NASA
Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the aerospace giants with decades of experience working on America’s space program, will happily sell rockets to carry astronauts into space, but the companies are leery about taking a leading role in President Obama’s vision for a revamped National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The prospect of NASA relying on smaller companies — unproven upstarts in the view of critics — could create yet another hurdle in convincing an already skeptical Congress of the idea of relying on commercial companies to provide taxi transportation to the International Space Station. Read the full NY Times article here.

Debate Reopens on Overhaul of U.S. Spy Agencies
A former U.S. spy chief reopened the debate over the government’s intelligence structure Tuesday, calling for the formation of a Department of Intelligence that would put the existing 16 intelligence agencies under one department. Former director of national intelligence Mike McConnell said an overhaul is needed for the country’s security. The current structure is too dependent on intelligence leaders getting along personally and “can be dysfunctional if the personalities don’t mesh,” he said. Read the full NY Times article here.

Cyber Attacks: The Next Big Security Threat?
When asked how often the federal government’s computers get targeted or probed each day, defense specialist Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., curtly responds: “North of a million times.” He emphasizes that it’s not all an effort to penetrate — a lot of it is “phishing” — but the Pentagon’s computers are targeted at least 5,000 times every 24 hours. A United States Cyber Command in the Defense Department becomes operational at the end of this month. The danger of cyber attack is “more serious than at any time” since Mr. Smith went to Washington, D.C. Read the full SPI story here.

Google Earth Dives Deeper, Expands Ocean Feature
The search giant’s popular mapping tool, which has done an admirable job charting the planet’s land masses, announced this week that it’s upping its attention on the “blue part.” While it launched Ocean in Google Earth last year, yesterday Google said the ocean layer would be part of the default set of annotations easily accessible to all Google Earth users. That means once you open up Google Earth, all you have to do is navigate over to the oceans and zoom in. Read the full ABC News story here.

BAE Systems and Geosemble Integrate Geospatial Technologies
Geosemble Technologies, Inc. and BAE Systems announced today that they have integrated their respective technologies to bring users greater utility and efficiency in geospatial decision making. The companies will demonstrate the technology at the “2010 BAE Systems GXP International User Conference and Professional Exchange” in San Diego, April 19 – 23. Geosemble has developed a text-visualization plug-in for BAE Systems’ SOCET GXP® software. Read the full press release here.

Volunteers Create New Digital Maps
When Brian “Beej” Hall first heard about an audacious volunteer effort to create an Internet map of every street and path in every city and village on the planet, he was hooked. At the time, the nascent effort had only a few American members, and the U.S. map was essentially a digital terra incognita. Just a few years later, the Berkeley software engineer is editing digital maps so precise they include drinking fountains and benches in the Bay Area parks where he hikes, and the mapping community has swelled to more than 240,000 global members. The effort, OpenStreetMap, is a kind of grass-roots Wikipedia for maps that is transforming how map data is collected, shared and used — from the desktop to smartphones to car navigation. Read the full San Jose Mercury News article here.

Happy Monday!