Review - S 4693 Introduced – Hybrid Space Architecture

Earlier this month, Sen Cruz (R,TX) introduced S 4693, the Nodes, Enterprise Workloads, and Hybrid Operations, Resilience, Integration, Zero-Trust, Orbital Networks (NEW HORIZON) Act, The bill would require DOD to carry out an operational pilot program to “to evaluate the use of commercially available orbital data center services and space-based cloud computing capabilities relevant to national security space and joint mission requirements”. No new funding is authorized by this bill. 

I can find no legislation in the 118th Congress that would appear to be similar to S 4693. I will be providing limited coverage of this bill under my Space Geek content offerings. Additionally, because of security requirements in the S 4693, I will be providing additional coverage of the bill. 

A press release from Cruz's office quoted the Senator as saying: 

“Data generated in space goes underutilized because of network bandwidth issues between satellites and ground stations. This legislation enables the Department of War to conduct operational testing on space-based data processing and storage, and will help to reduce latency, improve resilience, and enhance operational effectiveness across military and intelligence missions. I am proud to introduce this bill with Senator Hickenlooper.” 

Moving Forward  

Neither Cruz, nor his sole cosponsor, are members of the Senate Armed Services Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration. This means that there is unlikely to be adequate influence to see the bill considered by that Committee. Were the Committee to take up the bill, I suspect that there might be enough bipartisan support for the bill to be ordered reported favorably, but as a standalone bill, it is unlikely to move to the floor of the Senate. A more likely path would be to include the bill’s language in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that was beginning to wend it separate ways through House and Senate. 

For more information about the provisions of this bill, including a brief commentary on some of the orbital data center issues not addressed by this bill, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/s-4693-introduced-hybrid-space-architecture - subscription required.