NEW HORIZON Act

Defense pilot for orbital data centers

If enacted, the bill would require the Secretary of Defense to run an operational pilot, through the Defense Innovation Unit, testing orbital data centers and space‑based cloud services. The pilot would have to start within one year of enactment and the authority to run it would end five years after enactment. The Secretary would have to brief congressional defense committees by December 31, 2028 on execution, use cases, lessons learned, and recommendations. The pilot would allow testing and limited operational use in real mission scenarios, including intelligence collection and processing, space domain awareness, command and control, and data transport. Services that handle sensitive or classified data would have to adopt strong cybersecurity and resilience measures, including zero‑trust architecture, encryption, identity and access management, continuous monitoring, insider‑threat protections, and supply‑chain and foreign‑ownership risk controls. The pilot would also require redundancy and rapid reconstitution, protections against cyber, electronic warfare, and counterspace threats, secure authenticated telemetry and command links, protected timing and navigation inputs, secure update mechanisms, and safeguards for workload isolation and data sovereignty. The Secretary would be required to consult the Space Force, service acquisition executives, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy, the NRO, the NGA, and other appropriate entities. The Secretary would be encouraged to seek competitive participation from commercial space providers, nontraditional defense contractors, and small businesses.