Sec. 1608. Designation of component of Department of Defense responsible for coordination of hosted payload information
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Congress finds the following: Using commercially hosted payloads is an option for the Department of Defense that should be considered in analyses of alternatives, as it could increase cost savings, speed up capability to orbit, and contribute to resilience through the use of disaggregated space systems by the Department. The use by the Department of commercially hosted payloads has been limited so far, using commercial satellites to host three experimental payloads to date, though the use of hosted payloads could expand in the future.
The Department does not have the knowledge the Department needs to determine if commercially hosted payloads are an acquisition approach worth pursuing. The Department faces challenges in matching payloads to commercial hosts, due to numerous logistical challenges to matching payloads to hosts, including coordinating the size, weight and power of the payload with the commercial host, and aligning acquisition and funding timelines between government and commercial programs. The Comptroller General of the United States in preliminary findings concluded that the space acquisition culture of the Department lacks sufficient knowledge, such as costs, technical parameters, and lessons learned, to determine the benefits and address the challenges of using commercially hosted payloads and that the existing knowledge is fragmented across the Department without any plans to consolidate it.
Programs are not required to report data on commercially hosted payloads to any centralized office or database, and leveraging cost and technical data from hosted payload efforts could inform future interested programs and avoid duplication of efforts, but currently no such comprehensive data source exists. Not later than 30 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Secretary of the Air Force, and other Secretaries of the military departments and the heads of Defense Agencies the Secretary determines appropriate, shall designate a component of the Department of Defense or a military department to be responsible for coordinating information, processes, and lessons learned relating to using commercially hosted payloads across the military departments, Defense Agencies, and other appropriate elements of the Department of Defense.
The functions of such designated component shall include, at a minimum, the following: Systematically collecting information from past and planned hosted payload arrangements to inform future acquisition planning and space system architecture design, including integration test data, lessons learned, and design solutions. Creating a centralized database for cost, technical data, and lessons learned on commercially hosted payloads and sharing such information with other elements of the Department.