Commerce initiates civil space tracking operations with ‘beta’ users

WASHINGTON — The Commerce Department today announced that its new civil space tracking system, designed to take the burden of providing space situational awareness (SSA) data to non-military users from the Defense Department, has launched “beta” operations with a small group of industry, academia and civil agency users.

“As the DoC assumes this important mission, it will continue to have access to data collected through DoD’s worldwide space surveillance network. DoD will also continue to provide SSA services to civil and commercial users during the transition process until DoC is able to assume full responsibility for the mission,” said John Hill, who currently serves as DoD’s senior space policy officer.

“Transitioning the spaceflight safety SSA responsibilities to DoC, a civil agency, will improve support to these users and allow DoD to focus its resources on core defense missions,” he added.

Under Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) Phase 1.0, users will be provided warning notifications of potential collisions — what are known in the field as “conjunction data messages” or CDMs — and provide feedback about what works and what doesn’t, according to officials at the Office of Space Commerce (OSC) responsible for the program.

Those CDMs will be produced every four hours, as opposed to DoD’s current production rate of every eight hours, for both DoD and beta users to scrutinize, Sandy Magnus, OSC chief engineer, told Breaking Defense on Sept. 16.

Speaking during the annual Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) conference, she explained that the TraCSS 1.0 beta group was chosen to get a good mix of different types of users, including operators with satellites in various orbits.

Nine beta users are participating, according to the announcement: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Maxar, Telesat, Intelsat, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Planet Labs, Eutelsat Oneweb, Iridium, and the Aerospace Corporation.

(NOAA is OSC’s parent organization, and is responsible for licensing remote sensing satellite operators.)

While during its initial phase TraCSS will be relying on DoD’s Space-track.org website to disseminate its CDMs to the beta group, the plan is for civil and commercial operators both in the US and abroad to be weaned off the DoD network over to a TraCSS website, called TraCSS.gov, no later than next fall.

“Our plan is to have everybody migrated off of Space-track for all of Phase 1 on-orbit stuff completely by the end of fiscal year 2025,” Magnus said.

In order to do that, OSC is in the process of contracting for the website’s design and operations. According to the Aug. 1 request for proposal for the TraCSS “presentation layer,” the winning contractor is to provide “graphical user interfaces (GUI) and a data products service” based on the “application programming interfaces (APIs) and gateway business logic defined by the TraCSS System Integrator to store and retrieve data.”

Eventually, TraCSS.gov also will provide additional information beyond just warnings about on-orbit decisions, such as launch and re-entry safety data, OSC officials said.