New commercial space traffic system debuts soon, on heels of DoD, Commerce data sharing pact

WASHINGTON — The Department of Commerce on Sept. 30 will roll out an initial version of its nascent system for warning space operators of potential collisions, following a formal accord with the Defense Department on what data will be transferred from military assets monitoring the heavens.

Commerce is taking a “crawl, walk, run” approach to standing up the new Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) system, Sandy Magnus, chief engineer at the Office of Space Commerce (OSC) for the, told the ASCEND conference in Los Vegas on July 31.

“Phase 1.0” will involve only a small group of “beta users” and only a subset of the space monitoring and tracking data sources that eventually will fill the TraCCS database, she explained in a fireside chat with her primary Space Force counterpart, Barbara Golf, executive agent for space domain awareness at Space Systems Command.

OSC is slowly moving to take over management of providing space situational awareness for US and foreign commercial and civil satellite operators, which will allow the Pentagon to shake off that time-consuming mission and concentrate on threats from adversary space activities. The transition has been complicated by DoD security concerns about how data gathered from military radar and telescopes about space objects will be provided to TraCCS and shared with the system’s non-military users.

“We are working through some pretty detailed documentation. The first one we just got done … are the data transfer requirements … down to the micro-level” and “signed out by multiple four-stars,” Golf said.

Another agreement in the works is about respective roles and missions between the DoD and Commerce teams, she noted.

“There’s an awful lot of security concern about what we can see now, what the planet can see now,” Golf added.

Wrangling the security issue, she explained, is important so that when TraCCS is up and running it’s not bound by the restrictions on sharing information that the US military has “on the high side” with use of classified space monitoring sensors.

Golf credited Travis Langster, who formerly was overseeing the transition for the Pentagon Office of Space Policy, for “keeping everybody realistic; everyone can see it, get over it and grow up.” (Langster, who previously worked at commercial space-tracking firm COMSPOC, recently moved over to a Pentagon acquisition shop.)

Magnus and Golf explained that in the near term, the DoD and Commerce space tracking systems will be running in parallel until TraCCS can reach a quantifiable equivalence with the military’s capabilities. SpaceTrack.org is the public website where DoD publishes rough coordinates of the whereabouts of space objects, although not all US or allied military and Intelligence satellites are included in that so-called catalog.