Getting space traffic coordination on trackby Jeff Foust
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| “TraCSS represents a modern approach to spaceflight safety, integrating the latest technologies and providing on-ramps for continuous improvements that will scale into the future,” Rich DalBello said. |
The Office of Space Commerce, a small office with NOAA, itself part of the Department of Commerce, announced in a statement it had turned on its long-awaited civil space traffic coordination system, called Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS (pronounced “tracks.”) The initial “phase 1.0” version of TraCSS was now up and running, just meeting a goal of having it in place by the end of September.
“TraCSS represents a modern approach to spaceflight safety, integrating the latest technologies and providing on-ramps for continuous improvements that will scale into the future,” Rich DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, said in the statement. “I’m thankful for our team and partners for doing the hard work to launch the first phase on schedule.”
The milestone was more than six years in the making. In June 2018, Space Policy Directive 3 instructed the Commerce Department to take over space traffic management services that had been provided for decades by the Defense Department, freeing up the Pentagon to focus its resources on national security applications (see “Managing space traffic expectations”, The Space Review, June 25, 2018.)
(That directive was a “space traffic management” policy, although since then the term “space traffic coordination” has become preferred, reflecting the fact that, unlike air traffic, space traffic cannot be managed by a central authority but instead only coordinated among various operators and agencies.)
Developing a policy and implementing it, though, are two very different challenges. A skeptical Congress had to be convinced that Commerce was the right place to host a civil space traffic coordination system rather than NASA, the FAA or even keeping it with the Defense Department. A 2020 report by the National Academy of Public Administration, commissioned by Congress, agreed that the Office of Space Commerce within the Commerce Department was the best place for it.
Only later, though, did Congress finally start appropriating the funding the office needed to develop what became known as TraCSS. “In Washington, of course, everything takes a while,” DalBello quipped in a talk September 20 at the AMOS Conference, devoted to space situational awareness and space traffic topics. “We didn’t end up getting our first budget until 2023 to actually start the program.”
The office took an approach to TraCSS as if it was a Silicon Valley startup, embracing agile development of an MVP (minimum viable product, not most valuable player), one of the first projects in the Commerce Department to use that development technique. “We had the realization that this was a process,” DalBello said at AMOS. “This was going to be a system that was never done.”
What the Commerce Department announced Monday was now up and running was that MVP. The phase 1.0 version of TraCSS is essentially a beta test of the system, providing users with conjunction data messages, or CDMs, which inform them of potential close approaches between their satellites and other objects.
The office has limited phase 1.0 to nine satellite operators. They range from major GEO satellite operators like Intelsat and Telesat to Planet and Eutelsat OneWeb, which have constellations of hundreds of satellites in low Earth orbit. NOAA itself is among the operators participating in the beta test. About 1,000 satellites are included in the beta test, with their operators receiving CDMs six times a day, twice the frequency that the Defense Department has been offering.
DalBello noted in a panel discussion earlier in the month at the US Chamber of Commerce’s Global Aerospace Summit that the CDMs they would get from TraCSS are experimental. “The operators that are working with this know that this is not operational data yet. This is not data that they should be relying on for safety services yet,” he said. “They’ll be able to get comfortable with the processes and see the quality of data and make their own assessments about that.”
The TraCSS MVP is so minimal that the system doesn’t even have its own website yet, instead using the existing Space-Track system operated by the Defense Department to distribute those CDMs.
The purpose of this phase 1.0 beta test is to collect feedback from those operators that will be incorporated into later phases of TraCSS. The Office of Space Commerce, true to that agile development philosophy, plans to roll out a series of upgrades—phase 1.1, 1.2, etc.—on a quarterly basis. Those upgrades will involve bug fixes, new capabilities, and new sources of space situational awareness (SSA) data to augment what the office gets from the Defense Department.
| “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,” Hill said. |
By phase 1.4 of TraCSS, scheduled for next September, the system will finally have its own “presentation layer” or public interface, which will be online at tracss.gov. By then, the transition from Space-Track to TraCSS will be far along: DalBello said at AMOS that the goal is to complete that transition, with all current Space-Track users instead getting CDMs and other data from TraCSS, by the end of calendar year 2025.
He reassured operators, though, that the transition will be gradual. “Operators told us at the very beginning, ‘Please don’t just throw a switch one day,’” he said of the transition from Space-Track to TraCSS. He added it will be up to the Defense Department when to turn off Space-Track once the transition is complete.
“DoD standing down on a service should be a response to our mutual perception that we’ve got it, so we want to make sure that the new product is stable and that people can rely on it in a trustworthy fashion,” he said. “When we have run these processes in parallel for a while, and DoD goes, ‘We think you’ve got it,’ then they can step down.”
In the statement about the beginning of TraCSS phase 1.0, a Pentagon official emphasized the cooperative nature of the work between the two departments. “The Department of Defense is working side-by-side with the Department of Commerce to ensure the seamless transfer of responsibility for civil and commercial space situational awareness services and information,” said John Hill, performing the duties of associate secretary of defense for space policy.
DalBello, in previous conference appearances, also praised the cooperation between the DoD and his office. “Right now we’re getting tremendous support,” he said. As one example, he noted that his office was getting updated catalogs from the Defense Department through “sneakernet”: a manual transfer of data from a classified DoD catalog to the unclassified Commerce catalog. That will soon change, he said, with an automated pipeline to get that data to TraCSS.
The Defense Department is motivated to work with Commerce so that it can free up resources it currently uses for civil space traffic coordination for national security applications like space domain awareness (SDA), which goes beyond what objects are in orbit to what they are doing. In a webinar in August, John Shaw, a retired Space Force general who previously was deputy commander of US Space Command, lamented the lack of progress on SDA, calling for improvements such as “dynamic tracking of hard to detect and track targets in non-standard orbits.”
Hill echoed that intent. “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 said.
There are still many challenges ahead for TraCSS, including how it will incorporate other data sources beyond the DoD catalog. DalBello noted at AMOS that his office recently completed a “consolidated pathfinder” project to assess the capabilities and costs of commercial data, and will provide details about the outcomes of project in October at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan, Italy. “Spoiler alert: they were good.”
Space traffic coordination is more important than ever, as the number of active satellites and debris objects continues to grow. Incidents like the breakup in August of a Chinese upper stage in low Earth orbit after delivering a set of broadband satellites—the first for a constellation that could exceed 10,000 spacecraft—only heightened those concerns.
“As space has become more congested, NOAA has risen to the challenge to prevent catastrophic collisions in space by developing TraCSS,” NOAA administrator Rick Spinrad said in the statement. TraCSS alone won’t prevent catastrophic collisions—operators will need to heed warnings of potential collisions it produces, if they are able and willing to do so—but it is a necessary first step in maintaining safe space operations in increasingly congested orbits.
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