 The Space Traffic Coordination System, or TraCSS, will ultimately take over the Department of Defense's civilian space traffic coordination work. (credit: Office of Space Commerce) |
by Jeff Foust
Monday, September 30, 2024
A new era in space traffic coordination began Monday morning with all the pomp and circumstance of… a press release.
| “TraCSS represents a modern approach to spaceflight safety, integrating the latest technologies and providing on-ramps for continued improvements that will expand in the future,” said Rich DalBello. |
The Office of Space Commerce, a small office of NOAA, which is itself part of the Department of Commerce, announced in a statement that it had activated its long-awaited civil space traffic coordination system, called the Space Traffic Coordination System. Space, or TraCSS (pronounced “tracks”). The initial “phase 1.0” version of TraCSS was already up and running, meeting the goal of having it operational by the end of September.
“TraCSS represents a modern approach to spaceflight safety, integrating the latest technologies and providing on-ramps for continued improvements that will expand in the future,” Rich DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, said in the statement. “I am grateful to our team and partners for doing the hard work to launch the first phase on time.”
The milestone took more than six years in the making. In June 2018, Space Policy Directive 3 ordered the Department of Commerce to take over space traffic management services that had been provided for decades by the Department of Defense, freeing 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 the term “space traffic coordination” has since been preferred, reflecting the fact that, unlike air traffic, space traffic cannot be managed by a central authority, but only coordinated between several operators and agencies.)
However, developing a policy and implementing it are two very different challenges. A skeptical Congress had to be convinced that Commerce was the right place to house a civilian space traffic coordination system instead of NASA, the FAA, or even keeping it in the hands of the Department of Defense. TO 2020 Report of the National Academy of Public Administrationcommissioned by Congress, agreed that the Office of Space Commerce within the Commerce Department was the best place for it.
However, only later did Congress finally begin to allocate the funds the bureau needed to develop what became known as TraCSS. “In Washington, of course, everything takes a while,” DalBello joked in a Sept. 20 talk at the AMOS Conference, dedicated to issues of space situational awareness and space traffic. “We didn't end up getting our first budget until 2023 to start the program.”
The office took an approach to TraCSS as if it were a Silicon Valley startup, adopting agile development of an MVP (minimum viable product, not most valuable player), one of the first projects at the Department of Commerce to use that development technique. . “We realized it was a process,” DalBello said at AMOS. “This was going to be a system that was never made.”
What the Commerce Department announced Monday was already up and running was that MVP. The phase 1.0 release of TraCSS is essentially a beta test of the system, providing users with conjunction data messages, or CDMs, that inform them of possible close approaches between their satellites and other objects.
The bureau has limited phase 1.0 to nine satellite operators. They range from major GEO satellite operators such as 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, and their operators receive CDM six times a day, twice the frequency offered by the Department of Defense.
DalBello noted in a panel discussion earlier this month at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Global Aerospace Summit that the CDMs they would get from TraCSS are experimental. “The operators who are working with this know that it is not operational data yet. “This is not data that security services should rely on yet,” he said. “They will be able to get comfortable with the processes, see the quality of the data and make their own assessments of it.”
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 Department of Defense to distribute those CDMs.
The purpose of this Phase 1.0 beta test is to gather feedback from those operators who will be incorporated into later phases of TraCSS. The Office of Space Commerce, true to that agile development philosophy, plans to implement a series of updates (phases 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 Department of Defense.
| “Transitioning SSA's responsibilities for spaceflight safety to DoC, a civilian agency, will improve support for these users and allow DoD to focus its resources on core defense missions,” Hill said. |
For 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 well underway: DalBello said at AMOS that the goal is to complete that transition, with all current Space-Track users getting CDM and other data from TraCSS, by the end of the schedule . year 2025.
However, he assured operators that the transition will be gradual. “Operators told us from the beginning, 'Please don't flip a switch one day,'” he said of the transition from Space-Track to TraCSS. He added that it will be up to the Department of Defense when to turn off Space-Track once the transition is complete.
“DoD withdrawing from a service should be a response to our mutual perception that we have it, so we want to make sure the new product is stable and that people can rely on it reliably,” he said. “Once we've run these processes in parallel for a while and the Department of Defense says, 'We think you've got it all,' then they can resign.”
In the statement about the start of phase 1.0 of TraCSS, a Pentagon official emphasized the cooperative nature of the work between the two departments. “The Department of Defense is working closely 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, who serves as associate secretary of defense. for space. policy.
DalBello, in previous conference appearances, also praised the cooperation between the Department of Defense and his office. “Right now we're getting tremendous support,” he said. As an example, he noted that his office was receiving updated Department of Defense catalogs through a “sneakernet” — a manual transfer of data from a classified Department of Defense catalog to the unclassified Commerce catalog. That will change soon, he said, with an automated pipeline to get that data into TraCSS.
The Department of Defense is motivated to work with Commerce to free up resources it currently uses for civilian space traffic coordination for national security applications such as space domain awareness (SDA), which goes beyond what objects are in orbit and what are they doing. In a webinar in August, John Shaw, a retired Space Force general who was previously deputy commander of US Space Command, lamented the lack of progress on SDAcalling for improvements such as “dynamic tracking of difficult-to-detect and track targets in non-standard orbits.”
Hill echoed that intention. “Transitioning SSA's responsibilities for spaceflight safety to DoC, a civilian agency, will enhance support for 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 evaluate commercial data capabilities and costs, and will provide details on the project's results in October at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan, Italy. “Spoiler alert: they were fine.”
Space traffic coordination is more important than ever as the number of active satellites and debris objects continues to grow. Incidents such as the disintegration 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 taken on the challenge of preventing catastrophic collisions in space through the development of TraCSS,” NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in the statement. TraCSS alone will not prevent catastrophic collisions (operators will need to heed warnings about potential collisions 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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