Space Situational Awareness Seen Needing Action as Orbit Becomes Crowded

The current regime of DOD tracking and warning of possible conjunctions raises concerns about the completeness of its catalog of objects in space, its data accuracy and what's seen by some as an excessive number of false alarms, said George Nield, former FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation head, now Commercial Space Technologies president. Last year's SSA-focused space policy directive (see 1806180028) indicated Commerce should put together a civil framework, but Congress hasn't acted on that, he said. Private operators often buy private SSA services because of concerns about data quality, said Therese Jones, Satellite Industry Association senior policy director.

Options for a civil system could include relying on the current Pentagon-provided data, with a civil agency providing it to users, though that would mean the U.S. not benefiting from better capabilities available in the private sector and elsewhere, Nield said. A civil agency doing data collection and warnings generation would likely require sizable staffing and it could take years before the team has the necessary expertise, he said. Hiring a prime contractor to do it for the U.S. might be the fastest and easiest option but would kill the nascent SSA industry beyond that provider, while creating a certification process for SSA and space traffic management (STM) private sector providers would likely take a long time, Nield said. He said one approach that shows promise would involve government oversight of a nonprofit public-private partnership made up of a variety of stakeholders.

Nield said short term, government needs to start a civil pilot program using existing hardware and software to create a benchmark of performance capabilities against data available from DOD. He hopes a collection of agencies and the National Space Council meet with Congress, answering questions and resolving issues, to start the process of launching that operational civil system. While not the level of a pilot program, more-serious government/industry discussions are going on, O'Connell said.

Having STM rules that dictate, for example, who moves when a possible conjunction is detected, could be problematic since some non-geostationary orbit satellites lack propulsion, Jones said. That's why there needs to be more focus on improving data timeliness and accuracy, O'Connell said. He said the space policy directive opens the door to some regulatory steps by Commerce, but for now it's focused on data issues.

On SSA operations internationally, other nations think the most-realistic but least-desirable option is the U.S. expanding its SSA system and leading the world, said Asha Balakrishnan, Science and Technology Policy Institute researcher. Less likely but more desirable would be a globally governed SSA system run by an inter-governmental organization, she said. Also seen unrealistic was a patchwork of individual nations all running their own systems, but with interoperability among them, she said. Countries want to reduce dependence on U.S.-provided data but still want to collaborate with America on SSA, she said. With Europe interested in continuing to partner with the U.S., the federal government is about to fund an experiment on interoperability of their respective SSA systems, O'Connell said.

Asked how international data sharing would work with national security concerns about classified satellites, AstroPlanetview principal Sandy Magnus said with increased SSA capabilities worldwide, "they're going to be seen." And national security interests "are going to have to learn to live in a different world."

One problem for some U.S operators is that SSA operations centers of some nations or overseas companies aren't always staffed around the clock, leading to difficulty when conjunction warnings come, Jones said. She said one involving a Russian satellite during a Russian holiday ended up seeing State Department intervention to get a response.