WAIMEA, Hawaii — After a slow start, the Commerce Department says it’s making progress on establishing a civil space traffic coordination system that can depend on each industrial and government data.
During a panel discussion on the AMOS Conference here Sept. 21, Richard DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, emphasized the progress the office has made on creating the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) that can take over civil space safety responsibilities currently held by the Defense Department. TraCSS is slated to start initial services within the fourth quarter of 2024.
Much of that has been focused on getting personnel and funding. “Once I began, there was almost no staff,” said DalBello, who took over as director of the office in May 2022. The office has been slowly but steadily hiring and has a goal of fifty people by next 12 months. Lots of them will work in two TraCSS operations centers, the locations of which haven’t yet been determined.
That hiring is enabled by an increased budget: $70 million in fiscal 12 months 2023, lower than the $87 million requested but way over $16 million it received in 2022. “Now we have made good use of that budget,” he argued.
That features spending much of it on industrial services. DalBello said Sept. 21 that the office, which requested $88 million in fiscal 12 months 2024, projects spending $17 million of that on industrial infrastructure and $41 million on industrial space situational awareness data, services and pathfinders to support TraCSS.
TraCSS, though, will rely extensively on government resources as well, particularly data from the Defense Department. “We couldn’t be where we’re without DOD and NASA,” he said, with NASA handling research and development activities linked to TraCSS.
A Space Force official on the panel pledged increased support for TraCSS. Barbara Golf, strategic advisor for space domain awareness, said the Space Force would offer more accurate catalog information to the Commerce Department to enter its database than what it currently makes publicly available through the Space-Track service.
“We’re working to get the high-accuracy catalog released to the DOC, machine to machine, starting within the spring of next 12 months, every 4 hours indefinitely,” she said. “They are going to have all the pieces they need in an effort to be seeded for spaceflight safety. They will then augment with industrial data.”
Gen. Likelihood Saltzman, chief of space operations for the Space Force, said in a separate media briefing on the conference Sept. 20 that he was satisfied with the main target the Commerce Department was devoting to establishing TraCSS, partially since it has risen to the eye of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
“She talked very knowledgeably about it, which could be very encouraging. Meaning it’s on her radar. It means she understands what resource outlays are going to be required,” he said. “I’m really encouraged mostly due to the leadership that she’s shown with taking over that mission. They’ve got money. They’re investing the cash within the things that they ought to be.”
While the Office of Space Commerce has talked about having an initial version of TraCSS ready by late 2024, Saltzman said he was not rushing them to ascertain it. “We’ve got this covered. It’ll be about after they’re able to take this on since it’s necessary,” he said. “I just know the way tough it’s, and mostly we’re going to must proceed to do it anyway for our own purposes.”
Having the Commerce Department taking on civil space safety activities dates back to Space Policy Directive (SPD) 3 in 2018. Progress was initially slow due to an absence of funding and questions by some in Congress about whether Commerce was the very best agency to host that capability.
The policy was a “canary in a coal mine,” said Diane Howard, director of business space policy on the National Space Council, during a keynote on the conference Sept. 20. It raised issues about funding and the roles of each government and the private sector, she said, issues which have expanded beyond space traffic coordination.
“I feel a few of those early days of SPD-3 being an unfunded mandate forced a whole lot of those early conversations about learn how to make that transition, to be more creative,” she said. “A few of that’s baked into the conops now.”