LAS VEGAS — American and Chinese officials met recently to debate space situational awareness (SSA) data, a part of broader efforts by the U.S. to raised understand emerging national SSA systems.
Sandra Magnus, chief engineer for the Office of Space Commerce’s Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, said the top of the office, Richard DalBello, met with Chinese counterparts on the sidelines of the International Astronautical Congress in Baku, Azerbaijan, earlier this month.
DalBello “recently had some really good conversations along with his Chinese counterparts on the IAC meeting in Baku,” she said during a panel discussion at AIAA’s ASCEND conference here Oct. 23, later stating she didn’t have details concerning the substance of the discussions.
Those talks, she said, were linked to discussions about making a “federated network” of regional SSA providers, which requires understanding what data they should offer. “One in all the fees for the Office of Space Commerce is to exit and begin attempting to have dialogues with a few of these organizations and work out where’s the mutual ground we will meet within the context of safety” when it comes to what data could be shared and the way.
“TraCSS envisions the long run of SSA to be a globally federated system of providers with a series of interconnected national or regional hubs providing SSA information and services to spacecraft operators,” DalBello said in a press release to SpaceNews Oct. 24. “The primary steps in implementing such a vision could be to have interaction in a broad international dialogue focused on standards and best practices, and this dialogue ought to be coordinated with the continued work of the UN on long-term sustainability.”
DalBello has previously noted the event of other national SSA systems. “We’re not on this alone,” he said during a session of the AMOS Conference in Hawaii in September. Systems like European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking (EU SST) are emerging to supply services much like what the U.S. government has been offering. He described EU SST as “the primary of what can be a proliferation of international SSA systems.”
One challenge of cooperating and exchanging data with other national SSA systems, industry officials say, is to correlate that data in a useful way, particularly once they offer different positions of space objects. That goes beyond easy data exchange protocols to deeper understanding of how SSA data are collected and analyzed.
The meeting on the IAC, sources said, stemmed from a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in late August. In a readout of a gathering between Raimondo and He Lifeng, vice premier of China, the Commerce Department said the 2 discussed topics that included “space commerce,” an apparent reference to the Office of Space Commerce’s work on TraCSS since there’s little industrial space activity between the 2 countries. Sources said there aren’t any plans for extra meetings.
Communications between the USA and China in space traffic coordination have been limited lately. U.S. officials have publicly complained that while they’ve provided, as a courtesy, conjunction warnings to China involving close approaches of space objects to Chinese crewed spacecraft, they rarely receive an acknowledgement.
In December 2021, the Chinese government filed a diplomatic message often called a note verbale with the United Nations, complaining that on two occasions Starlink spacecraft passed near China’s Tiangong space station, creating what it claimed was a spaceflight safety hazard. The USA responded with its own note verbale in January 2022, saying it had concluded that the close approaches posed no safety threat to Tiangong.
China, in its note, claimed it had contacted U.S. officials several times by email but never received a reply. The U.S. responded that it was “unaware of any contact or attempted contact by China” concerning the incident before China filed its note verbale.