Commerce Pursues Space Tracking Role Despite Cuts

WASHINGTON: After Congress rejected most of its $10 million 2020 budget request, the Commerce Department is still plugging away to improve management of space debris — including co-hosting an exercise in December with DoD, says Kevin O’Connell, head of the Office of Space Commerce.

“It’s no secret that we did not get the budget we requested for 2020,”O’Connell told an audience at the Federal Aviation Administration’s annual conference on commercial space yesterday. As Breaking D readers will recall, Congress provided only $2.8 million for O’Connell’s office in 2020 — a tiny $500,000 increase from 2019.

The extra funding in the 2020 request was slated primarily for the Office of Space Commerce to begin taking over from DoD work to provide commercial operations with space situational awareness (SSA) data and information, O’Connell said, as well as for it to begin implementing a new US space traffic management (STM) regime.

President Donald Trump’s 2018 Space Policy Directive-3 (SPD-3) ordered the transfer of space object tracking and collision warning authority for civil and commercial space to free the military to focus on growing threats, especially from Russia and China, to US space assets.

Noting Commerce Secretary William Ross’s belief in the importance of space to the US economy, O’Connell said that despite the funding woes his instructions are “don’t slow down” on that work.

Ross spoke last week at Davos, where the rich and powerful gather each year, about the value of space to the global economy and the promise of the burgeoning commercial space sector versus that of governments.

“Space technologies have increased productivity, communication, and safety, and have brought new products and services to some of the most remote areas of the world,” Ross said in his Jan. 24 remarks. “Government activity in space is growing, but over 80 percent of the $415 billion space economy is commercial. We believe the future of space is overwhelmingly commercial in nature, and will no longer be dominated by government agencies and their priorities.”

O’Connell said he routinely meets on SSA and debris mitigation issues with senior military space leaders, including Gen. Jay Raymond, head of both Space Command and the new Space Force; Gen. Stephen Whiting, Space Force deputy commander; and Gen. John Shaw, now head of the Space Force Space Operations Command, formerly the 14th Air Force under Air Force Space Command, at Vandenberg AFB.

Debris tracking and mitigation, he said, is one of the biggest current risks to the space economy. “Sometimes I say it is the speed bump on the path to the trillion dollar space economy. We have to deal with it, we have to deal with it now,” he said, noting that the problem is only going to get more difficult as the thousands of satellites now in the planning stages as part of mega-constellations for Earth imaging and Internet connectivity are launched.

O’Connell said that the “silver lining” to the near miss of two defunct US satellites over Pittsburgh on Jan. 29 is that “people are beginning to realize that these near misses are taking place much more frequently. They are not a once a year occurrence. So dealing with the space debris problem is absolutely essential. ”

At the joint DoD-Commerce exercise in December, he explained, the goal was to explore “how government and commercial entities will work to manage space debris related activities.” For example, he said, one important question for the exercise was  “how is it that the government, when faced with a higher priority, can transition custody of a satellite of interest to a commercial entity.” Another issue the exercise considered was how the US could work with allies “to create an around the world like capability for persistence” in SSA.

“We continue to do a lot of good work in the interagency with our government colleagues,”O’Connell said. “We’ll also be able to do some work with our allies, we’re already doing some of that now,” he added, noting that Commerce has been in conversations with various allies about how they might contribute data to the US space tracking network.

For example, he said that next week will see the kick of a Commerce-led commercial industry working group on debris mitigation that was put on hold while the interagency working group led by NASA was revamping the US government rules. Breaking D readers will remember that the new rules were a disappointment to many in industry and DoD for failing to shorten the required long-standing 25-year deadline for removing non-functioning satellites from orbit after a fierce interagency debate.

O’Connell further noted that Commerce will be involved in the discussions in Vienna, Austria of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) on international norms of behavior in space. that kick off next week. The US delegation, led by the State Department, to the Feb. 3-14 meeting of the COPUOS Scientific and Technical Subcommittee is expected to outline the new US mitigation regulations as Washington seeks to mold international thinking to its own. This is in line with SPD-3’s mandate that the US lead international STM efforts by setting an example for others to follow.