Space debris. (NASA illustration)

WASHINGTON: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) plans to be ready to take over the military’s role of keeping tabs on space traffic and providing warnings of potential crashes by 2025, a senior official responsible for the effort said.

“We anticipate with the proposal that we have in place, and working with our sponsors inside the federal government and on the budget side, to have initial operating capacity of an operational civilian space situational awareness capability by 2024,” reaching full operational capability by 2025, Steve Volz, NOAA’s assistant administrator for satellite and information services, told reporters today.

Still, experts who spoke to Breaking Defense said questions remain not just about the timeline, but the manner in which the civilian agency can meet its goal of a truly international and industry-supported space-tracking operation.

The critical task of providing space traffic-related warnings is currently done by Space Command, which primarily keeps an eye on increasingly crowded orbits for its own strategic and national security reasons. But back in 2018, the Trump administration’s Space Policy Directive-3 (SPD-3) decided a civil agency should be responsible for providing SSA data to commercial and foreign operators — and eventually creating a civil regime for space traffic management (STM) to ensure safe operations. NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce (OSC) was tapped. However, movement has been painfully slow — drawing criticism both from key members of Congress as well as industry.

Volz said that NOAA, which is overseen by the Commerce Department, will issue requests for information (RFIs) “next week” asking industry to identify capabilities that can help determine requirements for a new, improved space object tracking system called the Open Architecture Data Repository (OADR). Unlike DoD’s semi-classified network, managed by SPACECOM’s 18th Space Control Squadron, the OADR would be able to widely share precise data and information about close approaches on orbit.

Scott Leonard, special advisor at the Office of Space Commerce, said during the briefing that the “next big milestone” will be wrapping up the OADR requirements process and creating an acquisition strategy. “This year, we’re finalizing all of our requirements and completing that, and we’ll be moving very, very quickly,” with a plan in 2023 to undertake “multiple acquisitions to build the system,” he said.

Asked by Breaking Defense if Defense Department officials were involved in developing those requirements, Volz said only that DoD “is an active participant in this,” with “a number of briefings and interactive dialogues over the past prior to this year, but … even more so as the prototype has been set up.”

However, according to several government and industry sources, collaboration has been spotty — and DoD officials have been frustrated with the pace of change, especially as the problem of orbital crowding continues to get worse.

The current OADR prototype, which was was developed by NOAA with the help of federally funded research and development centers the Aerospace Corporation, MITRE and MIT Lincoln Labs, as well as the University of Texas at Austin (UTA), can merge commercial data with data provided by SPACECOM, according to a demonstration by Leonard. He added that the database and software for collision warning processing is designed so that it can easily ingest new data sources and be upgraded as time goes on.

Asked about the accuracy of the prototype, he said, “Our architecture design was meeting the same quality of what DoD currently does.”

However, industry and outside experts point out, the whole concept of the OADR since its inception in 2020 was that by bringing in commercial data and info provided by foreign countries, it would provide better information  than the military provides.

“The most important aspect of the OADR is indeed being able to ingest sources of information that currently don’t flow in to the DoD and its catalog,” said Moriba Jah, an astrodynamicist at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA). “Not just industry, but international.”

Industry sources, however, have vocally complained that rather than actually bringing in data from companies already providing SSA services, NOAA used its admittedly sparse funds — $10 million in 2021 — to contract the research organizations and design the prototype. 

Further, it remains unclear whether and how NOAA plans to acquire raw SSA data from commercial firms, much less collision warning services.

Secure World Foundation’s Brian Weeden, in an email to Breaking Defense, stressed that “that buying commercial data (and potentially leveraging commercial platforms and services) was always supposed to be part of the plan. … Leveraging the existing commercial data and services is essential to both keeping the civil SSA/STM capabilities low cost and more innovative than the traditional government procurement approach that the DOD has used in the past.”

Weeden also noted that the mandate to the Commerce Department went beyond simply the creation of a civil analog to SPACECOM’s system, but to develop an overarching approach to STM. “What still puzzles me is what the overall plan is for providing civil SSA services to enhance space flight safety?” he said.

Chuck Beames, chair of the SmallSat Alliance, said that there is a “disconnect” between the urgency of the growing space traffic jam and the glacial pace that it is being addressed, adding that 2025 is too long to wait for a baseline capability. Industry “absolutely” could provide SSA capability today if Commerce and NOAA were to move out to fund it.

Further, he fretted that even the process for building out the OADR is moving too slowly. “RFIs are useless. All they are is a way by which to justify kicking the can down the road another couple of years. And, that’s just intolerable.”