The Trump administration’s budget would dramatically shrink the Office of Space Commerce and cancel an effort to transition responsibilities for keeping tabs on civil satellites from the Pentagon to the Commerce Department.
The IG further is urging NOAA's Office of Space Commerce to move out more aggressively to craft a plan to set binding rules to manage the ever increasing amount of on-orbit traffic — despite the fact, as pointed out to Breaking Defense by senior NOAA officials, that Congress has yet to give OSC the legal authority to do so.
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The joint DoD-Commerce SSA pilot launched Dec. 5 and will run for two months.
The Commerce Department doesn't simply want to replicate what DoD does now in providing space situational awareness data to industry, but go beyond to provide "a technologically superior product," said Richard DalBello, head of DoC's Commercial Space Office.
Traditionally, DoD and the Intelligence Community — as well as some US allies — have been leery about revealing the position of US national security satellites, because they wish to conceal their activities and characteristics.
The $87 million in funding for the Commerce office is a step in the direction of implementing the long-stalled plan to transfer authority for tracking non-military spacecraft to a civil agency.
Modeling and simulation get an AI upgrade for more realistic training and improved autonomous platforms.
The MoA will be followed by a set of annexes that include how the Defense Department will share funds, personnel and/or technology to help the Office of Space Commerce stand up a civil structure for space situational awareness (SSA).
Active debris removal is "definitely a need, and I think there is a use case for industry to get after that as a service-based opportunity," said Maj. Gen. DeAnna Burt.
"I just think it's a little too late for trying to have a stamp on something. It is just trying to say that they did something," said veteran space policy wonk Erin Neal.
SIA says there could be as many as 107,671 satellites on orbit by 2029. There are now slightly fewer than 3,000.
Onshoring and investment in military-specific semiconductors anchor a cornerstone of the defense industrial base.
"The DoD system is not scalable to meet the demands of a growing number of objects in space and to deal with an increasing number of space operators," the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) report says.
"Putting non-maneuverable cubesats into LEO in densely populated orbits ... is like putting go-carts on the freeway. Nobody would do that," says Viasat's John Janka.
The independent FCC seemingly "wrote these proposed rules mostly (if not entirely) in a vacuum, potentially failing to ensure White House directions in Space Policy Directives 1-through-4 were fully accounted for," said one USG official with an eye on the debate.
O'Connell said that the "silver lining" to the near miss of two defunct US satellites over Pittsburg on Jan. 29 is that "people are beginning to realize that these near misses are taking place much more frequently."