The policy is light on language regarding security issues — with the most specific provision reiterating Trump's Golden Dome push for a comprehensive air and missile defense shield.
After a drastic reduction proposed by the White House, the Senate Appropriations Committee would fund the Office of Space Commerce at $60 million in FY26 to continue with TraCSS.
Balancing security and access to data are critical to providing users with trustworthy, reliable data for real-time decisions.
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.
Many of the sensors contributed by the 15 EU SST participating states are military assets, and the European Defence Fund also is being tapped to help foster commercial innovation in the space situational awareness domain.
Representatives of US remote sensing firms remain extremely nervous about possible roadblocks to future plans that require either new licenses or license modifications due to the personnel downsizing resulting from the efforts of Elon Musk's DOGE team to chop the size of the federal bureaucracy.
License holders are receiving emails saying that all correspondence with the Commercial Remote Sensing for Regulatory Affairs is now being routed to the NOAA Office of General Counsel as no "senior personnel remain in the office," according to communications reviewed by Breaking Defense.
Knowing when to build on commercial systems and when to develop something new can be the difference between parity and information dominance.
Once up and running, the new TraCSS.gov site will allow commercial and foreign operators to migrate from DoD's Space-track.org website for accessing data on space object whereabouts.
"Transitioning the spaceflight safety SSA responsibilities to DoC, a civil agency, will improve support to these users and allow DoD to focus its resources on core defense missions,” John Hill, DoD's senior space policy officer, said.
TraCSS will go above and beyond DoD's current collision warning process by publicly providing the specifics of a potential crash in what are deemed emergency situations, explained Mariel Borowitz, OSC director of international SSA engagement.
In discussing the preliminary version of TraCSS, Richard DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, revealed to Breaking Defense that he's stepping down at the end of the year.
Why edge and endpoint security can’t be an afterthought.
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.
"There's an awful lot of security concern about what we can see now, what the planet can see now," said Barbara Golf, executive agent for space domain awareness at Space Systems Command.
All five contractors — COMSPOC, Kayhan Space, LeoLabs, Slingshot Aerospace, and SpaceNav — received new orders, bringing total "spending over the course of the Consolidated Pathfinder to $15.5 million," according to an announcement by the Office of Space Commerce.
A global ecosystem that shares space situational awareness data can secure a safe future for space, but much greater international coordination is needed, according to a new document from the Office of Space Commerce.