The Trump administration's plan to gut the Office of Space Commerce and cancel the government's first civilian-run space traffic control program is gaining plenty of detractors.
Earlier this week, seven space industry trade groups representing more than 450 companies sent letters to House and Senate leaders urging them to counter the White House's proposal. A spokesperson for the military's Space Operations Command, which currently has overall responsibility for space traffic management, said it will "continue to advocate" for a civilian organization to take over the Space Force's role as orbital traffic cop.
Giveth and taketh away
The White House's budget request submitted to Congress for fiscal year 2026 would slash the Office of Space Commerce's budget from $65 million to $10 million and eliminate funding for the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS). The TraCSS program was established in the Department of Commerce after Trump signed a policy directive in his first term as president to reform how the government supervises the movements of satellites and space debris in orbit.
The Office of Space Commerce, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has been around since the 1980s as a licensing agency for remote sensing and Earth observation satellites.
TraCSS is designed as a cloud-based system to serve as a nerve center for collecting satellite tracking data from spacecraft owners and a network of government and commercial telescopes and radars. The space traffic control network then uses the information to provide alerts of potential in-space collisions to satellite operators. This is becoming more important as thousands more satellites head to space each year.
Industry trade groups are lobbying Congress to reverse the Trump administration's proposal and restore the Office of Space Commerce's (OSC's) budget to this year's level of $65 million.
"One of OSC’s most important functions is to provide space traffic coordination support to US satellite operators, similar to the Federal Aviation Administration's role in air traffic control for the US airline industry," seven trade groups wrote in joint letters to Congress.
The trade organizations count the largest Western commercial satellite operators among their members: SpaceX, Amazon, Eutelsat OneWeb, Planet Labs, Iridium, SES, Intelsat, and Spire. These are the companies with the most at stake in the debate over the future of space traffic coordination. Industry sources told Ars that some companies are concerned a catastrophic collision in low-Earth orbit might trigger a wave of burdensome regulations, an outcome they would like to avoid.
"Without funding for space traffic coordination, US commercial and government satellite operators would face greater risks—putting critical missions in harm's way, raising the cost of doing business, and potentially driving US industry to relocate overseas," the industry groups warned.
The military currently performs the spaceflight safety mission, providing up to a million collision warnings per day to give satellite operators a heads-up that their spacecraft will encounter another object as they speed around the Earth at nearly 5 miles per second. A collision at those velocities would endanger numerous other satellites, including the International Space Station. This happened in 2009 with the accidental collision of a functional commercial communications satellite and a defunct Russian spacecraft, adding more than 2,000 pieces of debris to busy orbital traffic lanes.
Ideally, the Space Force issues its warnings in time for a satellite operator to maneuver their spacecraft out of the path of a potential collision. Satellite operators might also have more precise information on the location of their spacecraft, and determine that they don't need to perform any collision avoidance maneuver.
The military's Space Surveillance Network (SSN) tracks more than 47,000 objects in orbit. Most of these objects are orbital debris, but there's a growing number of active spacecraft as many operators—mainly SpaceX, Amazon, the Space Force, and China—deploy megaconstellations with hundreds to thousands of satellites.
The Satellite Industry Association reports that nearly 2,700 satellites were launched into Earth orbit last year, bringing the total number of active satellites to 11,539, a threefold increase over the number of operating spacecraft in 2020.
Under strain
Space Force officials are eager to exit the business of warning third-party satellite operators, including rivals such as Russia and China, of possible collisions in orbit. The military would prefer to focus on managing ever-growing threats from satellites, an intensive effort that requires continual monitoring as other nations' increasingly sophisticated spacecraft maneuver from one orbit to another.
But until someone else is ready to take over, the Space Force will remain saddled with the responsibility of issuing these alerts. The Space Force calls these alerts conjunction assessments, and there are national security reasons for sharing the warnings far and wide because a traffic accident in orbit would endanger the Space Force's own satellites.
Col. Raj Agrawal just completed a two-year tour of duty heading up Space Operations Command's space domain awareness mission. A decade ago, this would have entailed identifying, tracking, and characterizing the thousands of objects in Earth orbit. Today, the mission goes a step further to screen for potentially hostile satellites and develop defensive and offensive options for military commanders to consider if there's a conflict.
"Our intel apparatus gets after what things could potentially be a risk, and what things to continue to understand better, and what things we have to be ready to hold at risk," said Agrawal, whose unit, named Mission Delta 2, is charged with maintaining the world's publicly available reference catalog of all objects in orbit, alongside the new responsibilities in space warfare.
The Commerce Department's TraCSS program is supposed to take over the public-facing part of the space domain awareness mission.
"I'm not in the business of spaceflight safety," Agrawal told Ars in a recent interview. "I'm in the business of teeing up decisions for decision-makers to de-escalate risk. Spaceflight safety is just a foundational aspect. I’ve got to know the domain before we can anticipate options to make decisions.
"We're trying to get to where commercial spaceflight safety is managed by the Office of Space Commerce, so they're training side-by-side with us to kind of offload that mission," Agrawal said.
Agrawal's tour of duty as Mission Delta 2 ended last week, as planned. His next assignment will be as an instructor at the National Defense University.
"We want to get to where the authorities are rightly aligned, where civil or commercial notifications are done by an organization that's not focused on warfighting, and we focus on the things that we want to focus on," Agrawal said. "Also, if people are trying to engage with an organization for peaceful purposes or commercial equities, I want them engaging with another organization other than Department of Defense."
Under the existing plan, which dates to the first Trump administration, the Commerce Department's TraCSS program would still use data from the Space Force's network of tracking radars and telescopes. But a civilian agency would be charged with turning this data into a publicly accessible catalog of space objects and issuing collision alerts to civil, commercial, and international satellite operators.
In a justification document accompanying the White House's budget proposal, Trump administration officials wrote that the Commerce Department was "unable to complete a government-owned and-operated public-facing database and traffic coordination system."
TraCSS started beta testing last fall with a handful of satellite operators totaling around 1,000 spacecraft. Government officials announced in May that TraCSS was working to add SpaceX as a beta user, adding more than 7,000 additional satellites to the test program, which allows operators to submit thousands of satellite positions to TraCSS and screen for collision threats within a few minutes.
The Office of Space Commerce most recently said TraCSS was on track for a "full production release" in early 2026. Amazon Web Services has a contract for cloud hosting of TraCSS data, and the government tapped Parsons Corporation as the system's overall integrator.
The Trump administration now proposes to hand off responsibility for space traffic control to private industry. Officials wrote in the budget justification document that "private industry has proven that they have the capability and the business model" to provide civilian operators with space situational awareness data and space traffic management services. Later in the document, officials wrote that the "intent" of Trump's 2018 policy directive that led to the creation of TraCSS has been "satisfied" with private industry capable of offering a free basic service and "fee-based concierge services" to satellite operators.
Speaking for the satellite industry, trade groups cautioned that the White House's plan ignores the risk that the space traffic control mission will revert back to the military. "Successive administrations have recognized on a bipartisan basis that space traffic coordination is a global, commercial-facing function best managed by a civilian agency," the trade groups wrote.
"Keeping space traffic coordination within the Department of Commerce preserves military resources for core defense missions and prevents the conflation of space safety with military control–critical to US leadership in setting international standards and norms for space activities."
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