Commerce Cuts Space Traffic Management Program
By Shaun Waterman
The first Trump administration moved to relieve the Space Force of its burden to monitor and warn civilian space operators about potential space traffic hazards. But now, just as the Commerce Department’s new Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) program is nearly ready, the second Trump administration is looking to cancel it.
Space Policy Directive 3 issued in June 2018 laid out objectives for the future of space traffic management (STM) and commercial space situational awareness (SSA), with the idea that a civilian, rather than military, organization should be responsible for advising commercial operators when they are at risk of a collision in space. “In recognition of the need for DOD to focus on maintaining access to and freedom of action in space, a civil agency should, consistent with applicable law, be responsible for the publicly releasable portion of the DOD catalog and for administering an open architecture data repository,” the policy states. “The Department of Commerce should be that civil agency.”
A spokesman for Space Operations Command (SpOC) provided a statement that said the command will “continue to advocate” for the objectives outlined in SPD-3. The TracCSS solution was an answer to that policy direction, and without it, the next steps are unclear.
Commerce zeroed out funding for TracCSS in its fiscal 2026 budget request at a time when the burgeoning number of commercial satellites is making the domain increasingly congested and potentially less safe. The administration argues the private sector should be responsible for tracking satellites and warning operators about potential collisions.
The Space Force has had the de facto mission to manage space traffic for decades, notes Charles Galbreath, a retired Space Force colonel and now senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
If TracCS goes away now, that mission will fall back to the Space Force at a time when the service’s military mission is already growing.
The Space Force and, before that, the Air Force Space Command, began the road to handing off space traffic management to Commerce and TracCS seven years ago. The objective was a system that relieved the Space Force of the civilian STM mission but that also would be better than existing capabilities.
“TracCSS has Space Force data but there are also commercial sources, international sources, and sources from satellite operators,” Galbreath said. “That can all be fed into the algorithms, into a shared database, to do the orbit determination. And the more data you have coming in, the more accurate your orbital determination can be.”
Getting the Space Force out of the business of warning individual operators is key. “This allows our squadrons, both operational and sustainment, to focus more fully on our core mission of exploiting opportunities and mitigating vulnerabilities in the national security space terrain,” the SpOC spokesperson said in an email. “This is especially important as the space domain becomes increasingly contested by our adversaries.”
Shutting down TraCSS would save $55 million annually. Space advocates say that’s a small price to pay for space safety, and complain that doing away with the program will increase the chance of collisions in orbit and undermine America’s leadership role in international space.
A broad industry coalition of seven trade groups representing some 450 space companies are appealing to Congress to reverse the decision to cancel TracCSS. The groups include: The Commercial SSA Coalition, the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), the Satellite Industry Association, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the Commercial Space Federation, the National Security Space Association, and the Space Data Association. “The U.S. space industry is very concerned that this move will introduce new risks to our operations and to our businesses,” said Audrey Schaffer, a space industry executive representing the Commercial SSA Coalition, which represents companies that offer space situational awareness services to private sector space operators. It’s notable that even the companies that hope to profit by competing with TraCSS are advocating for it.
SpOC and before it, Air Force Space Command, have long had the job of tracking objects in orbit—including operational and decommissioned satellites, as well as larger orbital debris—and sharing that data for free with commercial space operators. SpOC now tracks 60,000 space objects, according to SpaceTrack.org, the command’s web accessible orbital catalog
The first Trump administration decided in 2018 to move the STM mission to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is part of the Department of Commerce and already had a regulatory role regarding satellites. TraCSS, the result of that move, began beta testing last year. It has been scheduled to take over the mission fully next year.
The transition would get the Space Force out of “being the Call Center for Space Safety for the whole world,” Schaeffer said.
Without it, Galbreath noted, the mission falls back on the Space Force as “an unfunded mandate.”
The SpOC spokesperson said the command “remains fully committed to the provision of data for the execution of spaceflight safety operations.”
The command will “continue to advocate for the completion of milestones established in support of Space Policy Directive-3 (SPD-3), which is critical to maintaining a safe, secure, and sustainable space environment,” the spokesperson said. SPD-3 is the 2018 policy directive that moved the mission to NOAA.
NOAA’s justification for zeroing out TraCSS in the budget pinned responsibility on the Biden administration, which it said failed to get the program going in time. “Under the prior administration, DOC was unable to complete a government owned and operated public-facing database and traffic coordination system,” the documents state. “In the [intervening] time, private industry has proven that they have the capability and the business model to provide civil operators with SSA data and STM services.”
A NOAA spokesperson referred questions about the cuts to the Office of Management and Budget. OMB did not respond to a request for comment.
But Richard DalBello, who headed the Office of Space Commerce at NOAA during the Biden administration and oversaw the set-up of TraCSS said that conclusion is incorrect.
“That’s the giant gap in the logic of the administration’s proposal,” he said. “They wish into existence this imaginary solution, which is that the commercial SSA operators will just do this, and that somehow magically they will get paid.”
DalBello said commercial providers may want to do this work, but they are not ready to do so. TracCSS, meanwhile, is already in beta testing. He noted that the original 2018 SPD-3 policy directive came without funding, and that it was not until 2023 that funding for TraCSS was made available, a year after he joined the department.
“All things being equal, given that we started the program in 2022 ,the fact that we’re in beta already is pretty damn good,” he said.
It will take time for private services operators to develop offerings and satellite operators to determine which capabilities to pay for.
“How are you picking and choosing among all the companies who do SSA?” Dalbello asked. “Some are good at observations in low-Earth orbit. Others are good at higher orbits. Some don’t do observation at all, but they do really great software and analysis and prediction.”
Also still undecided: What firms can acquire and resell U.S. data. “There are dozens of global companies that can do SSA,” DalBello said.
Steve Jordan Tomaszewski, vice president for space systems at the Aerospace Industries Association, which also signed the letter to Congress, said civilian space situational awareness needs are very different from military requirements for space domain awareness (SDA). Tomaszewski, a two-decade Air Force veteran, who now serves as a lieutenant colonel in the Reserve, compared it to the difference between civilian air traffic control and an Air Operations Center. It wouldn’t make sense “if the Air Force got called in to operate every single air traffic control tower in our country,” he said.
He added: “Every time that the military has to take on an additional mission that’s outside of [its] scope, it’s a distraction and it’s taking resources away from the core mission.”
TraCSS “frees up the Department of Defense to focus on space warfighting because they’re no longer doing this very basic space safety mission,” Tomaszewski said.
Madelaine Chang, director of policy at the Satellite Industry Association said TraCSS was also modernizing what users could see. TraCSS capabilities impressed beta users, she said, largely because it was built new and applied the latest technology.
“It will be world leading,” Chang predicted—if the system survives the cuts.
Space Force Ecosystem of GPS Alternatives
By Shaun Waterman
The Space Force is playing midwife to a new ecosystem of commercial satellite constellations providing alternatives to the service’s own Global Positioning System from much closer to the Earth, making their signals more accurate and harder to jam.
A half-dozen companies, including two with research contracts from Space Force or Air Force tech incubators, are currently planning low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellations of hundreds of small satellites that will offer position, navigation, and timing (PNT) services to augment or back up GPS.
The military has long been concerned about its reliance on GPS, but over the past few years civilian users have experienced increasingly severe GPS interference around conflict zones in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
In particular, civil aviation has been hard-hit, said Lisa Dyer of the GPS Innovation Alliance, a trade association that represents GPS receiver manufacturers, satellite operators, and user groups like boaters, surveyors, and autonomous vehicle developers.
GPS jamming, used to stop drone attacks and smart bomb targeting, creates “unnecessary extra burdens on our air traffic controllers and flight crews, and it’s increasing risks to the safety of the flight crews and the passengers,” Dyer told Air & Space Forces Magazine.
PNT signals from low-Earth orbit are harder to jam, experts say, because they are broadcast from much closer to the earth’s surface. New cryptographic techniques make the signals hard to impersonate with bogus data, a problem known as spoofing. And two of the new constellations also plan to use a completely different frequency band for their signals, which will make jamming more difficult and more complicated.
LEO satellites orbit between 100 and 1,200 miles above the surface of the Earth. GPS and its other major PNT constellations like China’s BeiDu, Russia’s GLONASS, and Europe’s Galileo are all in medium-Earth orbit (MEO), 11,000-15,000 miles above the surface.
“There are some advantages to medium-Earth orbit and some advantages to low-Earth orbit,” said Dyer.
The main advantage of MEO, she explained, is the smaller number of satellites required. From a higher orbit, a satellite is visible over a greater proportion of the Earth’s surface. In MEO, 24 satellites is enough to offer near-global coverage. The current GPS constellation has 31 satellites in orbit, which means there’s some redundancy, Dyer said.
The main advantage of LEO is the signal can be orders of magnitude stronger when it arrives at the receiver, making it easier to receive and harder to jam, said Patrick Shannon, co-founder and chief executive officer of TrustPoint, a LEO PNT startup that launched its third satellite last month.
With several hundred satellites in a large LEO constellation, users can also see more satellites in the sky at one time, and therefore receive more triangulating signals, making LEO PNT potentially more accurate than MEO-based systems.
The new GPS alternatives use cryptographic authentication, which means the user can be sure the data they’re getting is genuine and not a fraudulent replacement, or “spoofed” signal, designed to mislead. The new generation PNT systems also use encryption, which scrambles the signal so only those with the correct cryptographic key loaded in their receiver can use it. As well as guarding against spoofing, this makes subscription-only services easy to offer.
Both the Air Force and Space Force technology incubators—along with Department of Defense-wide efforts like the Defense Innovation Unit—have sought to seed commercial companies working in this space, with the aim of easing the emergence of a new ecosystem of LEO PNT providers that can provide a secure alternative to GPS.
Last year, TrustPoint was awarded three phase II research contracts from the Department of the Air Force: a Small business Technology Transfer (STTR) award of $1.6 million from AFWERX, the Air Force’s technology incubator; and two Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards worth a total of $3.8 million from SpaceWERX, the Space Force equivalent. The company is commercially focused, said Shannon, but is happy to be part of the Space Force’s Alt-PNT cadre of startups that are developing alternatives to GPS for military use, as well.
The awards helped TrustPoint develop technology to broadcast and receive PNT signals in C-Band, Shannon said, with a frequency just over 5 gigahertz. That’s much higher than the 1 to 2 gigahertz L-Band frequencies used by GPS and its state-backed alternatives.
The higher frequency C-Band signals are more subject to degradation during adverse weather and when traveling through buildings than L-Band, but make up for that by being transmitted from satellites over 30 times closer to the Earth, Shannon said. And the faster fall off in signal power over distance for the higher frequency C-Band signal, called path loss, complicates jamming efforts as well.
“The distance a signal travels is a function of the power behind it,” said Shannon, but a C-Band jammer loses power more quickly. An L-Band broadcast will travel three times as far as a similarly powered signal in C-Band, meaning someone trying to jam C-Band service will need many more jammers or much more powerful ones. They’ll also need new equipment, since existing GPS jammers are built to target L-Band broadcasts.
“The infrastructure required and the physical complexity of denying C-Band makes it much more difficult and costly,” concluded Shannon.
The satellites in TrustPoint’s constellation will be microsats, only about the size of a four-slice toaster. The company aims to have about 350 of them in orbit by the end of the decade, but will be able to start offering a service with a fraction of that number in 2027, Shannon said.
He also said that the small size of the satellites and advanced manufacturing technologies would allow the firm to put the entire constellation up for “$100 million, give or take, not billions.”
The global market for assured, or hard-to-jam, PNT is predicted to grow almost 25 percent a year from $400 million a year in 2022, to $3.5 billion a year in 2032, according to one forecast.
Shannon acknowledged that TrustPoint was already facing competition. “This is a massive problem,” he said of GPS jamming and spoofing. “Many industries, many nations, are experiencing these issues, and everyone’s looking for a solution. And that, of course, is an economic opportunity that a lot of companies are looking at.”
Those competitors include other members of the Space Force’s altPNT cadre, like Xona, a California-based startup which launched its first production satellite last month and recently announced a series B funding round and other capital backing to the tune of $92 million.
Xona aims for a constellation of 250 to 300 satellites and will broadcast signals in both L-Band and C-Band, according to its website. The company says it is partnering with receiver manufacturers to produce devices that can receive both GPS L-Band and LEO PNT C-Band signals.
Xona, TrustPoint, and other LEO PNT startups will have to contend with an incumbent; Iridium, the first-ever LEO constellation, has been providing an L-Band PNT service for eight years, initially in partnership with Satelles, until Iridium acquired it last year. The partnership, said Satelles founder and now Iridium Vice President of PNT Michael O’Connor, began as an ahead-of-its-time venture founded in the early years of the last decade, when concerns were only just starting to emerge about the fragility of GPS and the increasing dependence of the U.S. and global economy on it.
Iridium, which launched in the 1990s, had an L-Band channel originally used to provide a global pager service, O’Connor said. Satelles’ engineers figured out how to design a signal that could use it for PNT: “You’re 25 times closer to the Earth, and that [pager] channel was a strong signal … 1,000 times stronger” than GPS, said O’Connor.
By the time the service launched in 2016, North Korea had begun periodically jamming GPS signals over Seoul, and researchers from the University of Texas at Austin had shown how to take over drones by spoofing GPS signals.
GPS antennas are generally able to receive the Iridium broadcast, explained O’Connor, and Satelles partnered with equipment manufacturers to update the software that interpreted the signal so it could get timing and positioning data from the signal.
The initial customers were technology-driven businesses that used GPS for timing, rather than location, O’Connor said, like mobile phone network operators, cloud computing providers, and financial institutions. “We’re installed in major stock exchanges all around the world,” he said. “It turns out that if you can mess with the time at the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ, bad guys can get up to all kinds of mischief.”
Now that GPS interference is a reality, O’Connor said, Iridium’s LEO PNT is expanding into maritime, aviation, and other markets. “Industries out there are starting to recognize today that they have very serious problems around GPS jamming and spoofing. … Everyone’s seeing the writing on the wall that it is a problem, and you need a solution to that. And that’s our mission: To protect networks, protect our society, protect the fabric that keeps us connected.”