Space Commerce Office's Space Situational Awareness Service to Start by Year's End
NOAA'S Office of Space Commerce (OSC) expects it will have some form of a civil and commercial space situational awareness (SSA) service available by year's end, according to OSC Director Richard DalBello. DOD is in the midst of a phased handover of civil and commercial SSA oversight to OSC, stemming from the White House's 2018 space policy directive on space traffic management (see 21806180028). Designed to be slow and deliberate, that transition will be complete within five years, DalBello said Wednesday in a Washington Space Business Roundtable talk.
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"A coherent international SSA system," with nations' SSA systems sharing information relatively seamlessly, will probably take some years, DalBello added. OSC is working through the State Department on talks with other countries about space traffic best practices and standards, he said. SSA regulators everywhere might need to become more hands-on with actual coordination of space traffic, he indicated. "Eventually we will need to move to a place where we're not just offering thoughts" about coordination, he said.
DOD does "the very basics" of SSA, and OSC is trying to define the parameters its service should cover, DalBello said. Contracts announced last month with commercial space services providers (see 2401190011) are part of that effort to define "what is enough," he said.
OSC also is in a cooperative R&D agreement with SpaceX on the satellite operator's automated collision avoidance and satellite conjunction assessment capabilities, DalBello said. Multiple satellite fleets will likely ape SpaceX's approach, with its satellites semi-autonomously able to correct and redirect their paths to avoid collisions, he said. He said OSC is looking at and evaluating the company's tools for doing so.
The OSC service aims to be more timely than DOD's, DalBello said. While Defense updates every eight hours, the initial OSC service will halve that, he said. Autonomy tools like SpaceX's could help the system eventually reach a point where updates are continual, with data coming from object tracking as well as reporting from objects in space.
A one-stop shop for commercial space licensing isn't likely, DalBello said. Space regulatory agencies having different congressional committees of jurisdiction and various funding methods, said. "It would take a tremendous act of political will to restructure this."
Pointing to likely tens of thousands of satellites deorbiting over the next decade or so, DalBello said there are questions about the atmospheric impact. Eventually, funded research will study the issue, he said: Space sustainability is an OSC priority, and that extends beyond orbital debris to the efficient use of orbits to satellites' impact on night skies and astronomical observations.
DalBello said that since taking over as head of OSC in May 2022, the office has gone from a handful of staffers to 35, with that "shortly" growing to 50. "We are and will be an important regulator [and] a clear manifestation of what light-touch regulation should mean."