HOUSTON — Layoffs of staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have included its Office of Space Commerce, potentially affecting work on space traffic coordination and commercial remote sensing licensing.
According to industry sources, civil servants at the Office of Space Commerce were among those laid off on short notice Feb. 27, part of broader layoffs at NOAA and across the federal governments, ostensibly to cut costs and reduce bureaucracy.
The layoffs included staff working on the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS), the civil space traffic coordination system that the office is creating to implement Space Policy Directive 3 by the first Trump administration in 2018. TraCSS is intended to take over work currently done by the Defense Department to maintain a catalog of objects in orbit and provide warnings to satellite operators of potential close approaches of their satellites with other objects.
Also affected are staff in the office’s Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs Division, which handles licensing of commercial imaging spacecraft, as well as staff in the office who manage other operations.
The number of people laid off could be as much as a quarter of the staff of the Office of Space Commerce, which had about 60 civil servants and contractors as of late 2024. NOAA has not issued a statement about the layoffs and the office did not respond to questions about them late Feb. 27.
There are concerns that cuts in staffing at TraCSS could keep it from meeting its goal of entering full operations by the end of the current fiscal year. The service started beta testing last fall and planned a phased approach to implement additional capabilities through September. Similarly, reductions in its commercial remote sensing division could roll back progress by the office in reducing review times for license applications.
The layoffs are part of broader cuts at NOAA focused on so-called probationary civil servants, which are those who were either recently hired or moved into new positions. Such employees have fewer civil service protections and can be easier to fire. According to some reports, more than 800 such employees across NOAA were dismissed Feb. 27.
Many other federal agencies have also suffered layoffs of probationary employees. An exception was NASA, which managed to avoid layoffs, which would have affected at least 1,000 people working at the agency.
The legality of those firings is the subject of lawsuits. On Feb. 27, a federal judge ordered the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which has been overseeing the layoffs, to rescind directives to various federal agencies directing those layoffs. That order, though, did not have immediate impacts on agencies that have already conducted those layoffs.
The Office of Space Commerce also announced Feb. 28 it was canceling a meeting of its advisory committee, the Advisory Committee on Excellence in Space (ACES), that was scheduled for March 5. The announcement provided no details on the reason for the cancellation. The meeting was scheduled to discuss work on commercial remote sensing licensing and proposals for the office to handle “mission authorization” for commercial space activities not regulated by other agencies.
