COLORADO SPRINGS — The Commerce Department’s space traffic coordination system has moved into the next phase of its development with full service expected to start early next year.
In a talk at the 40th Space Symposium April 8, Janice Starzyk, acting director of the Office of Space Commerce, said the office’s Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) had upgraded to “program increment,” or version, 1.1 in March.
“Program increment 1.1 had some big jumps in capability,” she said, including the ability for owner/operators of satellites to upload ephemerides of their satellites, providing more accurate position information. TraCSS can also provide those satellite operators on-demand screening when they upload the ephemerides to detect any potential conjunctions with other space objects, which comes in the form of conjunction data messages (CDMs). “That was a big jump in 1.1.”
The TraCSS catalog is being updated six times a day, although she noted the updates are not exactly every four hours because of the manual nature of current processes. By comparison, Space-Track.org, the catalog maintained by the Defense Department, is updated four times a day.
The office is continuing to implement upgrades to TraCSS that is being beta-tested by an initial group of nine operators responsible for about 1,000 satellites. Starzyk said TraCSS will add another beta user this year “that will scale up the system to about 10 times its current capacity.” She didn’t name that user, but the only satellite operator handling significantly more than about 1,000 satellites is SpaceX, whose Starlink constellation has more than 7,000 satellites.
Another major development for TraCSS will be work on its “presentation layer,” or website. The office awarded a contract to Slingshot Aerospace in November to develop the presentation layer, but work was put on hold when Kayhan Space filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office. The GAO rejected that protest in a decision published March 26.
“We’re back up and running,” Starzyk said of work on the presentation layer. The current schedule calls for having that website, TraCSS.gov, ready for beta tests in August that will continue through the end of the calendar year.
That is slightly later than what the office predicted last year, when it estimated the service would be operational by the end of the calendar year. The office has faced challenges, such as the GAO protest and layoffs of “probationary” civil servants that included, temporarily, the program manager for TraCSS.
“By January 2026, TraCSS.gov will be fully operational,” she said. “We will be able to accept all the users interested in joining the system, and be able to provide collision avoidance, CDMs, all the data that would be needed to operate safely.”
