Hundreds of US companies on Tuesday urged Congress to back off from a plan to kill a small federal office tasked with managing satellite traffic in space, a badly needed civilian effort initiated by President Donald Trump's first administration but threatened by cuts.
The White House's 2026 budget proposal seeks $10m (R177m) for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Office of Space Commerce, an 84% cut from the office's 2025 funding that would terminate Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS), a civilian system to help prevent satellite collisions and alert operators of potential crashes.
A total of 450 companies from seven different industry groups, including Elon Musk's SpaceX and Amazon's Kuiper satellite unit, wrote in a joint letter on Tuesday to the Senate committee overseeing the NOAA that without funding TraCSS, “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 rise of vast satellite constellations such as SpaceX's Starlink and heightened military and commercial activities in Earth's orbit have driven up risks of collisions between the 12,000 active satellites in space and thousands more pieces of uncontrollable junk, prompting efforts to create what is essentially a civil air traffic control system for space.
Audrey Schaffer, vice-president of strategy and policy at space-tracking firm Slingshot Aerospace, said the cuts would forfeit an opportunity to shape global space traffic control as the US did decades ago for international air traffic control standards, while Europe and China develop their own satellite traffic systems.
“It's important that there be co-ordination among the different systems so we don't have a fragmented system,” Schaffer said. “If the US doesn't have a system it brings to the table, I'm not sure how the US exercises any leadership in the establishment of international space traffic management.”
The Pentagon has long managed a space traffic database called Space-Track, but defence and industry officials argued responsibility detracts from its national security mission and risks conflating an essential safety service with military interests as other countries seek improvements to global satellite co-ordination.
The space industry in 2020 praised Trump's first administration for directing the NOAA office to absorb the Pentagon's space-tracking function and improve efforts to fuse satellite position data from countries and companies. The office has since released a trial version of TraCSS in use by some companies before a full release planned for early next year.
However, the Trump administration in a budget document last month said it wants to terminate TraCSS because it did not complete the system during the previous administration and private companies “have the capability and business model” to do space traffic co-ordination on their own.
The two largest space industry organisations, the Commercial Space Federation and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, wrote in another letter protesting the termination of TraCSS to senators on Monday that “industry believes maintaining a basic space situational awareness service at no cost to the end user is inherently a government function”.
Reuters
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