WASHINGTON — The Office of Space Commerce is set to turn on the initial version of its civil space traffic coordination system at the end of the month, beginning a transition from the Defense Department that will run through next year.
In a talk at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference Sept. 19, Richard DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, said user testing of the initial Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, system will start by the end of the month.
This version of TraCSS will be a “minimum viable product” that will be used by a group of beta testers, “who will be working with us to assess how we’re doing,” he said. That feedback will be rolled into upgrades of TraCSS in the following months.
Those initial users will get conjunction data messages (CDMs), information about potential close approaches of their satellites with other objects in orbit, that will look similar to what they get today from the Defense Department and its Space-Track system, he said in an earlier panel at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Aerospace Summit Sept. 11.
“There’s not going to be a dramatic difference,” he said then, with TraCSS obtaining data from the DoD and from satellite owner/operators and then producing CDMs, which will be available to operators initially through Space-Track.
“The operators that are working with this know that this is not operational data yet. This is not data that they should be relying on for safety services yet,” he said. “They’ll be able to get comfortable with the processes and see the quality of data and make their own assessments about that.”
The Office of Space Commerce will incorporate revisions and new capabilities into TraCSS through the next year, such as the development of a “presentation layer” that will include a public website, tracss.gov, where TraCSS data will be available. The office plans to soon award a contract for the development of the presentation layer.
That will ultimately replace Space-Track, although DalBello emphasized at AMOS that the transition will be gradual. “Operators told us at the very beginning, ‘Please don’t just throw a switch one day,’” he said, noting that his office has been working closely with DoD on coordination issues, such as reconciling different catalogs.
At both events, DalBello praised the Defense Department for its cooperation with the office on the transition to TraCSS. “Right now we’re getting tremendous support,” he said at the Global Aerospace Summit, contrasting it to “interagency train wrecks” he has seen in the past. “Without their support, this would have never gotten off the ground.”
The migration from Space-Track to TraCSS should begin “mid to late” 2025, he said at AMOS, with the goal of completing the transition by the end of 2025. He added, though, that it will be up to DoD to decide when to shut down Space-Track after that transition.
“DoD standing down on a service should be a response to our mutual perception that we’ve got it, so we want to make sure that the new product is stable and that people can rely on it in a trustworthy fashion,” he said. “When we have run these processes in parallel for a while, and DoD goes, ‘We think you’ve got it,’ then they can step down.”
