The Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) is being developed by NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce (OSC) to provide basic space situational awareness (SSA) data and services to civil and private space operators in support of spaceflight safety. It aims to enhance spaceflight safety by providing operators handling over 8,000 spacecraft with spaceflight safety screening.
A bit of history
The initial version was launched in September, 2024 distributing TraCSS-generated Conjunction Data Messages (CDMs) to beta users in the program. These messages aide in collision avoidance for space debris, satellites, and spacecraft. CDMs were enabled for distribution via TraCSS APIs.
In May of this year, Increment 1.2 of the programme was released, providing on-demand screening of operational ephemerides (the calculated positions of a celestial object at regular intervals throughout a period) and bulk submission capabilities. The latter is important for large satellite constellation operators. Beta user satellite operators can submit ephemerides to TraCSS at any time and receive conjunction analysis results within two to five minutes. In other words, warning of any possible collisions.
The full production release is scheduled for early 2026, and between now and then the TraCSS team is expanding the system’s user participation. What’s most surprising is that the project was almost cut in July of this year during the Senate Appropriations Committee budget planning for fiscal year 2026. The commerce, justice and science (CJS) funding bill includes NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation. After a great deal of petitioning from the industry to keep the programme, it successfully made it through the budget round.
Today the programme includes participation from Iridium, OneWeb, SpaceX, Maxar, Planet, Intelsat, and Amazon Kuiper has just announced they will join. This will bring participation to a level of almost 80 percent of all active spacecraft.
Correlation with air traffic control
You’re probably reading this thinking, this is rather interesting but what does it have to do with air traffic control? It’s similar but different. It’s not a clear alignment to be able to say that it’s an FAA for space traffic. It provides data via an open architecture to the operators of spacecraft to be able to manage their own route in space.
Global Airspace Radar recently published an article looking at the importance of integrating air traffic management (ATM) and space traffic management (STM) with TraCSS mentioned as a piece of the much larger puzzle of how these topics work together. It’s not likely that the FAA will take over management of space traffic, but as this traffic crosses the national airspace (NAS) they will have to collaborate on the management as it impacts civil aviation.
There is an important side note that one can take when thinking about this overall situation. Although TraCSS is aimed at satellite operators, services that are provided from satellites are important to civil aviation – GNSS/GPS, weather, and communications. Keeping satellites safe from space debris has downstream impacts on the services we depend on from them.
