SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – The Office of Space Commerce’s space traffic management system, known as TraCSS, has onboarded more than 70 satellite owners and operators and more than 10 nations — but remains in the pilot phase due to budget “uncertainty,” an OSC official said Wednesday during the Small Satellite Conference.
TraCSS is part of a years-long effort for OSC to take over space situational awareness (SSA) services from the U.S. Department of Defense, which maintains spacetrack.org. The effort began in 2018 with Space Policy Directive-3.
After a beta launch in late 2024, OSC released the TraCSS production environment in March of this year with 17 users, kicking off the pilot period. Registration is now open for all spacecraft owner/operators and national governments.
Ethan Baumann, acting TracSS program manager, wasn’t able to provide an update on when TraCSS will exit the pilot phase, citing budget uncertainty. Last year, a proposal to slash the TraCSS budget prompted an outcry from space industry groups.
“We have been consistently funded by Congress the last few years, and we hope and expect that to continue in FY ‘27. But until some of that uncertainty is resolved, we’re not really able to state definitively when we would declare the system to be fully operational and start that migration of the community from SpaceTrack to TraCSS,” Baumann said.
The next milestone is for TraCSS is to roll out publicly available data later this year.
Baumann noted that during the pilot phase, the data is to be intended for use for “evaluation purposes only.” “We’re still working through some kinks with the system, but we believe we’ve done our due diligence and the data can be trusted,” he said.
OSC is gathering feedback from users on how to make the system better, and has received positive feedback from users.
“We have heard anecdotally that our users really like our services and the quality of our data and they’re finding ways to work it into their operational pipelines,” he said. “We’ve also done extensive comparisons between the data that we produce versus what is available on SpaceTrack.org, and the data is essentially the same.”
TraCSS Data Sources
Today, TraCSS data comes from two sources, Baumann explained. The first is the catalog maintained by the DoD from the Space Surveillance Network (SSN) that the Space Force operates, as well as ephemerides data from satellite owner/operators who are pilot users.
He cited it provides a comprehensive screening of everything on orbit, six times a day.
“Between the high accuracy catalog and the owner-operated ephemerides that are provided to us, we’re able to propagate state vectors and perform the conjunction analysis. Our primary data product is the conjunction data messages, or CDMs, that we pass back as our safety service to our registered users,” Baumann said.
However, TraCSS does not perform data fusion between the DoD data and owner/operator data at this point, but Baumann said there are plans to work in data fusion “at some point in the future.”
Also, the only commercial data in TraCSS is ephemeris data submitted by owner/operators in the program. There’s no SSA data or services from commercial companies that were involved in various pathfinder efforts.
Commercial data buys are “on hold for the foreseeable future,” Baumann told Via Satellite.
Integrating commercial data is something that OSC is “working to figure out,” he told the session.
“At the moment, we are focused solely on making TraCSS the best on orbit CA [collision avoidance] platform that we can,” he said. “But we recognize that there’s a lot of companies that have a lot of capabilities there. We are actively talking with them, trying to figure out how to best merge their data products and provide an even better solution relative to what’s available today.”
Current Capabilities
The current TRaCSS version provides conjunction screening every four hours using catalog information and ephemerides from owner/operators; maneuver screening on demand with results available within seconds; and an owner/operator directory to encourage coordination between satellite operators.
The upcoming public space situational awareness (SSA) data will include the TraCSSCat list of all unclassified objects in space; spacecraft location in TLE (two-line element); high accuracy spacecraft location; conjunction notifications for events above a set risk threshold; and owner/operator ephemerides with maneuver plans.
OSC’s vision for global SSA coordination is to minimize the potential for spacecraft operators to receive conflicting information about conjunction events, Baumann said. OSC aims to enable effective coordination between all the different groups.
“The vision within OSC is that we have a coordinated system of SSA operators and STC providers that are all working together and openly and freely sharing data back and forth, so that everybody has the best possible picture as to what’s going on in orbit,” he said.
