The confidence deficit in space

Space safety and security for military commanders, intelligence agencies and civil and commercial satellite operators hinges on one central assumption: that the space situational awareness (SSA) data that underpins their critical decision-making processes is “fit for purpose” — sufficiently accurate, timely and comprehensive enough to be trusted. 

That assumption deserves renewed scrutiny in light of new research findings underscoring the need for governments and industry worldwide to reassess the risk profile of today’s space architecture.

Every day, spacecraft operators must decide whether to maneuver valuable satellites based on collision warnings. Decision-makers must trade off an abundance of caution to avoid collisions with the expenditure of maneuvering fuel, potential service interruptions, extensive analysis and downstream planning challenges associated with mitigating collision risk. Get it wrong, and they risk losing a critical national security or commercial asset, along with outages in critical infrastructure for vital products and services.

Those decisions are only as good as the confidence operators have in the underlying orbital information. Recent research from our team at COMSPOC examining today’s typical conjunction assessment practices reveals a surprising and disconcerting finding: typical operators may only be retiring 7 percent of actual collision risk, leaving 93 percent still in play. 

That statistic should not be interpreted as a failure of satellite operators. Rather, it reflects the limitations of the information available to them. Operators can only make decisions based on the quality and confidence of the orbital data and space of object characteristics they receive. This distinction matters.

In many cases, it reflects insufficient confidence in where the objects will actually be. When positional knowledge is poor, collision probability calculations produce deceptively reassuring results. Conversely, incomplete data generates too many false warnings. Time, fuel and attention are wasted responding to threats that do not exist while real collision risks can be overlooked. The result: everyone loses.

As military and commercial reliance on space grows, that confidence gap becomes an operational readiness challenge, not simply a technical one. The United States and its allies increasingly rely on proliferated satellite constellations for communications, missile warning, positioning, navigation, intelligence collection and command and control. 

The gaps, which degrade the effectiveness of our SSA and safety, are not addressed merely by obtaining and using more space surveillance data. Rather, what is needed is a holistic approach that prioritizes advanced data fusion and analytics, data sharing and a deep collaboration between spacecraft operators, governments and SSA systems. 

Higher confidence in orbital information enables operators to better distinguish real threats from background noise. That means fewer unnecessary conjunction investigations, more effective prioritization of operator resources, better allocation of computing capacity and greater confidence that truly hazardous encounters receive the attention they deserve. 

Bottom line: better accuracy does not simply reduce workload — it can improve safety.

COMSPOC analysis indicates that substantial improvements in orbital positional accuracy are possible, and when combined with appropriately selected collision probability thresholds, these improvements can simultaneously reduce warning volume while addressing a much larger share of the actual collision risk. The solution is to provide operators with readily available, accurate, higher-confidence information so they can make better-informed decisions about when action is truly needed. In other words, operators do not have to choose between operational efficiency and mission safety. With better information, they can improve both.

That finding has important implications for defense policy.

As governments invest in next-generation space domain awareness capabilities, success should not be measured solely by the number of observations collected, the size of surveillance networks, the number of daily conjunction data messages produced, or the number of customers using the product. Those metrics describe activity, not operational effectiveness. A more meaningful measure is whether operators have sufficient confidence in the information to make better decisions under real operational conditions. 

Decision confidence is becoming a vital strategic capability. As military missions grow increasingly dependent on space and as adversaries seek to contest the domain, improving confidence in conjunction assessments will directly affect operational readiness, force resilience and long-term sustainability. And achieving this confidence efficiently means shorter decision loops and the resulting strategic and tactical advantage of holding the initiative.

The challenge facing space operators and those tasked with the acquisition of SSA capabilities is not just finding a solution with the capacity to manage more objects. It is also about adopting a solution that empowers operators to make better decisions and with greater confidence. In the years ahead, strengthening that confidence will almost certainly prove just as important as expanding our ability to observe the space environment itself.

Dan Oltrogge is COMSPOC’s Chief Scientist and Director of the Center for Space Standards and Innovation.