Whither TraCSS? DoD, industry face hard choices in showdown over Commerce spacewatch effort

MAUI — Almost $200 million and almost a decade after it was first announced, a Commerce Department effort designed to free the Pentagon from the mission of tracking civil and commercial space operations, in order to better focus its resources on potential on-orbit threats, remains in its nascent stages.

Now, as attendees gather for the annual AMOS conference here, long-simmering and complex debate about whether the Commerce Department should scrap, maintain or completely overhaul its Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) is at full boil, with decisions about fiscal 2028 budgets coming down to the wire, according to a dozen government, industry and expert sources who spoke with Breaking Defense, many on the condition of anonymity.

The burning question facing the Defense Department, Space Force and US Space Command is simple to state but difficult to answer: What is the proverbial Plan B if TraCSS disappears?

The White House, in its FY26 budget proposal, tried to kill the program, cutting the Office of Space Commerce’s FY25 budget of $65 million to only $10 million aimed at keeping the office itself, which performs other duties, running. Congress disagreed and appropriated $50 million, thus providing some $40 million for TraCSS to continue.

In FY27, the Commerce Department requested $11 million for OSC, with $1 million earmarked to “containerize” the TraCSS pilot system while the administration “works to implement a new operating and financial structure, including the potential establishment of user fees to offset future costs.”

The House Appropriations Committee in May instead slated $50 million for OSC in its FY27 funding bill for the Commerce Department, with bill language specifically calling for the continuation of TraCSS. The Senate committee has yet to act — although given that the Senate side was even more active in supporting TraCSS in FY26, there is a widespread expectation it also will move to restore funding.

Such an FY27 funding infusion alone, however, may not be enough to safeguard the future of TraCSS. Interagency conversations and consultations with industry in recent weeks about the program’s fate have intensified in the FY28 budget run-up, sources say, and opinions vary wildly about what should be done.

“Something has to give somewhere on this,” one frustrated industry source said.

Failure To Launch

The one thing most everyone agrees upon is that the status quo is not an option.

According to government and industry sources, the TraCSS program is nowhere close to fulfilling its raison d’etre: implementing the first Trump administration’s 2018 Space Policy Directive-3 (SPD-3). The two centrals tenets of SPD-3 were to improve space tracking, and to do so based on use of observational data and analyses provided by US commercial spacewatch companies.

“TraCSS has done useful work, but eight years after SPD-3, the government still has not delivered the architecture the policy envisioned. TraCSS remains a pilot,” said Andrew D’Uva, founder of consulting firm Providence Access Company and a long-time expert on space surveillance.

He explained that the current software cannot even fuse data provided by operators about where their satellites are in space and time with DoD observations and trajectory analyses, a combination needed to create more accurate assessments of when objects are getting too close for comfort. Further, commercial space situational awareness (SSA) observations and analytic services that could also help improve tracking “are not yet part of the operational baseline.”

Jim Cooper, who leads COMPOC’s SSA business, had harsher words: “We have concluded that the current implementation of TraCSS for space traffic coordination and management is misaligned, severely misaligned, with the policy that established it, SPD-3, and we’re not sure why it is continuing down the path it is on.”

Other SSA industry reps, while perhaps less bluntly, echoed Cooper’s opinion — noting that up to now OSC has only funded small “pathfinder” efforts to buy and test commercial tracking data.

“Basically, all they’ve done is put a Department of Commerce ‘wrapper’ around the DoD data and software,” an official from another commercial SSA firm said, in a phrasing almost word-for-word repeated by an official at a competing company.

COMSPOC, along with Kayhan Space, LeoLabs, Slingshot Aerospace, and SpaceNav, has received OSC pathfinder funds over the past few years. These firms, and others in the space tracking arena, such as Anduril following its recent buy of ExoAnalytic, all would benefit from a bigger, more commercially oriented TraCSS.

Even the former head of OSC during the Biden administration, Rich Dalbello, acknowledged that the current program is not what or where it should be.

“I think it is reasonable to criticize TraCSS for not incorporating commercial products more rapidly. …That is a legitimate concern,” he said.

To be fair to OSC, however, Dalbello pointed out the TraCSS program has never been consistently supported or funded. Thus, the current slow pace is at least partially “the result of the ‘on again off again’ nature of the political commitment to this program and the lack of a stable budget.”

D’Uva concerred, saying that the current situation “is a failure of sustained institutional execution, not of the underlying concept.”

The Commerce Department did not reply to questions for this story, although in the past officials have publicly stated that even the TraCSS pilot program actually improves DoD’s current activities in that it provides updates on the positions of space objects more often.

Further Dalbello noted that duplicating DoD capabilities was a deliberate first step in the plan for standing up TraCSS.

“We knew that dramatically departing from the existing systems was likely to be highly disruptive and would have undermined the confidence of DoD [in TraCSS capabilities].

Options For The Future?

A handful of potential pathways for TraCSS are now actively under debate, according to the sources who spoke with Breaking Defense. Each of those options has an upside and a downside, along with defenders and critics.

The first is that TraCSS is scrapped, and DoD stops providing its similar service, in the hopes that a purely private space safety market will emerge where satellite operators simply pay commercial SSA providers for data and analyses to help them avoid on-orbit smashups.

This would mean the US government and taxpayer, are off the hook for the costs of a public sector solution. The downside is that not all satellite operators may be to be willing or able to pay — increasing the risk of on-orbit collisions.

“I think if we all lived in a world where every satellite operator was a good actor and answered the phone when other satellite operators called and voluntarily shared their ephemeris with other operators, then I think a fully privatized system could work,” the commercial SSA rep said. “But the truth is we don’t live in that world.”

A second option is that TraCSS is terminated and DoD to simply keeps on keeping on with its current data and collision warning services to commercial, civil and foreign operators. That information is currently provided to non-military satellite operators by the 18th Space Defense Squadron, stationed at Vandenberg SFB in California.

This may be a reversion to status quo, but the entire point of the TraCSS effort was to free military space operators up to focus on military missions. Leaving this operation with the 18th Squadron would mean a drain on Pentagon resources.

“If TraCSS is ultimately wound down, the answer should not be to shift the civil collision-warning workload back onto Space Force operators,” D’Uva said.

The Space Force did not reply by presstime to questions from Breaking Defense.

A third option has two variants: replace TraCSS with either a government-owned contractor-operated program, or a contractor-owned contractor-operated system funded by the government.

“The government can competitively procure mature commercial capabilities to reprocess appropriate Space Surveillance Network metric observations, fuse them with commercial and operator data, generate better orbit solutions for space safety, and provide conjunction assessment as a basic public service,” D’Uva said.

The question for either variant is which government agency pays: DoD or the Commerce Department.

For industry, at least, the fear is that instead of the government making the hard choices necessary to implement any of these alternatives, TraCSS will simply linger as is, with annual infusions of congressional funds but no support for expanding its capabilities. This will leave the commercial SSA providers in a limbo about their ability to continue to invest in the business.

“I think if TraCSS continues to be funded by Congress, but without that explicit administration approval … it will continue to limp along in this pilot phase, which is not helpful for anyone because it continues to perpetuate uncertainty,” the first SSA industry official said.

Meanwhile, professional spacewatchers fret that the number of satellites and the amount of dangerous space junk on orbit continues to skyrocket ― especially in low Earth orbit where even tiny objects like a screw can kill an active satellite because of the high speeds of impact ― while the US space community’s ability to keep tabs on it all falls farther and farther behind.