Civilian Space Tracking Program Key for Sector Growth.

• Author: Zur, Christian
• Position: COMMENTARY

In keeping with the pace of the commercial space sector, the Biden administration is advancing a long-anticipated policy initiative to transfer responsibility for tracking objects in Earth's orbit from the U.S. military to the civilian National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

To make this move happen, the president proposed an increase in fiscal year 2023 of $78 million to develop a publicly available database that companies and countries can use to avoid collisions in space. Recently, Congressional appropriations committees passed bills largely supportive of this budget request.

The origin of space surveillance goes back to the earliest days of the Cold War. By the 1980s, the Air Force operated a network of more than 20 ground-based electro-optical telescopes and cameras, passive radio frequency sensors and phased array radar stations located predominately in the Northern Hemisphere to provide an early warning of over-the-Arctic ballistic missiles threats.

After the 2009 collision between Iridium and Cosmos satellites, the U.S. military was authorized to share cursory conjunction analysis with commercial companies and foreign governments.

By 2010, the Air Force program expanded to include space-based surveillance systems orbiting at 627 kilometers above sea level and able to monitor altitudes where most commercial satellites operate.

Today, these sensors collectively detect, track, identify and catalog all human made objects orbiting the Earth and serve as the baseline information for a tracking program known as the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, which is managed by the Combined Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Collectively, the network's worldwide ground stations and space-based sensors perform approximately 100,000 satellite observations per day and track objects around 10 centimeters and potentially as small as five centimeters at lower altitudes and highly inclined orbits which are easier to observe.

Currently, the catalog contains approximately 47,000 items and is used for object identification, notification of satellite flyover and space treaty compliance, as well as scientific and technical intelligence gathering. The center releases this data publicly on SpaceTrack.org.

However, such data has limited value for purposes of predicting and avoiding satellite conjunctions. SpaceTrack.org modeling largely relies on a range of two-line element inputs which specify object location along a limited timeframe...