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You might be excused for not paying too much attention to space matters. It has been a sleepy hollow for many years, away from the cut and thrust of ATM reform, unfair subsidies and consumer rights. When space makes the news it is because some very rich person has decided to tackle the last frontier for reasons that seem to be as connected to ego as commerce.
But that image is wrong. In May, US House of Representative appropriators approved an amendment to a bill that will raise the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation’s FY2017 budget by $1 million.
The budget increase, amongst other signs, portend further expansion of the Office of Commercial Space Transportation. Lawmakers are considering handing the FAA more powers to deal with space traffic. In November 2015, the US President signed into law the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act which requires NASA to evaluate alternate frameworks for Space Traffic Management (STM). Specifically, NASA is to assess current federal assets used for STM and Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and to assess private sector information sharing for STM and SSA. Based on this assessment, NASA will make recommendations.
A note about SSA—it’s not STM. Situational awareness is military-speak for knowing what’s going on around you. In the context of outer space, it has commercial applications as well. Satellite operators want to know whether their hardware is on a trajectory that will result in contact with another object. This is known as a conjunction assessment. Thus, SSA is simply the provision of information.
STM, on the other hand, would be more like ATM. It would involve an agency or non-governmental entity (depending on the related but not linked proposals for the reform of the Air Traffic Office of the FAA) telling an operator where to go and where not to go.
Currently, SSA is carried out by the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC), part of the US Strategic Command. JSpOC issues up to 1600 conjunctions assessment every day, monitoring every ‘bird’ in the sky the world over, US and non-US, governmental and non-governmental. Thus, JSpOC fills the role of a satellite traffic manager without the power to direct operators to move their satellites to new locations. It notifies operators of possible conjunctions and the operator then makes the decision as to whether to maneuver the satellite out of harms way.
As discussed in this month’s Aviation Intelligence Reporter, JSpOC wants out of the business of providing SSA to the world. It is burdened by the number of conjunction assessments, a duty that distracts it from monitoring real threats to national security. Last summer the then deputy commander of US Strategic Command, called for an FAA and/or ICAO for space. Since then, Congressman Jim Bridenstine has championed the call for civilian take-over of SSA and even, perhaps, civilian STM for outer space. These calls have come hand-in-hand with increasing Russian and Chinese space activities that illustrate vulnerabilities in US space national security and defense, exacerbating the US’ need to free JSpOC from its conjunctions assessment duties.
The problem with STM is obvious: even if legislation empowering a civilian entity, commercial or otherwise, to conduct STM could be pushed through Congress, that entity could issue direction to US satellite operators only. Non-US satellite operators would be beyond its jurisdiction and nothing would guarantee that they would heed its command. If STM is to be had, it would have to be through an international agreement that empowers an international organization to conduct the service. The likelihood of the US, Russia and China agreeing to a multilateral framework for anything, let along something as sensitive as space security, is slim.
It is in every operators’ interest to keep safe its satellites. For this reason, commercial information sharing, where operators keep each other informed of the trajectory of their satellites, goes a long way for preventing conjunctions. One such organization—the Space Data Association—has been formed for this purpose. Information sharing does not assist with the tracking of debris, however, which requires the capability of JSpOC. Commercial capabilities, such as the Commercial Space Operations Center (ComSpOC), are rapidly approaching the capabilities of JSpOC.
So, what of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation? Industry has the ear of Congress and the White House. The word around the campfire is that the NASA recommendations will lend an air of independent evaluation to a foregone conclusion: FAA involvement in SSA/STM will be rubber stamped.
It is unclear what role FAA will play, however. Industry stakeholders do not really want to be told where to go and what to do. That rules out STM. Industry seems to prefer solutions combining data sharing and commercial debris tracking, which means solutions like the Space Data Association and ComSpOC. But it is roundly recognized that the commercial debris tracking capabilities are not quite as good as those of JSpOC.
Thus, FAA might serve as an intermediary between JSpOC and industry, receiving raw data, calculating the possibility of conjunctions and feeding the results to industry. That’s likely to be the extent of the Office of Commercial Space Transportation operational role. Equally likely could be an eventual reliance on commercial capabilities, with FAA playing a purely regulatory, as opposed to operational, role. At the moment, though, it is all up in the air.
