Civilian space traffic management office coming along, but ‘don’t expect magic’
This week I read an article more focused on Space Situational Awareness (SSA) than SDA. The article starts by discussing a quote from the Office of Space Commerce (OSC) Director Director, Richard DalBello. DalBello states that “OSC is standing up a civilian space traffic management office, but the process is slow and incremental” [1]. He was discussing OSC’s project to “build out infrastructure capable s of tracking tens of thousands of active satellites and debris objects in orbit”[1]. Specifically, non-military assets in orbit. Currently the US military handles the tracking responsibilities for objects in orbit but as orbits become congested this becomes more difficult and time consuming. OSC’s primary job is to be an “advocate for the U.S. space industry and oversee commercial remote-sensing regulations and implement a 2018 policy directive to provide civil and commercial spaceflight safety services”[1]. They are not an “FAA for space though” [1].
How this relates to security is that it highlights two things to me. First is the extreme level of congestion that is happening in space right now. We’ve shown the growth in space to many times in the past weeks to discuss again but establishing a civil/commercial office will at least help ease the burden on the military. The EU has already established the EU Space Surveillance and Tracking (EUSST) to “assess the risk of in-orbit collisions and uncontrolled re-entry of space debris into the Earth’s atmosphere, and detect and characterize in-orbit fragmentations” [2]. The EUSST is tracking and even providing Twitter updates on some object with Decaying orbits. For the overall security of our civil/commercial/military space programs. The second thing and more related to the cybersecurity aspect of space vehicles is the importance of protecting data integrity when it comes to space craft location and trajectory information. The OSC only has the responsibility to “notify space vehicle operators of a potential collision and it is the operators responsibility to avoid Collison after notification” [1]. The OSC, EUSST, and US Military all rely on the information they receive being accurate to provide those notifications. As more counter space cyber weapons become available to nations and actors around data integrity may be the only thing protecting space vehicles from collison. Having another authority will make it more difficult to obfuscate a vehicles location and orbit path assuming feeds are not shared.
[1] EUSST, “EUSST,” UNK. https://www.eusst.eu (accessed Nov. 09, 22AD).
[2] S. Erwin, “Civilian space traffic management office coming along, but ‘don’t expect magic,” Nov. 03, 2022. https://spacenews.com/civilian-space-traffic-management-office-coming-along-but-dont-expect-magic/ (accessed 10, 2020).