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More than 400 companies urge Congress to fund TraCSS for

satellite safety

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Cuts risk U.S. leadership in global space traffic

management,

industry official warns

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Pentagon's Space-Track detracts from national security

mission,

officials argue

By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON, July 8 (Reuters) - Hundreds of U.S.

companies on Tuesday urged Congress to back off a plan to kill a

small federal office tasked with managing satellite traffic in

space, a badly needed civilian effort initiated by President

Donald Trump's first administration but now imperiled by cuts.

The White House's 2026 budget proposal seeks $10 million for

the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of

Space Commerce, an 84% cut from the office's 2025 funding that

would terminate Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS),

a civilian system to help prevent satellite collisions and alert

operators of potential crashes.

Four-hundred and fifty companies from seven different industry

groups, including Elon Musk's SpaceX and Amazon's ( AMZN )

Kuiper satellite unit, wrote in a joint letter on Tuesday to the

Senate committee overseeing NOAA that without funding TraCSS,

"U.S. commercial and government satellite operators would face

greater risks - putting critical missions in harm's way, raising

the cost of doing business, and potentially driving U.S.

industry to relocate overseas."

The rise of vast satellite constellations like SpaceX's

Starlink and heightened military and commercial activities in

Earth's orbit have driven up risks of collisions between the

roughly 12,000 active satellites in space and thousands more

pieces of uncontrollable junk, prompting efforts to create what

is essentially a civil air traffic control system for space.

Audrey Schaffer, vice president of strategy and policy at

space-tracking firm Slingshot Aerospace, said the cuts would

forfeit an opportunity to shape global space traffic control as

the U.S. did decades ago for international air traffic control

standards, while Europe and China develop their own satellite

traffic systems.

"It's really important that there be coordination amongst

these different systems, so we don't have this fragmented

system," Schaffer said. "If the U.S. doesn't have a system that

it brings to the table, I'm not really sure how the U.S.

exercises any leadership in the establishment of international

space traffic management."

The Pentagon has long managed a space traffic database

called Space-Track, but defense and industry officials argue

that responsibility detracts from its national security mission

and risks conflating an essential safety service with military

interests as other countries seek improvements to global

satellite coordination.

The space industry in 2020 praised Trump's first

administration for directing the NOAA office to absorb the

Pentagon's space-tracking function and improve efforts to fuse

satellite position data from countries and companies. The office

has since released a trial version of TraCSS currently in use by

some companies ahead of a full release planned for early next

year.

But the Trump administration in a budget document last month

explained it wants to terminate TraCSS because it did not

complete the system during the prior administration and that

private companies "have the capability and the business model"

to do space traffic coordination on their own.

The two largest space industry organizations - the

Commercial Space Federation and the American Institute of

Aeronautics and Astronautics - wrote in another letter

protesting the termination of TraCSS to senators on Monday that

"industry believes that maintaining a basic SSA service at no

cost to the end user is inherently a government function."