The Department of Commerce will launch by the end of September the initial phase of the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, program, Breaking Defense reported Monday.
The announcement of the rollout comes after the agency signed an agreement with the Department of Defense regarding data from military radar and related assets that will be shared with TraCSS and the system’s non-military users.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Space Commerce is developing TraCSS as a cloud-based information technology system that will provide space situational awareness and space traffic coordination support services for private and civil space operators.
During a conference in Las Vegas, Sandy Magnus, chief engineer at OSC, said Phase 1.0 of the TraCSS system will include a small group of “beta users” only and a subset of the space tracking and monitoring data sources.
Barbara Golf, executive agent for space domain awareness at Space Systems Command, discussed DOD’s efforts to address security concerns over data-sharing with the new space traffic system.
“We are working through some pretty detailed documentation. The first one we just got done … are the data transfer requirements … down to the micro-level” and “signed out by multiple four-stars,” Golf said at the event.
OSC on Thursday released a solicitation for the TraCSS program’s Presentation Layer.
