The Office of Space Commerce chose Parsons Corporation to develop important parts of its civil space traffic coordination system.
The office, located within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced on March 18 that a $15.5 million contract was given to Parsons to provide system integration and cloud management services for its Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS. The one-year contract includes an option for another year, which could raise its total value to $26.9 million.
Under the contract, Parsons will create what the office refers to as the “software backbone” for TraCSS, incorporating both the OASIS repository for space situational awareness data and the SKYLINE application layer. The contract also includes cybersecurity, cloud management, and system administration.
Carey Smith, president and chief executive of Parsons, expressed excitement about the TraCSS award, stating, “We look forward to leveraging Parsons’ expertise across the national security sector and our operational experience in space domain awareness supporting flight safety of all active satellites on orbit to support the Office of Space Commerce as it takes over this crucial mission from the Department of Defense.”
The award to Parsons is part of the office’s efforts to enhance TraCSS, which will be developed in stages and should have an initial operating capability ready by the end of the current fiscal year. TraCSS will eventually take over civil space traffic coordination services from the Defense Department, as directed by Space Policy Directive 3 in 2018.
Richard DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, shared during a panel discussion at the Satellite 2024 conference on March 19, “We’re very much in the process of building the next generation space traffic coordination system, and we’ll be relying heavily both on commercial partners in the U.S. and on our allies and friends around the world.”
The award to Parsons follows a series of contracts for its Consolidated Pathfinder effort to inform the development of TraCSS. The office has awarded $11.5 million in contracts to five companies for that project, focusing on low Earth orbit operations. The office awarded contracts to COMSPOC, LeoLabs, and Slingshot Aerospace for data and services in January, and to Kayhan Space and SpaceNav in February for data quality monitoring services. Separately, the office selected Amazon Web Services to provide secure cloud computing services in 2023.
One aspect of TraCSS that is yet to be developed is the presentation layer, which will provide the user interface for the system. NOAA revealed in the statement about the award to Parsons that it was researching the market for that aspect after issuing a request for information last October.
The aim, according to DalBello, is to establish a superior space tracking system that will improve on the currently available system. “We’re pretty good at something that something that we need to be consistently excellent at. We’re at the very beginning of space traffic monitoring and we have a long way to go on that.”
Sustainability
The development of TraCSS fits into a broader view of space sustainability that DalBello has previously discussed that goes beyond space traffic coordination to other impacts from space activities, from the effects satellites have on optical and radio astronomy to environmental impacts on the upper atmosphere from launches and spacecraft reentries.
DalBello said considerations of space sustainability fall into three categories. One is “understanding the totality of our impact” that includes space debris as well as astronomical and environmental impacts from satellites. The second is understanding what is going on, which his office is addressing with TraCSS. The third is determining what can be done to address those impacts.
The Office is Space Commerce is not the only government agency thinking about space sustainability along those lines. Speaking at the National Academies’ Space Science Week March 19, Nicola Fox, associate administrator for science at NASA, said the agency is preparing to roll out a space sustainability policy.
“We have been working on a space sustainability strategy and we will be discussing it robustly at Space Symposium,” she said. “The agency is very, very engaged.” She declined to discuss details about the policy since it has not been formally announced.
NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy is scheduled to discuss “the agency’s unified approach to support the long-term sustainability of the space environment” in a speech at the Space Symposium April 9.
