The Commerce Department’s civil space traffic coordination system has passed 70 satellite operators and 10 national governments as pilot users, though a full-operations date remains uncertain.
Ethan Baumann, acting program manager for the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, updated the Small Satellite Conference on Aug. 26. He said the system is open to any satellite operator, with waitlisted users added earlier this year. National governments can review, though not change, data on satellites tied to their countries, and the office expects to open TraCSS data to the public before year’s end.
Pilot users are told the services are for evaluation only and should not drive spacecraft operations, yet Baumann said operators report liking the data quality and are folding it into their pipelines. He described the information as essentially the same as what the Space Force’s Space-Track.org provides.
No timeline exists for ending the pilot phase. The administration proposed zeroing TraCSS funding in its fiscal 2026 and 2027 budget requests, and the Commerce office has floated user fees as an alternative; Congress funded the system this year and a House bill would do so again in 2027. Until that uncertainty clears, Baumann said, the program cannot commit to a go-live date.
When TraCSS goes live, operators now using Space-Track for conjunction warnings would shift over, though the Pentagon is still working out that migration and Space-Track itself is expected to keep handling launch and reentry work.
Baumann called SpaceX’s new space-safety.com service complementary rather than competitive, noting it focuses on low Earth orbit while TraCSS draws on a Space Force catalog that reaches beyond geostationary orbit and catches objects Stargaze cannot see.
