space situational awareness

Appropriators restore funding for Commerce’s TraCSS spacewatch effort

After a drastic reduction proposed by the White House, the Senate Appropriations Committee would fund the Office of Space Commerce at $60 million in FY26 to continue with TraCSS.

Industry lobbies to protect Commerce space office at risk of cuts

The Trump administration’s budget would dramatically shrink the Office of Space Commerce and cancel an effort to transition responsibilities for keeping tabs on civil satellites from the Pentagon to the Commerce Department.

New NATO commercial space strategy seeks to prompt more investment

The new strategy strongly echoes the US Space Force's Commercial Space Strategy published in April 2024, and copies some of the implementation tools the service has put into place.

Chinese sats appear to be attempting first-ever on-orbit refueling, sat tracking firms say

"While this type of close approach activity does not automatically signify a military mission, it obviously could provide a co-orbital counterspace capability," expert Victoria Samson told Breaking Defense.

NATO aims to bolster investments in space, intelligence sharing

"[I]ncreased situational awareness in the space domain is absolutely essential for NATO allies," Maj. Gen. Paul Lynch, deputy assistant secretary general for intelligence on NATO's military staff, said today. 

Space Force unveils multi-front push to fix its Unified Data Library

The space service’s new “Data & AI Strategic Action Plan” emphasizes overhauling UDL, aiming to finally integrate its private-sector data with operational Space Force systems.

5 Chinese satellites practiced ‘dogfighting’ in space, Space Force says

Space Force leaders are sharpening their rhetorical swords regarding the service's need to build space warfighting chops.

Space Systems Command reviewing expensive legacy programs for possible commercial shift

The idea behind the commercial reviews is to find potential alternatives for "getting us out of one-off, billion-dollar systems into a proliferated architecture," said Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy.

EU space monitoring program moves toward ‘strategic autonomy’

Many of the sensors contributed by the 15 EU SST participating states are military assets, and the European Defence Fund also is being tapped to help foster commercial innovation in the space situational awareness domain.

AST, Kayhan, LeoLabs team to demo capability to reduce Space Force satellite tracking times

The goal of the collaborative effort was to show that commercial data can help close the time lag between when a satellite is released into orbit from a rocket to when the Space Force can reliably track it and put the trajectory coordinates into the military's catalog of space objects, said Kayhan CEO Siamak Hesar..

White House charges Pentagon to develop cislunar monitoring tech, including for ‘planetary defense’

The new White House plan for cislunar S&T tasks DoD to lead development of new, and/or improvement of current, ground- and space-based sensors for monitoring the cislunar region.

Commerce taps Slingshot to create space tracking user website

Once up and running, the new TraCSS.gov site will allow commercial and foreign operators to migrate from DoD's Space-track.org website for accessing data on space object whereabouts.

US Olympic Defender allies seek ‘common’ space picture

“It’s essential that the [Olympic Defender] allies and partners have a shared understanding of the battlespace, to ensure mission impacting decision-making is based on common perceptions of what’s occurring and likely to occur in the Area of Responsibility," said Royal Australian Air Force Group Captain Julien Greening, CSpOC deputy director.

Lots of ‘buzz’ but no ‘compelling’ military value for cislunar space: CSIS

A new study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies details a number of serious obstacles to cislunar operations, from a lack of robust business cases to the literal fabric of time.