AUSTIN, Texas — The manager of the Commerce Department’s program to develop a civil space traffic coordination system is back on the job after being swept up in layoffs, but questions remain about the future of that effort.
Dmitry Poisik, program manager for the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) in the Office of Space Commerce, was among so-called probationary civil servants — new to their positions — at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who were fired Feb. 27 as part of efforts across the federal government to terminate such employees. The Office of Space Commerce is part of NOAA.
Two sources said March 4 that Poisik had been brought back along with Sarah Brothers, director of the office’s Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs division, which manages licensing of commercial imaging satellites. That came after some industry groups contacted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to raise concerns about the effects the layoffs would have on commercial space activities.
Poisik was scheduled to speak at the 11th Annual Space Traffic Management Conference at the University of Texas March 5. He canceled his appearance when he was laid off, although participants at the conference confirmed he has returned to job. “There is movement afoot to get people back in place,” said Charlie McGillis of The Provenance Chain Network during a panel discussion that took the place of his talk at the conference.
McGillis, who serves on an independent review board for TraCSS, said that the program had made good progress recently. TraCSS started a beta test program last fall involving several spacecraft operators accounting for about 1,000 satellites. There are also continued discussions on how to transfer space traffic coordination responsibilities from the Defense Department to the office to avoid any interruptions in service.
To accomplish that, the office has been hiring both civil servants and contractors for TraCSS. “You can’t continue to run an operation like that,” she said, “on a shoestring budget and with no people.”
There remains worries in industry, though, about the long-term future of TraCSS, particularly given plans by the administration to cut spending and perform broader layoffs of federal workers.
“We’re glad that Dmitry was hired back, but we don’t know if the hire-back was because they lost a lawsuit about firing probationary employees or because there was a realization that the mission of OSC was very important and should move forward,” said Ruth Stilwell, founder of Aerospace Policy Solutions, on the panel. “We don’t know if there is an organizational concern about the future of TraCSS.”
One issue is that recent and potential future actions at the Office of Space Commerce might cause a loss of momentum in the development of TraCSS that took years to build up. Stilwell noted that while the first Trump administration’s Space Policy Directive 3 in 2018 directed the Commerce Department to develop a civil space traffic management system, it took several years to win support and funding from Congress and to then start work on what would become TraCSS.
“We had a pretty cold period already that slowed a lot of progress,” she said. If there was another such cold period, she projected it could lead to slow progress at best on TraCSS and limited international coordination and cooperation with commercial providers of space situational awareness data and services. “In that ‘too cold’ scenario, there could be a lot of adverse consequences for the entire space community.”
A different scenario might unfold if “something really horrible” happens in space, said Diane Howard, former director of commercial space policy at the National Space Council. In that scenario, countries that feel like they have not been served by current, voluntary approaches to space traffic coordination might band together to force the creation of an international space traffic management regulator. That might lead to strict regulations and high barriers to new commercial entrants, she said, reducing collision risks in orbit but at the cost of sacrificing commercial space development and innovation.
The preference in the space traffic management community, though, is for one where TraCSS continues to develop with commercial and international partnerships.
Pascal Faucher, chairman of the European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking (EU-SST) program, a European counterpart to TraCSS, suggested various national space traffic coordination systems could be federated through an approach like the International Committee on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (ICG), a forum for voluntary cooperation among countries that have their own satellite navigation systems.
That, he argued, would be a more effective approach than a centralized international system while maintaining some degree of cooperation among national systems. “This is the ideal situation for us,” he said, “It’s a pragmatic and rational approach to coordinate between existing systems and developing systems.”
