Naomi Cooper
Six companies and one nonprofit association have received contracts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to carry out data analysis work over two months as part of a space traffic coordination pilot project.
Awardees will track satellites in medium and geostationary Earth orbits, detect anomalies and analyze spaceflight safety measures, NOAA said Tuesday.
The project seeks to examine commercial space situational awareness offerings as a potential complementary or replacement to services the Department of Defense is currently providing to coordinate civil and commercial spaceflight activities.
NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce will assess the commercial SSA services against a benchmark of present services to determine their maturity upon the conclusion of the pilot initiative.
The awardees are:
- COMSPOC Corp.
- ExoAnalytic Solutions
- Kayhan Space
- KBR
- NorthStar Earth & Space
- Slingshot Aerospace
- Space Data Association
Rick Spinrad, administrator of NOAA, said the agency expects the project to help “usher in a new phase in how government and commercial operators work together to coordinate activities on-orbit.”
A June 2018 directive from the White House instructed DOD leaders to migrate SSA services to the Department of Commerce.
