{"id":64815,"date":"2018-06-25T19:23:45","date_gmt":"2018-06-25T11:23:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/commerce-department-prepares-for-its-new-role-in-ssa\/"},"modified":"2018-06-25T19:23:45","modified_gmt":"2018-06-25T11:23:45","slug":"commerce-department-prepares-for-its-new-role-in-ssa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/commerce-department-prepares-for-its-new-role-in-ssa\/","title":{"rendered":"Commerce Department Prepares For Its New Role In SSA"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n<p>The <strong>U.S. Department of Commerce<\/strong>, which the Trump administration recently tapped to replace the <strong>Department of Defense<\/strong> (DOD) in providing space object tracking information to industry, expects to finish taking over its new role in about a year, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said June 22. The Commerce Department plans to send \u201cinitial delegations\u201d to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) in Omaha, Nebraska, \u201cwithin the next couple of weeks\u201d to learn more about what the transition will entail, Ross testified before a joint hearing of the House Armed Services Committee\u2019s strategic forces panel and the House Science, Space and Technology Committee\u2019s space panel.<\/p>\n<p>Vandenberg hosts the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC), which tracks tens of thousands of man-made objects orbiting Earth. Stratcom\u2019s Joint Force Space Component Commander oversees the JSpOC.<\/p>\n<p>Under Space Policy Directive \u2013 3, which President Donald Trump signed June 18, the Commerce Department will disseminate information based on the space catalog compiled by DOD. Commerce\u2019s new Space Policy Advancing Commercial Enterprise (SPACE) Administration will take over the industry interface role to support the growing commercial space sector and&nbsp;free up DOD to focus on defending U.S. satellites, Ross said.<\/p>\n<p>Since Ross had to leave the hearing early, Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., said he intends to ask him in writing how Commerce&nbsp;will&nbsp;fund&nbsp;its new Space Situational Awareness (SSA)&nbsp;role. The enacted Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 budget and the administration\u2019s FY 2019 budget request do not seem to provide such funding, according to Lucas.<\/p>\n<p>Rep. Ami Bera, D-Calif., the space panel\u2019s ranking member, urged Ross to hold off on making the SSA transition, saying it is ultimately the job of Congress to decide whether that&nbsp;role will go to the Department of Commerce or another entity, such as the Department of Transportation. \u201cWe have to do our work, and we\u2019re not abdicating our responsibility,\u201d Bera said.<\/p>\n<p>Air Force Gen. John Hyten, Stratcom\u2019s commander, testified that he has no preference on whether the SSA role is assigned to Commerce or Transportation. \u201cBluntly, it doesn\u2019t matter to me,\u201d Hyten said. \u201cWe need a civil agency that is doing that role. Commerce makes sense. Transportation makes sense. That\u2019s a political decision. I will work with whatever element that our nation decides is the right place to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If the SSA role does go to Commerce,&nbsp;Hyten envisions having representatives of that department assigned to the JSpOC,&nbsp;which will soon&nbsp;be renamed the Combined Space Operations Center. Other details, such as how SSA information&nbsp;would be fed to Commerce, remain to be worked out. \u201cWe\u2019re still in the early days of figuring this out,\u201d Hyten said.<\/p>\n<p>Hyten also testified that the Air Force\u2019s Space Fence radar on the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands is on track to become operational in 2019. The Space Fence, whose prime contractor is&nbsp;<strong>Lockheed Martin<\/strong>, \u201cwill allow us to see hundreds of thousands of objects that we don\u2019t see today,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The U.S. Department of Commerce, which the Trump administration recently tapped to replace the Department of Defense (DOD) in providing space object tracking information to industry, expects to finish taking over its new role in about a year, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said June 22. The Commerce Department plans to send \u201cinitial delegations\u201d to Vandenberg [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48869,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64815"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}