The move follows a period of upheaval at the government’s nascent space traffic control program, the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or Traccs. In 2025, Musk’s Doge fired many of the program’s staff, and the Trump administration has twice sought to cut its funding. Many in the industry viewed these actions as an attempt to privatize space traffic control. Traccs was established under the first Trump administration to take over commercial space traffic coordination from the defense department, but it has never been fully funded or staffed.<\/p>\n
SpaceX and the Space Force signed the new contract. The access includes Vector Covariance Messages, tracking data collected from military sensors, telescopes and ground radars that follow satellites and objects in lower orbit down to about 10cm in size. The military uses this data primarily to monitor other countries’ satellites but also to track commercial spacecraft and avoid collisions. In exchange, the government receives access to Starlink’s Stargaze system, made up of thousands of cameras and radars mounted on Starlink satellites that can see objects down to about half a meter. A SpaceX employee said at an industry conference that the military radar data is an extremely valuable tool to supplement Stargaze.<\/p>\n
The VCM data is designated as controlled unclassified information and has been closely held because it could expose the limits of defense capabilities and allow reverse engineering of sensors used to monitor other nations’ satellites. Traccs manages thousands of satellites, debris and spacecraft, and helps prevent up to 50,000 near-collisions, called conjunctions, daily. Starlink operates about 11,000 satellites in orbit and could have as many as 20,000 in coming years. In a statement to Breaking Defense, a Space Force spokesperson said it is engaging with several companies to exchange commercial data sources for access to sections of the controlled, unclassified information, high accuracy catalogue, where it provides benefit to the US government.<\/p>\n
Cole Donovan, a former Traccs employee now with the Stand Up for Science non-profit, said the arrangement makes SpaceX the de facto source for space traffic coordination within the US. He compared it to giving a trucking company control of all the traffic lights, which they can switch to red whenever it is their competition’s turn to go. The US commercial space market is expected to reach nearly $2tn in value over the next decade. Craig Holman, a lobbyist for Public Citizen, said the access is another example of the Trump administration rewarding a donor with business opportunities, stating that Musk’s political investment is paying off very handsomely. A former NOAA official said SpaceX has been remarkably responsive to space safety concerns and placed greater blame on the government’s failure to establish a coherent space governance framework.<\/p>\n
The latest move comes at what Donovan described as a crossroads for Traccs, as the administration, Congress and industry debate what to do next. The administration proposed slashing the program’s budget to nearly zero in fiscal year 2027, but the House reinserted the funding, repeating a dispute from fiscal year 2026 when Congress restored money the administration sought to cut.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The move follows a period of upheaval at the government’s nascent space traffic control program, the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or Traccs. In 2025, Musk’s Doge fired many of the program’s staff, and the Trump administration has twice sought to cut its funding. Many in the industry viewed these actions as an attempt to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":91209,"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-91208","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\/91208"}],"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=91208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}