Debate over which agency should manage civil STM stymies progress
FOR THE HEAD OF NASA, IT WAS ONE CLOSE APPROACH TOO MANY.
On Sept. 22, International Space Station controllers acted quickly to adjust the orbit of the station when U.S. Space Command informed them that an unidentified piece of debris would come within 1.4 kilometers of the station later that day. A Progress cargo spacecraft docked to the station fired its thrusters, nudging the station enough to ensure the object — later found to be debris from an H-2A rocket upper stage that broke apart last year — passed without incident.
“The space station has maneuvered three times in 2020 to avoid debris. In the last two weeks, there have been three high concern potential conjunctions. Debris is getting worse!” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted shortly after the debris passed. “Time for Congress to provide the Commerce Department with the $15 mil requested by the President for the Office of Space Commerce.”
Bridenstine was referring to the administration’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal, which requested $15 million for the Office of Space Commerce, far more than the $2.3 million it received in 2020. Most of that money would go to carrying out the responsibilities for taking over civil space traffic management (STM) assigned to the Commerce Department by Space Policy Directive 3 in June 2018, work today that is carried out by the Defense Department despite widespread agreement it should be handed over to another agency.
Disagreement about which agency should take over civil STM, though, has stymied progress. The administration sought $10 million for the Office of Space Commerce in 2020, again primarily for STM work. Congressional appropriators, though, rejected that proposal. Instead, they added half a million dollars to the office’s 2019 budget of $1.8 million, and directed the office to use it on a study by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) on which agency was best to handle STM.
ADDRESSING A LOOMING CHALLENGE
To perform the report, NAPA convened a panel of experts chaired by Michael Dominguez, a former assistant secretary of the Air Force. That panel included Sean O’Keefe, best known in the space community as a former NASA administrator but who also previously worked at the Pentagon and Office of Management and Budget.
“It became very apparent, from the earliest meetings and discussions that we had, that this is a looming challenge that is becoming more and more difficult, almost exponentially,” O’Keefe said of the committee’s study of space traffic management during a SpaceNews webinar Oct. 13. “You then begin to inventory up the range of federal agencies that are participating at present for their own interests, and for the individual public services they provide.”
Office of Space Commerce Director Kevin O’Connell, top left, and former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe, bottom, discuss space traffic management Oct. 13 with SpaceNews senior staff writer Jeff Foust, upper right. Credit: SpaceNews webinar screenshot
For this study, that meant the Defense Department and the Office of Space Commerce as well as NASA and the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, an agency that previously sought to take over civil STM before the administration decided to assign it to Commerce. The panel’s research included interviews with more than 100 people in government and industry, incorporating their comments into a detailed scoring system that assessed each agency’s technical, organizational and related capabilities.
“The report goes through a pretty explicit valuation, classification, determination of where those capabilities reside,” O’Keefe said, “and then thinks through what is the best entity to actually reach the broadest range of all the stakeholders, and be the primary coordination official.”
That effort ultimately boiled down to a single number: a combined score assessing the overall ability of each agency to take the lead on civil STM, on a scale of zero (“significant limitations”) to three (“very few or minor limitations”). The Office of Space Commerce came out on top with a score of 2.9, followed by NASA at 2.55, FAA at 2.25 and the Defense Department at 1.7.
The DoD’s low score surprised many, since it’s handling the civil STM job now by default. O’Keefe said the score reflected the fact that the Pentagon has its hands full with other work, including keeping its own satellites safe. “That’s a real operational challenge in and of itself. That’s consuming all their focus,” he said.
He added that the Pentagon isn’t equipped to deal with the wide range of commercial and international stakeholders for any civil STM effort. “That falls to the bottom of the list at the Defense Department,” he said.
The FAA had a similar issue, he said, given its focus on overseeing commercial launches. “FAA certainly has a very well-established set of capabilities” for handling launches, he said. “But as soon as you reach altitude and are in orbit, it’s a whole different condition.”
NASA, which has never advocated for taking over civil STM, scored surprisingly well, which O’Keefe credited to an “extended range of capabilities” both technically and through partnerships with other organization and countries. However, those capabilities are just a means to a bigger goal than STM. “Their objective is exploration,” he said.
The Office of Space Commerce came out on top, the report concluded, because it could focus on the civil STM mission while tapping capabilities elsewhere in the Commerce Department, as well as with others both inside and outside the federal government.
“The Commerce Department demonstrated that incredible expanse of reach to be able to touch each of those stakeholders on a regular basis,” he said, “as well as understand what those federal capabilities could be, and know exactly where those capacities reside, and to help put some coordination together to collaborate on that information and make it readily available to the emerging commercial industry.”
GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY SUPPORT
Needless to say, the Commerce Department was happy that the report endorsed the decision in Space Policy Directive 3 to give it responsibility for civil STM. “I am pleased to see that following an intensive survey of key government and industry stakeholders, NAPA’s findings independently validate that the Department of Commerce is the best civil agency,” said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in a statement Aug. 20, the day NAPA released the report.
Others, both inside and outside government, back the report’s conclusion. Besides NASA Administrator Bridenstine’s endorsement, NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel discussed the report and its recommendations at its most recent meeting Oct. 1.
“It is well overdue that the U.S. exert some effective international leadership in the safety of space operations, and begin doing so by designating a lead agency to provide timely and actionable safety data to all space operators,” Susan Helms, a former NASA astronaut and retired Air Force general who serves on the panel, said at that meeting.
“I cannot emphasize the importance of this issue enough,” added Patricia Sanders, chair of the panel, “and we really need some action taken now.”
Industry also supports giving the Office of Space Commerce that responsibility, although in some cases it’s less of an endorsement of the office’s capabilities and more of a desire for Congress and the White House to settle on an agency once and for all.
“Quite honestly, as an owner-operator, we’re ambivalent, as long as it’s being done,” said Walt Everetts, vice president of space operations and engineering at Iridium, during a panel discussion at the AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum shortly after the release of the NAPA report. The Office of Space Commerce, he said, “is a fine choice, but I think we’ve probably debated it too long.”
“WE’RE KIND OF IN LIMBO RIGHT NOW”
That debate continues, though, because Congress hasn’t decided on funding for the Office of Space Commerce. A House version of a fiscal year 2021 spending bill passed in July rejected the office’s request for $15 million, with appropriators stating that they were awaiting the NAPA report. The Senate has yet to release its version of that spending bill, and neither House nor Senate appropriators have publicly commented on the NAPA report.
“We’ve been meeting routinely now with congressional staff and some congressional members to explain why this is so important,” said Kevin O’Connell, director of the Office of Space Commerce, during the SpaceNews webinar with O’Keefe. “We’re making the case as strongly as we can, not just from the office but from the secretary as well.”
O’Keefe, who earlier in his career served on the staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee, noted that the NAPA panel met with House and Senate staffers as part of the study. They told the panel their priority was finding the agency best able to integrate capabilities from across the government, which O’Keefe believes the Office of Space Commerce is best suited to do.
He also emphasized that the decision in Space Policy Directive 3 to give the office the civil STM mission indicated there had already been coordination among the agencies. “The strongest signal that was sent by that, all by itself, is that an effort had been engaged as part of the interagency process,” he said of the language in the directive. “That spoke volumes.”
O’Connell said the Office of Space Commerce is ready to move forward if it does get the $15 million from Congress. “Next year will be largely what I’ll call a ‘building block’ year,” he said. Besides hiring a “modest amount” of new staff, there will be a particular emphasis on building up the system the office calls the “open architecture data repository,” which will combine the space situational awareness data from the Defense Department with data from commercial and international partners, from which both the office and others can use to identify potential conjunctions.
By the end of 2021, he said, “we will have an initial architecture that is up and running.” That will mirror what the Defense Department provides now, in terms of data and conjunction notices, “but we’ll have an open place where we can start to experiment.”
That experimentation includes how to incorporate other data sources into that repository. “How do we bring that data into one place? How do we do it securely? How do we analyze it so that we’re providing a coherent picture of the space environment that’s trusted?” O’Connell said. The office will hold an industry day in late November to allow companies to pitch their ideas for providing data and improved conjunction notices.
“We have to make progress on many different fronts,” he concluded. “With an appropriate level of funding, we will be able to bring the data together to start to improve this, I think, very quickly.”
The catch, of course, is “with an appropriate level of funding,” an issue that remains uncertain. The Office of Space Commerce and others continue to advocate for that funding, including Bridenstine, who discussed it when asked about orbital debris at a Sept. 30 hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee on NASA’s programs.
“The Department of Commerce should be picking up this mission,” he said, “but they don’t have the authorities provided by Congress at this point, nor do they have the appropriations provided by Congress. So, we’re kind of in limbo right now.”
This article originally appeared in the Oct. 19, 2020 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
By Debra Werner
Satellite operators are receiving warnings that their spacecraft are within 1 kilometer of another satellite or piece of tracked debris approximately twice as often as they did three years ago.
That was one of the key takeaways from data compiled for SpaceNews by Analytical Graphics Inc. (AGI), the Exton, Pennsylvania firm that hosts the Space Data Center, a platform that ingests information from Space Data Association satellite operators and compares it with commercial radar and telescope observations to assess conjunction risks and warn satellite operators.
AGI also hosts Satellite Orbital Conjunction Reports Assessing Threatening Encounters in Space (SOCRATES), a service that has identified potential collision risks since 2004.
In low Earth orbit, satellite operators typically evaluate the need for a collision avoidance maneuver when one of their satellites is expected to come within 1 kilometer of another object. Space Data Center and SOCRATES data indicate that in 2017, LEO spacecraft likely came within 1 kilometer of other objects an average of 2,000 times per month. Now, it’s closer to 4,000 monthly conjunctions.
Those are averages. For some satellite operators, conjunction alerts may be increasing even faster. “As steep as this curve is, there are operators that are seeing even higher conjunction rates than this curve depicts,” said Daniel Oltrogge, director of the AGI Center for Space Standards and Innovation.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The body of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei — who died after being set on fire by her partner in Kenya — was received Friday by family and anti-femicide crusaders, ahead of her burial a day later.
Cheptegei’s family met with dozens of activists Friday who had marched to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital’s morgue in the western city of Eldoret while chanting anti-femicide slogans.
She is the fourth female athlete to have been killed by her partner in Kenya in yet another case of gender-based violence in recent years.
Viola Cheptoo, the founder of Tirop Angels – an organization that was formed in honor of athlete Agnes Tirop, who was stabbed to death in 2021, said stakeholders need to ensure this is the last death of an athlete due to gender-based violence.
“We are here to say that enough is enough, we are tired of burying our sisters due to GBV,” she said.
It was a somber mood at the morgue as athletes and family members viewed Cheptegei’s body which sustained 80% of burns after she was doused with gasoline by her partner Dickson Ndiema. Ndiema sustained 30% burns on his body and later succumbed.
Ndiema and Cheptegei were said to have quarreled over a piece of land that the athlete bought in Kenya, according to a report filed by the local chief.
Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month before the attack. She finished in 44th place.
Cheptegei’s father, Joseph, said that the body will make a brief stop at their home in the Endebess area before proceeding to Bukwo in eastern Uganda for a night vigil and burial on Saturday.
“We are in the final part of giving my daughter the last respect,” a visibly distraught Joseph said.
He told reporters last week that Ndiema was stalking and threatening Cheptegei and the family had informed police.
Four in 10 women or an estimated 41% of dating or married Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or most recent partner, according to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
