Part of a two-month pilot providing spaceflight safety mission assurance to select spacecraft in medium Earth orbit (MEO) and geostationary Earth orbit (GEO), the analysis supports satellite tracking, safety notifications, and anomaly detection and alerts.

OSC resides within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration within the Department of Commerce, which was given until 2024 to assume the Department of Defense‘s responsibility of coordinating increasingly congested commercial and civil satellite orbits around Earth in a 2018 presidential directive. The office contributed $850,000 to DOD for the award of space situational awareness (SSA) data analysis contracts to seven firms, via the Joint Task Force-Space Defense Commercial Office Operations (JCO) vehicle, enabling the pilot.

“The space traffic coordination pilot project contracts — combined with the approximately $3.1 million in contracts that the Department of Commerce let in the summer for data purchase — are designed to demonstrate commercial capabilities and to help the Office of Space Commerce team develop the structure and operational requirements for the future system,” a NOAA spokesperson told FedScoop.

OSC hopes the pilot will help determine the extent to which commercial SSA services can augment or replace DOD’s existing capabilities, ideally forming the core of the new system.

COMSPOC Corp.; ExoAnalytic Solutions; Kayhan Space; KBR; NorthStar Earth & Space, Inc.; Slingshot Aerospace; and the Space Data Association received contracts.

DOD already awarded five contracts for GEO space object tracking data in September that also support the pilot.

Members of the Space Data Association will gather feedback from commercial satellite operators on the usefulness of the SSA services provided. OSC will then compare results to determine the maturity of SSA services and inform its approach to low Earth orbit (LEO).

“This pilot project helps usher in a new phase in how government and commercial operators work together to coordinate activities on-orbit,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad in a statement. “NOAA looks forward to continued collaborations that safely enhance the economic and technical potential of the U.S. commercial space sector.”

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is exploring multi-factor authentication beyond its network as it looks to strengthen cybersecurity in accordance with the federal zero trust strategy, according to its chief information officer.

Zach Goldstein told FedScoop his agency already requires Common Access Cards (CACs) and personal identification numbers to authenticate to its network but continues to perform comparative analyses of multi-factor authentication (MFA) solutions for applications and devices.

“We’re looking at things other than CAC cards, things that are intelligent tokens — that know who I am, that can exchange certificates with a certificate server, that can be easily revoked, that can have multiple kinds of privileges,” Goldstein said.

Goldstein added that cybersecurity is his “first priority,” in keeping with the White House’s Cybersecurity Executive Order issued in May 2021, and that he hopes to select a token for app and device authentication by the second quarter of fiscal 2023.

NOAA is also increasing supply chain risk assessments of Software as a Service — looking not only at the firm but what they buy and use for services — under Goldstein, who’s been with the agency 17-and-a-half years and CIO since 2015.

Goldstein wants to expand NOAA’s use of the cloud in a way that further improves the agency’s cyber posture while shedding light on how migration is progressing.

“We have an initiative to create a Cloud Program Management Office (PMO), one of whose jobs will be to provide me and NOAA leadership with that answer,” he said.

Assuming the funding for the office within the president’s fiscal 2023 budget stands, Goldstein hopes to launch it by the end of that fiscal year.

According to Goldstein, NOAA was the second federal agency to move its email and calendar to a public cloud, Google Apps for Government, in 2011, and since then the agency has migrated websites, help desk ticketing and global device management.

“It became very clear that we needed to have more discipline going to the cloud and more efficiencies because people were duplicating each other by having to learn how to do a security evaluation of going to the cloud, learn how to authenticate to the cloud, figure out how to communicate and get my data to the cloud,” Goldstein said. “And they were also using different contract vehicles.”

The CIO agreed to authorize NOAA offices’ migrations with the expectation that once his team implemented centralized cloud services streamlining and lowering the cost of the process, they’d use those instead.

NOAA now offers a standard way of getting to the cloud; authenticating using its identity, credential and access management (ICAM) service; and contracting with the three large service providers — Google, Amazon and Microsoft — and others. The Office of the CIO’s Cyber Division evaluates cloud offerings once for universal use across NOAA, accelerating offices’ migrations, but the Cloud PMO will make it so they don’t have to consult separate experts for each step in the process.

A Cloud PMO will also help offices take advantage of NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD), which allows for “extremely inexpensive” egress to the public, Goldstein said.

The White House proposed a large funding increase for the Office of Space Commerce in its fiscal 2023 budget, which if accepted by Congress would elevate it to a staff office receiving IT support from the OCIO. 

Goldstein expects to indirectly advise on, provide perimeter security for and oversee the cloud-native Open-Architecture Data Repository, which processes tracking data on space objects to predict and assess risk of collision. This information will improve space situational awareness for commercial and civil space operators. A requirements analysis is ongoing, so the operational cost hasn’t been calculated yet.

“Because the cloud is available and they know how to do it, we know how to do it — we’re going to help the Office of Space Commerce with this — they’ll be able to get that capability in the hands of the world faster,” Goldstein said.

The cloud is also freeing up NOAA’s IT professionals — previously stuck patching, scanning and performing domain controller work — to improve weather forecasting model accuracy and speed.

Supercomputing improvements that continue to be made by NOAA have increased capacity for forecasting three times over and should lead to 30% growth in research computing by the end of 2022, but research and development could benefit from even more, Goldstein said. The agency’s objective is to get enough capacity to perform all NOAA research, and enable focusing these applications down to what should be operationalized.

“We’re not there yet,” Goldstein said. “But we’re getting closer.”

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His appointment as director, announced by the agency on Wednesday, comes nearly 16 months after OSC’s last chief stepped down—and also as the office confronts weighty new responsibilities and prepares for what could be a massive budget boost proposed by President Joe Biden’s administration. 

“Richard DalBello officially starts his new role on May 9, 2022,” NOAA Spokesperson John Leslie told FedScoop on Thursday.

OSC has operated as the government’s main coordinator and hub for space commerce activities for decades, and Its key mission is to foster technological advancement within the commercial space industry. The office also maintains operating licenses for private space systems.

More recently though, the office’s responsibilities have expanded to include a greater focus on modernizing and managing America’s systems for space situational awareness.

An influential memorandum on space policy signed by former President Donald Trump in 2018 essentially transferred the authority of monitoring space traffic and warning of potential orbital collisions from the Defense Department to OSC, within NOAA and the Commerce Department. That switch came partly because the number of satellites, tools and debris in that realm is growing exponentially as space commercialization booms. With all those items increasingly hovering around Earth, the Pentagon opted to move on from that mandate so it could place an even deeper focus on its space-based national security missions. 

So far, Commerce has not acted so swiftly on this transition to governing Earth’s orbit, but Biden’s budget request for fiscal year 2023 commits roughly $88 million to OSC to make it happen. That marks an almost eight-fold increase from its 2021 enacted level of funding.

“This is an exciting opportunity and I appreciate the support and encouragement OSC is receiving from NOAA, the Department of Commerce, the White House and Congress,” DalBello said in the agency’s release. “Space safety and sustainability are two of the most critical issues facing the international community today and I am pleased the Biden administration has made these issues a priority.”

Having a new permanent director to help manage those millions, provided Congress approves that money, will also likely make a notable difference in this space surveillance operation. NOAA’s Leslie noted that the office’s last director, Kevin O’Connell, stepped down in January 2021, with the transition from Trump’s team to Biden’s. Mark Paese, the deputy assistant administrator of NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service, is serving as acting OSC director until DalBello assumes his fresh position. 

Leslie said the agency will share more information regarding DalBello’s early priorities after his first day on the job.

Former Chief of Staff at the National Space Council Jared Stout told FedScoop that he has known DalBello for nearly 10 years and that he is a “brilliant, dedicated and extremely hard-working” official.

Commenting on OSC’s evolving responsibilities, Stout added: “I think we are going to have to see, ultimately, what they decide to do with the funding, but my sincere hope is that the roles and responsibilities of the Office of Space Commerce will continue to grow and that Congress will continue to empower the office.”

DalBello will enter the position with more than 3 decades of experience in the space industry, according to his LinkedIn profile. From 2013 to 2015, he was OSTP’s lead for space and aeronautics under former President Barack Obama—a position he also held during the Clinton administration. Most recently, he was the vice president of government affairs at space consulting firm GXO. And prior to that, he served as Virgin Galactic’s vice president of business development and government affairs, among other roles.

Stout, who is now the director of congressional and regulatory policy at Meeks, Butera and Israel, said OSC’s first priority under its new leadership “absolutely must be to stand up the civil space situational awareness system as soon as possible, with U.S. industry leading the way.”

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OSC had the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration‘s acquisition arm issue a request for information (RFI) Feb. 16 on commercial tracking data and services that will be available between now and 2030, so that its repository might serve as a marketplace for them.

Companies provided some data for free so OSC could develop a cloud-based Open-Architecture Data Repository (OADR) prototype, containing the locations of orbiting satellites and debris for space situational awareness (SSA), last summer. But OSC needs to study more commercial low Earth orbit (LEO) and geostationary orbit (GEO) data to improve its OADR algorithms to the point where satellite users trust the reliability of their collision warnings.

“We’re going to do that for the first few years, get that going and then we’re going after international data,” Leonard told FedScoop. “At the end of the day this is a global problem, and we feel like the U.S. can be the global leader in this area.”

OADR is an unclassified system, and OSC is already working with the European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking (EUSST) program to determine what data is interoperable and how more might be shared to fill in reporting gaps and begin tacking debris less than 3 centimeters in size.

OSC hopes to issue another RFI soon for cloud hosting of OADR and, after that, an omnibus RFI for all of the services comprising OADR like conjunction screening, ephemeris generation and the web interface, Leonard said.

The OADR prototype combined 60 days of Department of Defense data with commercial data on about 20,000 to generate on-orbit collision warnings every 15 minutes

“We feel like we can do this even faster because the cloud really offers a great opportunity for scaling up processing power, and that’s one of our intentions,” Leonard said. “We want to make sure that the satellite user gets these warnings and watches of the space environment on a very close to near real-time basis, which is a whole lot more modernized than what currently happens at DOD.”

DOD’s traditional SSA system currently provides collision warnings every eight hours and relies solely on its own tracking data, which is a problem because the department lacks the assets to do so effectively while also monitoring active payloads, large objects and foreign issues. As a result, companies that operate satellites are often reluctant to move them when DOD’s system warns them of a potential collision, Leonard said.

The Department of Commerce, of which OSC is a part, plans to take commercial sector work off of DOD’s plate with OADR, so it can focus on its defense and national security missions.

OSC is building a research and development environment in conjunction with OADR for testing the latest algorithms and working with companies like SpaceX, OneWeb and Amazon to get their large, planned constellations of satellites talking to OADR autonomously. The goal is for satellites to send timed maneuvers to OADR, which would give them the all-clear before proceeding, or alternatively the system would warn them of a pending collision and advise them on which of their stored maneuvers to use.

SpaceX’s launch of its Starling will help OSC and NASA, which has been involved with the project for the last six to seven months, get autonomous operations talking to ground systems as well.

OADR won’t just enable collision warnings though. Once the database is established, OSC has apps planned for satellite pre-launch and reentry screenings, gap analyses between the time satellites are launched and catalogued, validating data accuracy, predicting satellite light pollution for astronomers, and space weather forecasting.

The containerized architecture of OADR will allow OSC to provide satellite operators with DOD, NASA and commercial models in addition to its own, allowing for the sale of more in-depth analysis. DOD, NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration will fund advances to the OADR data products they need.

“We’ve been working with our appropriators in Congress and requesting the proper funding next year and follow-ons to build this system, and we’re excited,” Leonard said. “We’re bringing in new staff this year and should have a director and deputy director very soon; they actually just advertised the deputy director position for the office.”

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CISA’s primary concern is mitigating cyber risks to position, navigation and timing (PNT) services and GPS, Kolasky said, during an AFCEA Bethesda event on Tuesday.

The agency already examined all 55 national critical functions — ones government and the private sector perform that, if corrupted, would be detrimental to national security — as they relate to space.

“We have to think about space as a potential risk vector to national critical functions and space infrastructure as critical infrastructure,” Kolasky said.

CISA’s working group will leverage critical infrastructure sector partnerships, similar to how it’s done with pipeline operators in the aftermath of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in May, he added.

The agency is also exploring ways to extend the benefits of investments in national security systems to commercial space missions working with the Department of Defense.

CISA continues to partner with DOD and the Department of Transportation to ensure redundant and terrestrial backup systems to space systems are resilient. Meanwhile the Department of Commerce’s Office of Space Commerce is teaming with DOD, DOT and NASA; industry; and academia to populate its Open-Architecture Data Repository of orbiting satellite and space junk locations.

The challenge to any efforts to harden space systems from earth after launch is they employ channels that foreign adversaries like Russia and China can also exploit.

“Space systems have a unique characteristic of things up there, right?” Kolasky said. “You don’t get many opportunities to replace them.”

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Called the Open-Architecture Data Repository (OADR), the prototype will ensure the U.S. space industry has situational awareness of orbiting satellites and junk for future missions.

The U.S. needs the best-available data to track about 29,000 space objects currently in orbit and an estimated 50,000 new satellites launching between now and 2030, so the Office of Space Commerce began piloting activities to improve commercial space safety earlier this year.

“It was a data strategy that really fell out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because they already have the satellites up there,” said Tom Beach, interim chief data office at DOC, during a recent ACT-IAC event. “They already are collecting this data.”

OSC plans to conduct analysis, develop technical prototypes and perform additional demos with an eye toward using sensors and artificial intelligence to monitor the thermosphere and exosphere and prevent space objects from crashing into each other, Beach said.

What OSC is not trying to be is the Federal Aviation Administration of space. So while it will populate the OADR with accurate, timely data, that data is for industry to expand upon and develop services around that it sells back to government, Beach said.

OSC is working with the departments of Defense and Transportation and NASA — all of which have a shared interest in space traffic management — as well as industry and academia to populate OADR with data.

OADR will also provide conjunction, or close approach, alerts to satellite operators.

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