The short version

• On 19 August 2026 NASA and Katalyst Space called off the attempt to capture and boost the Swift observatory after Katalyst’s LINK servicer lost attitude control in orbit. Swift will now fall back to Earth, probably before the end of the year.
• The mission had every licence American law currently asks for. What it did not have, because no US agency issues one, was a licence for the part that mattered: flying up to someone else’s satellite and grabbing it.
• That gap was filled in practice by the customer. NASA owned the target, paid for the servicer and watched every step. That is a sensible arrangement once. It is not a regulatory system.
• Two things changed this summer. The FCC’s new Part 100 now has a licensing category built for servicers, and the Office of Space Commerce has opened a pilot for “novel” missions. Neither one yet asks the questions Japan and the United Kingdom have been asking servicers since 2021.

Swift was never meant to be touched. NASA launched it in 2004 to catch gamma-ray bursts, the brightest explosions in the universe, and it did that job for more than two decades. It carries no docking ring, no grapple fixture and no handles. It was designed on the assumption that when its orbit finally decayed, it would simply come down.

The orbit decayed faster than anyone planned. The last solar maximum puffed up the upper atmosphere, drag increased, and by January 2025 NASA was forecasting reentry by the summer of 2026. So NASA did something it had never done with a science mission. In September 2025 it paid a small company from Flagstaff, Arizona, $30 million to build a robot, launch it on an air-dropped Pegasus rocket, fly it up to Swift, take hold of the telescope with three mechanical grippers, and push it back up to about 600 kilometres.

LINK launched from Kwajalein Atoll on 3 July. By late July it was tumbling. On 19 August, NASA and Katalyst announced that there would be no capture and no boost. LINK would instead try to fly close to Swift and gather data for future servicing missions. Swift’s team switched its instruments back on, accepting a faster fall in exchange for a few more weeks of science.

NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks.

Jared Isaacman, NASA Administrator, 19 August 2026

I agree with him, and I would add one thing. Taking smart risks in orbit is exactly what law is supposed to make room for. The Swift mission is being written up as an engineering story, and it is one. It is also the clearest real example we have of an American legal system that authorises launching a servicer, authorises its radios, and then has nothing specific to say about the moment it reaches out and touches another spacecraft.

What the law actually looked at

It helps to be precise here, because “unregulated” is the wrong word and I do not want to use it.

LINK went through the processes that every US commercial spacecraft goes through. The launch on Pegasus was licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration, which also runs a payload review. That review is narrow by statute: the FAA can stop a payload only on grounds of public health and safety, safety of property, national security, foreign policy, or the international obligations of the United States. It is not an assessment of whether a robotic capture of a twenty-year-old telescope is being planned sensibly. It was never designed to be. We have written about the FAA’s Part 450 regime before, and its focus is the ride to orbit.

The Federal Communications Commission licensed LINK’s transmitters, and as part of that process it asks for an orbital debris showing: collision risk, disposal plans, passivation. That is real scrutiny and it matters. But it is scrutiny of a satellite as a satellite. The FCC’s own attempt to write rules for in-space servicing, a notice of proposed rulemaking in early 2024, never became a standalone rule.

No US agency issued LINK anything that said: you may approach this particular object, on these trajectories, with these abort criteria, having shown that its owner consents. That approval, in substance, came from NASA. It came as a contract.

Why the customer ended up doing the regulator’s job

Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty says the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space “shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party.” The United States has met that obligation for decades through a patchwork: the FAA for launch and reentry, the FCC for spectrum, NOAA for imaging the Earth. Anything that does not fit one of those three boxes has fallen into what American space lawyers have called the mission authorization gap since at least 2016.

On Swift, the gap closed itself, almost by accident. NASA was the owner of the target, so consent was not in doubt. NASA was the customer, so it set the requirements, reviewed the design, and sat in on the operations. NASA’s engineers at Goddard ran LINK through vibration and thermal vacuum testing in May. If you asked what “continuing supervision” looked like for this mission, the honest answer is that it looked like a very attentive client.

The liability position lands the same way. The Liability Convention does not apply to damage a launching state’s space object causes to that state’s own nationals, which is Article VII. Had LINK struck Swift, this would have been an American company damaging an American government asset. No treaty claim, no diplomacy, just the contract. That is fine for a $30 million demonstration with a single sophisticated customer.

Now change one fact. Make the customer a private operator whose satellite is registered in another country. Or make the target a dead satellite whose operator went bankrupt years ago. Or remove the customer altogether, and make the purpose inspection rather than service. The contract that did the regulating on Swift is gone, and nothing statutory takes its place.

That last case is not hypothetical. Last week I wrote about the United States confirming it has on-orbit space control weapons. A great deal of what counterspace looks like in practice is rendezvous and proximity operations, the same close approaches LINK was built to perform. The difference between a servicer and an inspector is often nothing more than consent. A licensing system that does not ask about consent cannot tell the two apart.

Other countries already ask the question

This is where I think the American conversation has been oddly provincial.

Japan’s Cabinet Office published guidelines for licensing on-orbit servicing spacecraft in November 2021, under its 2016 Space Activities Act. They are not long. They require the applicant to show a contract with a client that “holds the authority to have the client object serviced.” They ask for approach trajectories planned for a low probability of collision and, where possible, passively safe trajectories, meaning a path that will not end in a collision if the servicer loses control halfway through. They require contingency procedures for identified failure modes and a plan for sharing the operational picture with Japanese and foreign space situational awareness providers. Since then Astroscale’s ADRAS-J has flown a close inspection of a spent Japanese rocket stage, in 2024, which is exactly the kind of mission the guidelines anticipate.

The United Kingdom got there first. In March 2021 the UK Space Agency licensed Astroscale’s ELSA-d mission under the Outer Space Act 1986, describing it as the first licence it had issued for a mission involving close proximity and docking operations.

There is also a standard, ISO 24330, published in 2022, which sets out programmatic principles for rendezvous and proximity operations and on-orbit servicing. Nobody is obliged to follow it. It exists.

Read those requirements against what went wrong with LINK. A servicer lost attitude control shortly after launch and could not recover it well enough to attempt capture. Luckily it happened during commissioning, well before any close approach. The Japanese guidelines exist precisely because the dangerous version of that failure is the one that happens at twenty metres, not at two hundred kilometres.

What changed this summer

To be fair to Washington, the last three months have produced more movement on this than the previous eight years.

On 22 July the FCC adopted its overhaul of satellite licensing, moving space station rules into a new Part 100. Among the changes is a new licensing category, the variable trajectory space station, which the Commission defines to include rendezvous and proximity operations platforms and in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing systems. Operators describe an operational envelope rather than a fixed orbit, register with an approved space situational awareness provider and keep their ephemeris current. There are no bond or milestone requirements. The Commission closed its separate 2024 servicing docket on the basis that Part 100 now covers it. The effective date has not yet been announced.

On 20 August the Office of Space Commerce opened a pilot for what it calls Space Commerce Certifications, under Section 5 of Executive Order 14335. It is aimed at “in-space activities that are not currently clearly or straightforwardly governed by existing regulatory frameworks,” which is to say, missions like LINK. One application, circulated to the FAA, FCC, Department of War, State Department and NASA, producing a certificate that may include recommended best practices. Expressions of interest are due by 5 October.

And on 15 July the House Science Committee held a hearing on the proposal, where Chairman Brian Babin asked openly whether the approach meets the sector’s needs “or whether legislative action is needed to codify the Department of Commerce’s authority over these activities.”

The case that this is enough, and why I am not persuaded

The strongest argument for the current direction goes something like this. Servicing is an immature industry. Heavy rules written now will be written around the last mission rather than the next one. The FCC route already captures collision risk, trackability and disposal. The Commerce pilot adds a single front door and interagency review. Light touch is the right touch, and if a problem appears, fix it then.

Much of that is right, and I would not want the United States to copy any regime wholesale. But three things in the current design trouble me.

First, the Commerce certificate, in the pilot’s own words, has “no direct legal effect.” It is voluntary. An operator who does not apply is in exactly the position LINK was in. It is hard to describe a voluntary, non-binding certificate as authorization and continuing supervision within the meaning of Article VI. It is a good-faith review process. It is not yet a licence.

Second, the FCC’s new category is built around what the FCC regulates, which is radio. It will ask a servicer where it might go. As far as the adopted framework has been described, it will not ask whose satellite it is going to, or whether they agreed. Consent is the single question that distinguishes servicing from harassment, and it is not the FCC’s question to ask. Nor should it be.

Third, there is nothing yet that requires a public account when a mission like this goes wrong near someone else’s asset. NASA and Katalyst have been unusually open about LINK, through NASA’s own blog and briefings. That openness was a choice. The next operator may choose differently, and the next target owner may not be NASA.

None of this needs a heavy statute. The Japanese guidelines run to a few pages. What they do that the American process does not yet do is make three things conditions of permission rather than good practice: documented consent from the target’s owner, trajectories that stay safe if the servicer fails, and disclosure of the operational plan to people who share the orbit. Congress could write those three in a paragraph. Commerce could make them conditions of a certificate that actually carries legal weight.

What this means if you are building or buying servicing

If you are a servicer, the practical point is that the absence of a licence does not mean the absence of liability. Your exposure to your client sits in your contract, and your exposure to everyone else sits in national law and, for foreign-registered targets, in the treaties. Get the risk allocation right before you fly, including what happens if your spacecraft damages the client’s asset during approach, and make sure your insurance actually responds to that scenario. A lot of in-orbit policies were not written with a second spacecraft in the picture.

If you are the owner of a satellite that someone proposes to service, ask for the approach plan, the abort criteria and the passive safety analysis in writing, and make your consent conditional on them. On Swift, NASA could do that because NASA was paying. You may not be.

If your mission is novel in the pilot’s sense, the Commerce pilot is worth applying to by 5 October. The certificate may carry no legal effect today, but the operators who go through the pilot will shape what the permanent version asks for. That is a better position than having it written around you.

And if you are a regulator anywhere else, watch what the United States does next. The world’s largest commercial space market is about to decide whether servicing is licensed as a radio problem, a voluntary certification, or something with the same bones as the Japanese and British approaches. Whatever it decides will quietly become the default for everyone else.

Where this leaves us

Swift will come down in the next few months. It had a long life and the people who tried to extend it deserve credit, not blame. A $30 million experimental spacecraft, built in under a year and aimed at a target never designed to be caught, was always a long shot. NASA said so at the start.

The legal lesson is narrower than the engineering one, and more durable. The first American attempt to rescue a satellite in orbit was supervised properly, and the reason it was supervised properly is that the client happened to be a space agency. The next one will not have that luck built in. The law should not depend on it.

The short version

• On 14 September 2026 the US Secretary of the Air Force said the United States has on-orbit space control weapons. It is the first time any government has said that out loud.
• It almost certainly does not breach the Outer Space Treaty. Article IV bans nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit. It says nothing about conventional ones.
• The “peaceful purposes” clause everyone is quoting this week applies to the Moon and other celestial bodies, not to Earth orbit. A lot of the coverage has this wrong.
• The real problem is not that the law was broken. It is that the law has almost nothing to say, and the forum that was supposed to fix that has been stuck for forty years.

There is a particular kind of silence that follows a government saying something everybody already assumed. On 14 September, at the Air and Space Forces Association conference at National Harbor, the US Secretary of the Air Force, Troy Meink, said this:

The United States has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action.

Troy Meink, Secretary of the Air Force, 14 September 2026

That is the whole disclosure. One sentence. No system named, no orbit given, no numbers, no date of deployment. Asked for detail, Meink said he was not going to talk about specifics, whether anything had been tested, or the type of weapon.

Within a day the Space Force had gone further rather than walking it back. A spokesperson confirmed the wording and then defined the mission set, describing space control as employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities through disruption, degradation and, if necessary, destruction, available for offensive as well as defensive purposes at the direction of a combatant command.

Read those two statements together and the gap between them is the story. The announcement was dressed as defence. The doctrine it sits inside is not limited to defence.

I want to make a narrow argument here, because the wide one is being made badly almost everywhere else this week. The argument is this: nothing unlawful has been established, the law is the problem, and the people who have spent forty years failing to fix the law now have a much harder job than they did on 13 September.

What the treaty actually says

Article IV of the Outer Space Treaty has two paragraphs and they do very different things.

The first paragraph is the famous one. States undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, not to install such weapons on celestial bodies, and not to station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.

Notice what the sentence is keyed to. Every limb of it, including the catch-all at the end, attaches to nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction. The catch-all widens the manner of placement. It does not widen the class of weapon. A conventional weapon in Earth orbit is not caught by paragraph one, and never has been.

The second paragraph is where the language people have been quoting all week actually lives. The Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes. Military bases, installations and fortifications are forbidden there, as is the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres.

That is a real prohibition, and it is a broad one. It applies to the Moon. It does not apply to low Earth orbit.

I have now read several respectable outlets describing the treaty as reserving space for peaceful purposes, full stop. National Public Radio called space under the treaty a shared global domain reserved exclusively for peaceful applications. That is simply not what the text says, and the error matters, because it lets readers conclude that a violation has occurred when the more uncomfortable truth is that no violation is needed for this to be alarming.

So is it lawful?

On the face of the treaty, yes, probably. The United States asserts compliance and the assertion is not obviously wrong.

There are three places where it could still get complicated, and none of them can be assessed on the information released.

Article III and the UN Charter

Article III requires that space activity be carried on in accordance with international law, including the UN Charter. That is the hook by which Article 2(4) on the threat or use of force, and Article 51 on self-defence, reach into orbit.

Placing a weapon is not using force. But a weapon whose purpose is announced as defending against hostile action, in a domain with no agreed rules of engagement and no agreed threshold for what counts as an attack, is a threat posture. Whether an announcement of capability crosses into a threat of force under Article 2(4) is genuinely contested, and one sentence with no stated conditions of use gives nobody enough to judge it.

Article IX and the duty to consult

Article IX requires a state that has reason to believe a planned activity would cause potentially harmful interference with the activities of others to undertake appropriate international consultations before proceeding.

Note the shape of that duty. It is triggered by planned activity, it is owed before proceeding, and it is a duty to consult rather than a duty to obtain consent. I could find no public record of any Article IX consultation preceding this deployment. Absence of reporting is not proof of absence, and I would not assert that none took place. But if one did, nobody has said so, and the provision is worth considerably more attention than it gets.

The peaceful purposes split

Underneath all of this sits an interpretive argument as old as the treaty. Does peaceful mean non-military, or does it mean non-aggressive?

State practice has answered this decisively in favour of non-aggressive. Orbit has been used for military reconnaissance since 1957 and nobody seriously argues that weather satellites for artillery or GPS for munitions guidance breach the treaty. The argument is not close on the law. It is only close on the politics.

The part that should worry you

Here is what I keep coming back to. The treaty is fine. The treaty is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which was to stop the two superpowers of 1966 putting nuclear weapons over each other’s cities. It has done that for fifty nine years across one hundred and eighteen states parties, and that is an extraordinary record.

What the treaty was never designed to do is govern the thing that has just been announced. And the machinery built to fill that gap has failed, repeatedly, in public, for decades.

Consider what the record looks like.

The Conference on Disarmament has had prevention of an arms race in outer space on its agenda since 1985. An ad hoc committee ran from 1985 to 1994 and achieved essentially nothing. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute describes the discussions as deadlocked for decades, stuck on the two questions that matter most, which weapons to prohibit and how to verify.

The Russia and China draft treaty, the PPWT, has been on the table since 2008 and revised in 2014. The longstanding US objection is that it does not define a weapon in space, does not cover ground-based threats, and has no verification mechanism. Those objections are, in my view, substantially correct, which is a problem, because the alternative on offer is nothing.

At the Security Council in April 2024 a US and Japanese draft reaffirming the Article IV obligation was vetoed by Russia, thirteen votes to one with China abstaining. A Russian counter-draft failed in May 2024 on a seven to seven split. Two attempts, two failures, in the space of a month.

The Open-Ended Working Group on reducing space threats ran four sessions across 2022 and 2023 and could not agree a report. Its merged successor, the OEWG on the prevention of an arms race in outer space in all its aspects, spent its first session in April 2025 failing to agree an agenda and going partially closed. It managed an agenda by consensus in July 2025. It met again in Geneva in July 2026, with a mandate running to 2028. I could find no substantive outcome from that session.

And in November 2025, at the eightieth General Assembly, the United States and Israel were the only two states to vote against the annual PAROS resolution. It passed one hundred and seventy seven to two. The historical US position on that resolution was abstention.

That is the ground on which this announcement lands. Not a functioning regime with a new violation in it. A regime that has produced one binding sentence on weapons in space since 1967, and a diplomatic process that has not produced a consensus document in four years.

The strongest argument for the announcement, and why I do not buy it

Let me put the other case properly, because it deserves better than dismissal.

Deterrence requires the other side to know you can hurt them. Russia and China have been developing counterspace capabilities for two decades and have been considerably less forthcoming about it. The Secure World Foundation’s ninth Global Counterspace Capabilities assessment, published in April 2026, documents Russian rendezvous and proximity activity in the geostationary belt, a broad array of Russian ground-based jammers, and reporting that China may have a new direct-ascent interceptor, alongside repeated Chinese refuelling operations in GEO through the second half of 2025. Thomas González Roberts at Georgia Tech makes the fair point that the United States is at least taking a different approach from states that obfuscate.

On that reading, saying it out loud is honesty, and honesty reduces the chance of somebody misreading an ambiguous manoeuvre and starting something.

I do not think it survives contact with what was actually said. Clayton Swope at CSIS has the sharpest version of the objection and I think he is right: disclosure alone does not deter. Deterrence requires an adversary to understand both your capability and the conditions under which you would use it. This announcement supplied neither. Roberts himself notes that it tells you nothing about method of attack, reversibility, attributability, collateral damage or observability, which is to say nothing you would need in order to calibrate a response.

What it does supply, free of charge, is a talking point. Victoria Samson at the Secure World Foundation says the announcement crosses a line and risks normalising the weaponisation of orbit, among allies as much as adversaries. Cassandra Steer argues it validates exactly the accusation Moscow and Beijing have been making for years and strengthens their preference for a restrictive binding instrument over the Western responsible-behaviour agenda.

Watch what actually happened. Maria Zakharova’s response on 15 September did not only condemn the deployment. It attacked the moratorium on destructive anti-satellite missile testing as laden with hypocrisy. That moratorium, announced unilaterally by the United States in April 2022 and endorsed by a General Assembly resolution in December 2022 by one hundred and fifty five votes to nine, is the single most successful norm-building initiative the space security community has produced this century. Thirty eight states had joined it as of November 2024.

It is also the one thing standing between us and more events like Fengyun-1C. When China destroyed that satellite in January 2007 at around 850 kilometres, it created more than three thousand catalogued fragments, roughly two thirds of which are still up there. When Russia destroyed Cosmos 1408 in November 2021 at around 480 kilometres, it created about eighteen hundred, and almost all of them have decayed. Same act, different altitude, a difference of decades in consequence.

Handing Moscow a rhetorical stick to beat that moratorium with is not a small cost. It may turn out to be the most expensive part of this week.

What this means if you operate a satellite

This is the part that has been almost entirely absent from the coverage, and it is the part that matters to most readers of this journal.

The overwhelming majority of active satellites are commercial. The European Space Agency’s Space Environment Report, issued on 8 September 2026, models around 11,300 active payloads among 68,450 tracked objects larger than ten centimetres. A single commercial operator accounts for more than half of them.

Military dependence on that commercial layer is not marginal and it is deepening. SpaceX won a 2.29 billion dollar Space Force contract in May 2026 to build out the service’s low Earth orbit communications backbone, and holds a 4.16 billion dollar prime contract for the air moving target indication constellation whose first launches are due this month. Commercial space domain awareness providers are now part of the threat picture in their own right, with LeoLabs detecting Chinese counterspace manoeuvring in June 2026.

Here is the legal consequence, and operators should sit with it. Under the law of armed conflict, a civilian object that makes an effective contribution to military action by its nature, location, purpose or use becomes a military objective. The Woomera Manual on the International Law of Military Space Operations, published by Oxford University Press in 2024 under an editorial team led by Jack Beard, with Dale Stephens and David Koplow, states the position directly: third party civilian satellites that have become military objectives through their use for military purposes can be legitimate targets.

That is not a proposal. The Woomera Manual is descriptive of the law as it stands, drawn from state practice. It is worth being clear that this is a different exercise from the McGill Manual, often called MILAMOS, which is expressly confined to peacetime and does not address armed conflict at all. If you have seen the two cited interchangeably, they are not interchangeable.

The Woomera Manual also does something I find genuinely interesting. It holds that belligerents must select methods that minimise debris creation, because fragments endanger every user of the domain rather than only the adversary. That is a precaution in attack owed, in effect, to everybody. I am not aware of a close analogue anywhere else in the law of armed conflict, and if the manual’s position is right it is the single most useful legal development of the past decade for commercial operators.

Three practical questions follow.

Do you know what your capacity is being used for? A hosted payload, a leased transponder, a government customer buying imagery. The targeting test turns on use, and use can be established by your customer rather than by you.

Have you read your war risk exclusion recently? Expanding war risk exclusion language is one of the structural shifts reshaping a space insurance market that was already hard after the 2023 loss year. An in-orbit policy written against the geopolitical assumptions of 2019 is not priced for this. I cannot point you to public exclusion wording, because there is not any, which is itself the point. Ask your broker.

Who bears the loss if you are collateral damage? The Liability Convention gives you a fault standard for damage in orbit and never defines fault. There is no agreed rule of the road, no right of way, and no forum with compulsory jurisdiction. We have written about that gap before and it has not narrowed.

No commercial operator, industry association or insurer had said anything publicly about the announcement as of 17 September. I find that silence more interesting than any of the statements.

Where this leaves us

I do not think the United States has broken the Outer Space Treaty, and I think people claiming otherwise are reading paragraph two of Article IV as though it governed Earth orbit. It does not.

I also do not think that is reassuring, and I am uneasy with the number of lawyers this week who have treated the compliance question as the end of the analysis. A rule that permits everything the parties want to do is not a rule that is working well. It is a rule that has stopped being tested.

Article IV did one job, in 1967, superbly. It is still doing it. Everything that has happened in orbit since has been governed by nothing much at all, and the forum built to change that has spent forty years demonstrating that it cannot.

The question worth asking is not whether Washington complied. It is what the other one hundred and seventeen states parties intend to do about a treaty that turns out to permit this. So far the answer from Europe, which has the most commercial exposure and the least counterspace capability of any major bloc, has been nothing at all. No European government, no EU institution and no European Space Agency statement had been reported as of 17 September.

That silence is a choice, and it is the one I would watch.

The short version

• Conjunction warnings for the world still come free from the US Space Force, which tracks roughly 60,000 objects and publishes through Space-Track.org.
• The civil replacement, TraCSS, had 70 pilot users covering more than 11,345 satellites and 10 national government accounts as at August 2026.
• Its funding has been zeroed out in two consecutive budget requests. Appropriators restored it once, at $52.5 million for FY2026. The FY2027 request is $11 million.
• None of this addresses the real gap, which is that nobody has authority to tell two operators which one must move.

This is a signed opinion piece. It argues a position.

There is a fact about space traffic management that people outside the field find difficult to believe when they first hear it. When two satellites owned by two different companies are heading for the same point in space, there is no authority anywhere that can require either of them to move.

Not the FCC. Not the FAA. Not the ITU. Not the UN. Nobody.

What happens instead is that both operators receive a warning, and then they email each other.

What actually exists

The warning comes from the US Space Force. Space Operations Command tracks roughly 60,000 space objects and distributes catalogue data and conjunction data messages free of charge through Space-Track.org. Operationally the work sits with the 18th and 19th Space Defense Squadrons under the Combined Space Operations Center at Vandenberg.

This is a remarkable public good. A military organisation in one country provides collision warnings to the entire world, including to operators of states it is in open competition with, at no charge, and has done so for years.

It is also an odd foundation for global infrastructure. It exists because someone decided it should, it is funded through a defence budget for defence purposes, and its continuation is a matter of US policy rather than international obligation.

Space Policy Directive-3 in June 2018 recognised the oddity and directed the Department of Commerce to take the civil space traffic safety mission from the Department of Defense. The Office of Space Commerce built the Traffic Coordination System for Space to do it.

Where TraCSS has got to

The programme has made real progress. Beta testing began in 2024 and SpaceX joined as the tenth beta user. The pilot expanded in September 2025 with solicitations for commercial conjunction assessment screening. Satellite owner and operator registrations opened in early 2026 at tracss.gov.

As at August 2026 the Office of Space Commerce reported 70 pilot users covering more than 11,345 satellites, with 10 national government accounts onboarded. Its director described the system in July 2026 as in a pilot phase but essentially operational.

The handover from the Space Force, originally scheduled for 2026, has not completed.

The funding fight

Here is the part that should worry anyone who cares about orbital safety.

The FY2026 budget request zeroed out TraCSS, a programme costing roughly $55 million a year, as part of an approximately 83 percent cut to the Office of Space Commerce. Seven trade associations representing around 450 space companies petitioned Congress to reverse it. Appropriators did, at an enacted level of $52.5 million for the Office of Space Commerce.

The same fight has repeated for FY2027, with a request of $11 million, roughly an 80 percent cut from the FY2026 enacted level. As at 24 August 2026 there is no confirmed final congressional action.

Consider what that means. The industry’s own trade associations, representing hundreds of companies with tens of billions of dollars of assets in orbit, had to lobby to keep a $55 million safety programme alive. Twice.

My actual complaint

I want to be careful here, because the TraCSS funding story is the one everyone tells and it is not the most important one.

Even a fully funded, fully operational TraCSS is a data service. It screens conjunctions and tells operators about them. It does not decide who moves.

That is the gap. And it is not a technical gap, it is a legal one.

The Liability Convention supplies a fault standard for in-orbit damage and never defines fault, as we set out in our piece on debris liability. There are no rules of the road. No right of way. No obligation to maintain manoeuvring capability. No defined probability of collision at which action becomes mandatory. No duty to answer another operator’s message.

So when two operators receive the same conjunction data message, what governs is goodwill, engineering judgement, and whether their operations teams happen to have each other’s phone numbers.

Most of the time that works, because most operators are professional and nobody wants to lose a satellite. The Space Data Association exists precisely to pool ephemeris data and make operator to operator coordination easier, and it does useful work.

But “most of the time it works because everyone is being sensible” is not a regulatory system. It is the absence of one. It fails in exactly the cases that matter: when one object is dead and cannot move, when an operator is unresponsive, when two operators disagree about whose data is right, and when the parties are from states that do not talk to each other.

What a referee would need

I do not think this is unsolvable, and I do not think it requires a new treaty, which would take twenty years and probably fail.

Three things would do most of the work, and all three can be done through national licensing, which is where the leverage already sits.

A duty to be reachable. Licence conditions requiring a 24 hour operational contact, a maximum response time to a conjunction notification, and published ephemeris of stated accuracy. Trivial to impose. Almost costless to comply with.

A default manoeuvre rule. Something as simple as: where both objects are manoeuvrable and the operators have not agreed otherwise within a defined window, the object in the lower orbit manoeuvres. The specific rule matters much less than having one, because the current default is that nobody is obliged to do anything.

A duty to retain capability. A requirement to maintain propellant sufficient for collision avoidance through end of mission, separate from the disposal reserve. The FCC’s willingness to enforce a disposal commitment against DISH in 2023 shows the enforcement route already exists. We discuss that case here.

None of that requires a global authority. It requires the three or four regulators that license most of the world’s satellites to impose similar conditions, which is how debris mitigation norms spread in the first place.

Why it has not happened

Partly because it is nobody’s job. The FCC regulates communications and reaches orbital safety through the licensing back door. The FAA regulates the flight, not the orbit. Commerce has the mission and has spent two years defending its budget.

Partly because the industry’s incentives are split. Large constellation operators have the best conjunction data, the most manoeuvrable satellites and the most sophisticated automation. A default rule would constrain them more than it would help them, and they can manage bilaterally with anyone who matters.

And partly because nothing has gone catastrophically wrong yet. The 2009 Iridium and Cosmos collision was the last event that made this a headline, and it produced guidelines rather than rules.

The uncomfortable truth is that this is a regime that will probably be fixed after an accident rather than before one. I would rather be wrong about that.