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.