Report: CEOs Meet With Commerce Department’s Don Graves to Discuss Space Situational Awareness Services

Don Graves, deputy secretary at the Department of Commerce, met with CEOs of nine space situational awareness companies to seek ideas on how industry could help build and implement a Traffic Coordination System for Space, Breaking Defense reported Wednesday.

The free space traffic management service is one of the government’s initiatives outside the Department of Defense to maintain U.S. leadership in the global SSA market.

DOC recently issued a draft request for information on the service, also known as TraCSS, according to the report.

The technology is expected to leverage open architecture to provide information, such as satellite and debris orbital paths, to help commercial and civilian space satellite operators calculate the probability of collision.

Graves invited leaders of KBR (NYSE: KBR), Kratos Defense & Security Solutions (Nasdaq: KTOS), COMSPOC, ExoAnalytic Solutions, Kayhan Space, LeoLabs, Omitron, Privateer and Slingshot Aerospace to provide input on the draft RFI.

A department official told Breaking Defense the executives who attended the meeting “stressed the need for [Commerce] to work quickly to field the new capabilities — ideally by buying and redistributing existing commercial products — in order to maintain leadership in the face of competing SSA offerings from the EU and China.”

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