FAA Sees Potential Start to Satellite Traffic Cop Duties, if Congress Agrees

If its takeover of DOD duties monitoring space traffic and warning of possible satellite collisions is approved by the White House and Congress, the Federal Aviation Administration could have a pilot program or the first steps of such a transition underway in the "next couple years," George Nield, FAA associate administrator-commercial space transportation, said Thursday on a Washington Space Business Roundtable panel.

The Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 requires a variety of reports to be submitted to Congress over the next year, and the results of those studies should help lawmakers decide what route they want to take as the DOD looks to hand off some of those duties, Nield said. The FAA is volunteering to take over the work "without creating a huge new regulatory burden," he said, saying FAA mission licenses and mission authorizations would likely involve satisfying national security, foreign policy and international obligation concerns.

While the FCC, the FAA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration all have some regulatory authorization and supervision duties, Nield said, one growing issue is that none has good oversight of nontraditional space operations ranging from the low earth orbit (LEO) satellite boom to asteroid mining. Nield also said any increased FAA oversight of space traffic likely wouldn't be done by the agency solely but also using some commercial services: "There's no reason why it has to be 100 percent civil service employees."

The space industry is talking more than ever about debris and traffic coordination issues, due to small satellite constellations and such events as the 2009 collision between Iridium and Russian Space Forces satellites, but "there hasn't been a lot of final decisions being made, a lot of concrete actions taken," Nield said. The space industry "can't afford one more" debris-generating event, said Paul Welsh, Analytical Graphics vice president-business development.

Panelists said tackling such issues must be international. One of the biggest hurdles to international norms for space operations has been the lack of consistent definitions, said Mallory Stewart, State Department deputy assistant secretary-emerging security challenges. Common issues like space debris could be an inroad to creating those norms, she said. Stewart said U.S. talks with other major space players such as China and Russia are leading to those norms, albeit slowly. "We're getting closer to better cooperation, but it's a long, slow process," she said.

Much of the event revolved around small satellite regulation in the context of the accelerating number of constellations planned for launch in coming years. Planet Labs Director-Government Affairs Rich Leshner said regulatory focus shouldn't be on small satellites' size or numbers but on capabilities or mission goals, because technology is changing so rapidly. Leshner pushed for space community-created norms, with regulatory oversight then coming in the form of ensuring that self-management.

Much work remains before establishing such norms, said Mike Lindsay, OneWeb lead-mission systems engineering and analysis. He said a small satellite's maneuverability and location and the operator's locational awareness are far more pressing issues than the satellite's size. He said the standard 25-year deorbiting timeline for LEO satellites would lead to congestion problems, with OneWeb aiming for deorbit timelines of less than five years.