How Space-WATCHing Turned into Stargazing
- 4 hours ago
- 10 min read
Aug. 28, 2026
By Kimberly Siversen Burke
SpaceX used the Small Satellite Conference in Utah this week to pitch satellite operators on a free collision-warning service. A few doors down, the acting manager of the government program charged with that same mission could not say when that system would move beyond its pilot.
SpaceX software engineer Mike Hoot demonstrated the company’s conjunction-screening platform at a side meeting during the Smallsat conference. Two days later, Ethan Baumann, acting program manager for the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS), told attendees that the Commerce Department’s Office of Space Commerce (OSC) will keep TraCSS in evaluation mode and hold off on migrating operators from Space-Track until FY27 appropriations shake out.
That puts TraCSS in an awkward race with a commercial service that does not live or die by appropriation. The two systems serve the same users and offer similar functionality: a satellite operator uploads a predicted trajectory, and the software checks it against other objects in space before sending back conjunction warnings for potentially dangerous collisions.
SpaceX does the check within a minute of an operator upload, using Stargaze, the tracking system it unveiled in January. Stargaze turns 30,000 Starlink star trackers into a sensing layer that logs 30 million object transits a day, then combines that data with ephemerides submitted by other operators. TraCSS runs the same check every four hours against the Space Force’s catalog and user-submitted data.
OSC moved TraCSS onto its live system in March. More than 70 operators from 10-plus countries are now testing it, but its warnings still carry an evaluation-only label. In the week before SpaceX’s Salt Lake City briefing, more than 30 operators fed trajectory data into Stargaze for more than 700 objects.
Directing Space Traffic: How TraCSS Came to Be
A 2018 policy directive put Commerce in charge of the civil side of a mission the Pentagon had taken on after the 2009 Iridium-Cosmos collision: warning commercial and foreign operators when their spacecraft faced a potential conjunction.
OSC has been building toward that handoff since Congress first funded the work in late 2022. But OSC has to fund TraCSS one year at a time – pitting institutional inertia against the commercial velocity of a player that can deploy new capabilities without having to wait on government funding.
And while Congress has not exactly starved TraCSS, the White House has twice proposed killing it by slashing the OSC account that funds it. The FY26 request would have cut the office to roughly $10M from the $65M it received in FY25, effectively terminating the program. Senate appropriators rejected that, writing in their report that space situational awareness (SSA) and traffic management are inherently governmental, and the enacted bill gave the office $52.5M. The FY27 request, released in April, asked for $11M for the office and included no dedicated line for TraCSS. But the House Appropriations Committee pushed back. On May 15, it reported H.R. 8845, providing $50M for OSC and endorsing continued work on TraCSS.
Appropriators can keep TraCSS funded, but they cannot control when it leaves the runway.
The Handoff That Has Not Happened Yet
TraCSS was never supposed to be a civilian copy of Space-Track.
Its architects wanted it to outperform the military system by combining the Space Force catalog with trajectory data operators submit for their own satellites, then sharpening that picture with observations from commercial tracking companies. OSC would run the service, giving operators a more accurate view of the orbital environment while freeing the Pentagon to focus its sensors on adversary threats.
OSC spent the past two years building a commercial data supply for TraCSS. In January 2024, it placed $15.5M in orders with five companies for the Consolidated Pathfinder, then ran a second Pathfinder that used operator ephemerides. In June 2025, it awarded another $10.1M to eight companies to fill a post-launch data gap, when newly launched satellites can be the hardest to track. The office reported in October 2024 that it had successfully incorporated commercial data into conjunction assessment.
As recently as January, OSC was soliciting new commercial data and describing TraCSS as nearing production release. By August, Baumann said the purchases were on hold for the foreseeable future.
Commercial SSA providers such as COMSPOC, LeoLabs, Slingshot and Kayhan built their businesses around customers paying for tracking data and conjunction screening. Now one of their biggest potential customers has stopped buying, while the world’s largest satellite operator is offering a competing service for free.
That creates a tricky commercial equation. Why invest in the data and infrastructure needed to serve TraCSS if Washington might pull the plug on the program, while SpaceX is training operators to expect the same capability at no cost? An administration that has twice put TraCSS on the chopping block gives vendors little reason to make multiyear bets on it.
But funding uncertainty is not TraCSS's only hurdle. Operators also need a reason to abandon the systems they already use, and SpaceX just made that harder by launching a free alternative while TraCSS spent three consecutive budget cycles fighting for its life.
The Real Cost of Stargaze
SpaceX has collected $107.7M in government contracts to develop the sensing technology behind the Stargaze service it now offers for free.
DARPA funded work through two agreements under a program called Space-WATCH, administered by the Space Development Agency’s contracting office. Space-WATCH grew out of the idea that commercial constellations already carry enough sensors to track objects across LEO and can do so for a fraction of the cost of ground-based radar.
But Space-WATCH was not a normal procurement, where the government writes the spec for the system it wants to buy. DARPA instead wanted to create a functioning market for orbital observations, where commercial operators would sell sensor data at priority-driven prices, with a dedicated working group building the pricing model. The solicitation called it a "dynamically priced marketplace." One track would buy the observations while a second would build the software to fuse them into a comprehensive picture of LEO. In between would be a government platform that would QA data integrity and decide what it was worth.
The $65M Program with a $107.7M Price Tag
During its January 2023 industry day, DARPA told bidders that Space-WATCH would cost $65M all in — sensing, fusion, government support, and the working group designing the pricing model.
The solicitation for the fusion work set that track's budget at $14.5M across all performers. SpaceX's two agreements came to $107.7M, two-thirds more than DARPA said the entire program would cost.
DARPA opened FA24012390008 on April 20, 2023, with a $600,000 award — the fixed price it set for first-phase architecture work — and expanded it through 13 modifications totaling $27.7M. A November 2024 modification, worth $4.5M, describes the requirement as a Space-WATCH long-wave infrared sensor. DARPA followed with another award (FA24012490017) on Jan. 30, 2024, committing $40M in each of the next two years for a total of $80M.
The second agreement expired Nov. 30, 2025. Three weeks later, DARPA made the last of those 13 modifications, adding $2.5M to the first agreement and carrying it to May 30 of this year. Neither award shows a follow-on or extension since, though the work could be continuing under another vehicle.
Mission Over Method
Back when the solicitation was first released in 2023, Space-WATCH program manager Greg Kuperman said the sensor data would initially serve the Defense Department and eventually reach the Commerce Department as a service. Rather than buy satellites or claim ownership of the data, the government would fund sensor upgrades on spacecraft already in orbit, then buy the resulting observations. It seems the plan might have been for TraCSS to buy the observations that Space-WATCH produced. The solicitation says that once the program moved from development to data purchases, the government's access would run through an end-user license negotiated with each supplier. As of now, SpaceX is the only known supplier.
Per the 2023 industry day documents, Commerce sat on the Space-WATCH program team from the start, with NOAA representatives helping performers clear licensing requirements.
OSC worked directly with SpaceX too. On Jan. 31, 2024, a day after the $80M award, OSC announced a no-exchange-of-funds research agreement to evaluate SpaceX's automated collision-avoidance software, later widened to cover launch screening, and brought the company on as its 10th TraCSS beta user. Each step made sense on its own terms. Together they gave the largest satellite operator in orbit a seat at every table where civil space traffic management was being designed.
Who Validates the Data
DARPA issued a solicitation for the fusion work in January 2024, tasking companies with turning raw sensor feeds into usable warnings. Underneath their software would sit a government platform, Data Service Management and Validation, responsible for judging the quality of incoming data and setting its value. Those were the two functions needed to keep the marketplace running.
DARPA told bidders it anticipated spending $14.5M on the effort. But the three publicly identified fusion awards appear to total just $4.15M. Riverside Research landed an $853,800 award that expired six months later with no further funding. NextGen Federal Systems, which teamed with Ansys Government Initiatives and Space Exploration Engineering, won a $499,900 award in July 2024. And Peraton ran the full 22 months on $2.8M.
Stargaze Goes Live
Stargaze debuted two months after the $80M agreement expired.
SpaceX soft-launched the tracking system in January, ran a closed beta with more than a dozen operators through the spring, and by August was screening more than 500,000 ephemeris files a day on space-safety.com and returning a warning within a minute of submission.
Stargaze access requires sharing your own trajectories, and SpaceX runs every step of what comes back. It collects the observations, computes the orbits, screens the conjunctions, and characterizes the uncertainty. When TraCSS issues a warning, its inputs come from a catalog the Space Force maintains independently. When Stargaze issues one, the whole chain sits inside a single company, and no outside assessment of its accuracy has been published. Nobody sets a price because nobody is paying. Yet.
OSC is meanwhile weighing whether to charge for TraCSS. Director Taylor Jordan said in July the office was evaluating alternatives to appropriations, including user fees.
The Specs are in Sync
DARPA’s performance targets track closely with Stargaze’s published capabilities. The solicitation called for sensors that could detect objects as small as 1.5 meters in the first phase and 40 centimeters in the second across LEO, refresh tracks within five minutes of an observation, and revisit every object in less than 30 minutes.
Stargaze claims to detect objects as small as about a meter, revisit them as often as 10 times an hour, and generate a new orbit within five minutes. Neither DARPA nor SpaceX has ever publicly linked the two programs, but a Stargaze paternity test would probably find plenty of Space-WATCH DNA.
Stargaze’s Blind Spots
Stargaze tracks roughly 16,500 objects, about 48% of the public catalog the Space Force maintains, and its meter-class floor misses most cubesats and most small debris.
For now, it complements radar rather than replacing it, since radar sees what Stargaze cannot. Both gaps come from the same physics: star trackers are visible-light cameras, so they register only objects lit by the sun, and up to a third of every orbit is spent in Earth's shadow.
Closing that gap is what DARPA paid SpaceX to do, and the fix would land on Stargaze itself. The Space-WATCH solicitation calls for modified star trackers to cover the sunlit portion of an orbit and an infrared payload for the rest, which explains the LWIR mod to SpaceX’s contract. Star trackers see visible light and nothing else. Infrared needs different detectors behind different optics, which means a separate payload on new spacecraft.
It is a play almost no other operator in the space sector could pull off. Space-based infrared has been a government mission — missile warning and tracking, SBIRS and its successors — because the sensors cost a fortune and the satellites carrying them are few. Commercial SSA relies on ground-based radar, ground telescopes, and a handful of optical satellites, but none of them are deployed at scale. SpaceX launches more spacecraft in a month than most operators fly in a decade, so a payload added to future production spreads across a manufacturing line that no competitor has.
Whether that sensor is in orbit today – on Starlink? Starshield? – is not publicly disclosed. But once it is, Stargaze will see through the dark half of every orbit and detect all those smaller objects, closing the loop on both of its current limitations.
Baumann calls SpaceX's platform “very complementary to TraCSS,” pointing out that Stargaze is largely confined to LEO while TraCSS draws on a Space Force catalog that reaches past GEO and catches objects too small for star trackers. SpaceX sends Starlink ephemerides to TraCSS several times a day. “I view it as two complementary systems that are working to coordinate together,” he said.
Stargaze cannot replace radar. Optical sensors measure where an object appears in the sky; radar measures both direction and distance, which is why radar remains the workhorse for LEO orbit determination. And because Stargaze's sensors ride on Starlink satellites, its view stops at the shells those satellites occupy. Those limits leave ground radar with a job Stargaze can't poach just yet.
The Real Cost of Free
On its Stargaze page, SpaceX argues that hundreds of thousands of flights a day avoid each other because aircraft broadcast position and flight plan, and that spacecraft operators should meet the same minimal standard. SpaceX’s analogy is right in principle and wrong in practice. Aviation broadcasts work because ADS-B is a mandated open standard any receiver on Earth can decode, not a platform any one carrier owns. Operators reach SpaceX's data by joining SpaceX's platform.
Two agreements govern this data, and neither is public. DARPA planned to take Space-WATCH observations under a license negotiated with each supplier, while operators joining Stargaze sign terms of service that are not public either. Net: the government paid $107.7M for the sensing behind a service whose rules it does not set and cannot see.
Congress Was Warned
Lawmakers commissioned a study themselves in the FY2020 appropriations bill. The 2020 National Academy of Public Administration report that came back named OSC as the agency best suited to run space traffic management. It urged Congress to fund it without delay, and cautioned that “there cannot be, and should not be, a stand-alone provider of STM services.”
The panel also predicted the failure mode: companies operating in a policy vacuum would move to set the rules themselves, in ways that reinforced their own advantages.
Six years after that report, TraCSS’s fate is uncertain, and Stargaze is hard-launching the government’s wish-list with a slick UI/API, staging sandbox, direct-contact directory for collision avoidance, sub-minute screening, and pre-flight maneuver modeling.
Appropriators can fund a program like Space-WATCH or TraCSS. But they cannot legislate it into being faster than a commercial vendor with 30,000 star trackers already on orbit.
And they’ve yet to budget for when the free tier stops being free.
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