Commerce Department budget proposal revives concerns about TraCSS

WASHINGTON — A budget proposal for the Department of Commerce raises new doubts about the future of a civil space traffic management system under development there.

A high-level fiscal year 2027 budget proposal released by the department April 3 included $11 million for the Office of Space Commerce, now located in the Departmental Management account of the budget. The office, previously part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was moved to directly report to the secretary of commerce after an executive order in August 2025.

The budget document does not provide any details on how that funding would be allocated, and the department has yet to release a more thorough congressional budget justification. Department spokespersons did not respond to questions about the Office of Space Commerce budget.

The fiscal year 2026 budget proposal, though, requested a similar amount for the office, $10 million. That proposal did not include any funding for the office’s work on the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, a civil space traffic coordination system the office has been developing.

TraCSS had accounted for most of the office’s budget, which was $65 million in 2024. House and Senate appropriators worked to reverse the cuts in the 2026 spending bills.

Industry sources interpreted the $11 million request for the Office of Space Commerce in 2027 as another attempt by the White House Office of Management and Budget to cancel or severely curtail TraCSS. In the 2026 proposal, NOAA cited delays in the development of TraCSS and argued that the private sector could instead provide space traffic coordination services.

Work has continued on TraCSS, although the system has not yet started full operations. In February, the Office of Space Commerce announced the creation of a “waitlist” for satellite operators interested in testing the system. “As the system moves into a full production environment, TraCSS will use this waitlist to invite spacecraft operators to onboard onto the system,” the office stated, but did not provide a schedule for doing so.

TraCSS is an implementation of the first Trump administration’s Space Policy Directive (SPD) 3, which called on the Commerce Department to establish a civil space traffic management system. A space policy executive order in December, though, modified SPD-3 by removing language that required the department to make basic space safety information available free of charge.

At the Goddard Space Science Symposium in March, administration officials said that the edits to the policy did not mean that they planned to charge user fees for TraCSS, but would allow them to consider doing so.

“It didn’t say go do this,” Taylor Jordan, assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction and acting director of the Office of Space Commerce, said of potential user fees. “It eliminated the words, so it gives us the flexibility to go look at that.”

Jordan has not otherwise talked much publicly about TraCSS since being named to lead the office in December. In a March 25 speech at the Satellite 2026 conference where he announced a new proposal for mission authorization of novel space activities, he took several questions from the audience submitted electronically but avoided questions about TraCSS.

Some in industry speculated that the Commerce Department might seek to fund TraCSS through user fees rather than standard appropriations but cautioned it may be difficult to do so.