LeoLabs lands interagency contract to feed TraCSS and track adversarial spacecraft

TAMPA, Fla. — LeoLabs said Dec. 9 it won an interagency contract to provide space-surveillance data for the U.S. government, supporting adversarial spacecraft monitoring and the TraCSS orbital traffic coordination platform due to enter full service early next year.

The California-based space tracker is providing its full public catalog under the six-month contract, covering nearly 25,000 objects in low Earth orbit, as well as radar observations, object state updates and maneuver-detection data.

The Space Force’s Joint Commercial Operations cell will use the data for threat assessments, while the Office of Space Commerce (OSC) is evaluating how to integrate it with TraCSS (Traffic Coordination System for Space), which aims to combine government and commercial insights to improve spaceflight safety.

TraCSS is an evolution of the Defense Department’s Space-Track.org, offering basic space situational awareness (SSA) data and services to civil and commercial space operators for free to coordinate operations and avoid collisions.

A LeoLabs spokesperson said the contract will run through mid-March 2026, with opportunities to extend.

“We hope this award is the first step toward LeoLabs becoming the foundational, commercial data source for the U.S. Government’s Space Traffic Management and Space Domain Awareness missions,” the spokesperson said via email.

Pennsylvania-based space-tracking rival Comspoc said OSC’s funding constraints are holding back diverse, long-term operational awards.

The Office of Management and Budget reduced OSC’s FY25 funding from $65 million to $37 million, Comspoc SSA solutions lead Jim Cooper said, and FY26 appropriations are still unresolved.

He said the company “strongly supports fully funding OSC so it can effectively engage commercial partners, operationalize their capabilities, and leverage their innovation to strengthen the nation’s SSA capabilities.”

TraCSS upgrades

A beta TraCSS service was launched last year with a handful of operators, which as of September included Amazon, Intelsat, Iridium, Maxar, OneWeb, Planet and SpaceX.

In June, OSC awarded LeoLabs and other SSA providers contracts to improve TraCSS capabilities during the high-risk period immediately after launch.

LeoLabs’ overall U.S. government bookings have soared more than 180% since 2024 to address escalating threats in increasingly crowded orbits, according to the company, with $29.4 million in contract awards secured in the year-to-date.

Other government contracts include a NASA Space Act Agreement to evaluate LeoLabs’ data for conjunction assessment missions, and two U.S. Space Force innovation awards to advance its next-generation radars. 

The funding supports a new Ultra High Frequency radar in the Indo-Pacific region and a software upgrade to enable its mobile Scout radar to detect and track foreign launches.

“As of now, the [recently awarded interagency] license is limited to OSC and JCO use,” the LeoLabs spokesperson said. “However, we’re seeing demand from other U.S. Government agencies to further expand licensing rights.”