‘The awkward, teenage phase’ of space sustainability

Dmitry Poisik surveyed the room. “How many of you guys represent owner/operators?” he asked a crowd of a few dozen people attending a side session at the SmallSat 2025 Conference in Salt Lake City on Aug. 11.

No one raised their hands. That didn’t seem to surprise Poisik, the program manager for the Office of Space Commerce’s Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, the system set to take over civil space traffic coordination responsibilities from the U.S. Space Force in January.

“One of the big unknowns I have as a program manager for the last year or so is that I have no idea if the companies even know we’re coming,” he said. He noted he mostly hears from companies that offer space situational awareness data and services that could be incorporated into TraCSS.

For several years, one of the biggest concerns about space traffic management and space sustainability has involved megaconstellations of thousands of satellites. The size of those systems prompted fears they would require an unmanageably large number of maneuvers to avoid other objects. That would lead to collisions, creating debris that posed even greater hazards in low Earth orbit.

Those fears have not come to pass, at least not yet. SpaceX now has more than 8,000 satellites in orbit, a number that grows by a few dozen every week. Those satellites have turned out to be good neighbors in LEO, with automated processes to perform collision avoidance maneuvers to maintain safe operations for themselves and others.

However, the growth of newcomers to space, from universities to startups to new national space agencies, remains an issue. Without the experience or knowledge of established space operators, even a few smallsats from such new actors could pose a risk to space sustainability, particularly when there are limited regulations.

“We’re in the awkward teenager phase right now,” said Andrew Faiola, commercial director for Astroscale U.K., during another side session at the conference two days later. That session was organized by the Secure World Foundation, which published the second edition of its Handbook for New Actors in Space last year to provide emerging satellite operators with insights into topics like space sustainability.

The handbook is a compendium of best practices and some national-level rules regarding space sustainability, he said, “but we’re in this phase of lots of good ideas and lots of good momentum, but regulation is trailing behind.”

Some degree of regulation, he and other panelists argued, is needed to ensure that new entrants, flying their first satellites, operate with the same degree of safety expected of experienced operators with hundreds or thousands of spacecraft.

There is movement in that direction, like the European Union Space Act released in June whose provisions include rules governing post-mission disposal of satellites. “By 2030, we could have laws where, if you operate in the EU, you must talk about your deorbiting practices, your sustainability practices,” said Daria Filichkina, chief operating officer at AstroAgency, a strategic communications and market intelligence company.

She acknowledged, though, that one challenge is compliance, both with varying rules and guidelines across nations as well as varying expertise among various operators.

“Compliance has to be equal for all actors,” she argued. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a startup or a prime, you still have to comply equally to the standards. Navigating that can be a little tricky.”

Poisik, who was also on the panel, said this requires individual operators to do their share. “Solutions are going to come from small, individual efforts by countries, by companies,” he said, particularly given the lack of global rules. “Everybody just takes responsibility.”

Those efforts, he said, rest on the availability of accurate orbital information, which is where TraCSS fits in. “A lot of these smaller users and operators don’t know about TraCSS,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out our outreach strategy to make sure they do.”

That strategy included the earlier side session about TraCSS at the conference. In that section, he made a plea to attendees. “If you run across one of those owner/operators, help us get the word out that a big change is coming in January.”

This article first appeared in the September 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.