The Defense Department has agreed to give SpaceX exclusive access to the government’s most classified space tracking data, according to a dozen government and industry sources. A Space Force official said a contractual agreement has been signed between SpaceX and the Space Force’s Joint Commercial Operations Cell (JCO), trading company access to US Space Command’s (SPACECOM) most detailed version of its High Accuracy Catalog (HAC) of on-orbit objects in exchange for SpaceX giving the JCO data from its Stargaze star-tracking cameras.
It’s unclear when the arrangement began, but in recent days it has sparked concern in the US space tracking industry, sources said. The Space Force official said the high-fidelity information has been provided to SpaceX only for “internal use,” but industry and government sources told Breaking Defense it is not clear whether that data is permitted to play a background role in honing the accuracy of products and analysis SpaceX provides to non-military space operators — potentially undercutting the market.
Barbara Golf, head of JCO, referred a question to Space Force Space Systems Command, which oversees JCO acquisition. Neither the Space Force nor SpaceX responded to multiple inquiries about the deal.
Jon Herman, SpaceX senior director for Starlink constellation engineering, was asked directly about the purported deal, the data’s value to the company, and its terms of use during a panel at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference in Hawaii last week. He did not address the deal specifically, but explained why the data is helpful. SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are “bad at seeing the small stuff,” he said, and therefore “radar data is an extremely valuable tool to supplement Stargaze.”
Stargaze currently uses about 30,000 star-tracking cameras mounted on Starlink satellites to keep tabs on the heavens in low Earth orbit (LEO), according to Herman. “We detect objects that are down to about a meter/half a meter in size, which means that we can see more than 80 percent of the Space Force catalog that is below 600 kilometers (about 373 miles),” he told the AMOS conference on Sept. 17.
Most current military and commercial radar and telescopes based on the ground can see and routinely track objects down to about 10 centimeters in LEO. Herman said the advantage of Stargaze is that the cameras can take “tens to hundreds” of pictures of an object in a given period of time, which allows better tracking over time of an object’s orbital path.
The star-tracker observations are entered into a database that catalogs objects seen, and then processed to create a picture of what is in space where and when. For SpaceX, this allows it to keep its roughly 11,000 Starlink and Starshield satellites safe from collisions. That Stargaze catalog is not shared publicly, or with other operators who agree to share the whereabouts of their own satellites in exchange for services, Herman said. Rather, participating operators receive products and services, such as information about potential collisions, derived from it. There are about 100 operators currently “onboarded” with Stargaze, he added.
SPACECOM generates three types of space object database reports, each with a varying level of accuracy. The public version, on Space-Track.org, includes two-line elements (TLEs) showing a snapshot of a space object’s position and velocity at a certain time. A second version, the Special Perturbations-High Accuracy Catalog (SP-HAC), uses a higher fidelity mathematical model and is not public; access is provided to those companies and foreign governments that sign a sharing agreement with SPACECOM. The third and most precise version is embodied in Vector Covariance Messages (VCMs), which include volumetric margin of error bubbles, called covariances, that allow more precise plotting of potential collisions. In the past, those error bubbles have been classified and largely kept for internal military use.
According to industry sources, while some commercial entities have been given limited access to VCM data in the past, no other firm besides SpaceX has been given routine access to VCM and the error bubbles for non-government uses.
Sources: The Aviationist · Defense News