Collisions in space are a growing concern. A plan to address it is reigniting a turf war

This composite image of exposures taken over 30 minutes on an early June night shows a satellite-filled sky. (Alan Dyer/VWPics/Universal Images Group/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

As the number of satellites orbiting Earth continues to grow, so does the risk of crashes between these spacecraft. Such collisions could create fields of debris, potentially rendering entire areas of orbit useless.

Objects in space have crashed, or had near misses, in the past. But while such incidents remain extremely rare, there are now more than 18,000 active and inactive satellites in orbit — a number that has more than doubled in the past six years alone. And the vast majority of them are located in the same region, low-Earth orbit, where the increased congestion is making collisions statistically more likely.

Now, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is considering a new set of rules, which is largely supported by the industry, that would “modernize” the approval process for satellites and create new “space safety” provisions. Specifically, the rules would require satellite operators to share real-time tracking data so that space traffic managers can gain a more holistic understanding of where objects are in orbit. Historically, it has been dangerously difficult to predict potential collisions.

But while the proposed FCC rules themselves are not widely objectionable, they are reigniting a turf war over who gets to call the shots on space.

The FCC has been the de facto satellite regulator for decades because of its authority to manage spectrum, or the radio waves that allow data to be beamed wirelessly from space or aircraft. But as the commercial space industry has boomed, lawmakers have sought to give space regulatory authority to the U.S. Department of Commerce instead. Their argument is that Commerce could handle oversight of the sector and work closely with companies to ensure the U.S. space industry remains globally competitive.

Officials on both sides of the aisle have shown support for the switch. In fact, the two ranking members on the House Science Committee — Republican Brian Babin and Democrat Zoe Lofgren — sent a letter to the FCC in February urging the commission to abandon or alter the new rules. They argued that federal law “contains no clear congressional authorization empowering the FCC to regulate space safety, space traffic management, or broader non-communications space operations.”

The FCC has not issued a public response to the letter nor has it responded to requests for comment from CNN.

The commission could adopt the space traffic rules anyway. The FCC is slated to vote to adopt the new rules on Wednesday.

When reached for comment, Republican House Science Committee staff on Tuesday said Babin and Lofgren had sent a follow-up letter to FCC chair Brendan Carr, urging him to postpone the vote and begin discussing the matter with lawmakers.

The regulatory conundrum highlights the rapidly shifting dynamics in the space industry: As companies such as SpaceX, OneWeb and Amazon deploy hundreds to thousands of new satellites, questions remain about who has the authority to police them.

Seeing the skies

While Congress and U.S. President Donald Trump have signalled their desire to have the Department of Commerce take over the role of space traffic cop and regulator, those efforts have been in limbo in part because of uncertainty about how much money will be appropriated to allow the agency to take up the task. The Department of Commerce has not responded to a request for comment from CNN.

“We’re in a gray area right now,” Tom Stroup, president of the Satellite Industry Association, told CNN. “Not a lot had been done with respect to space sustainability” or preventing in-space collisions.

And, Stroup added, time is of the essence. The industry has truly massive plans: SpaceX, for example, intends to launch a constellation of up to 1 million satellites as it seeks to deploy orbital data centres.

When it comes to new space sustainability rules like the one the FCC is considering, “one could argue that should have been done five years ago,” Stroup said.

“One thing is clear: We can’t wait another five years,” he added.

SpaceX has worked closely with the Space Situational Awareness, or SSA, community and says it takes space traffic management seriously. But the FCC rules would create an industry-wide standard, better enforcing best practices.

And there is precedent for the FCC to step in and help nudge the industry toward being better stewards of space. For example, in 2022, the FCC implemented a new rule requiring operators to dispose of dead satellites within five years, aimed at ensuring defunct spacecraft would not remain spaceborne garbage for decades to come. (House Science Committee leadership also opposed that rule, arguing that the commission lacks the proper authority.)

A couple of years later, the FCC also began requiring operators to disclose whether their satellites were designed to burn up in the atmosphere at the end of their lives or if the spacecraft were likely to survive the trip home and hit the ground.

“Orbital debris degrades the environment for all future space activity,” then-FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement in 2024. “So the policies we put in place to address it matter.”

The rules the FCC is set to consider Wednesday, however, aim to solve a long-running issue in the world of space traffic management.

Right now, objects in space are tracked with telescopes and radar operated by governments and private companies. But those systems have blind spots. And while companies typically have real-time location data for their operational satellites, they have historically been hesitant to share that information with third parties.

That’s likely because, in the past, companies have been worried about privacy issues or divulging proprietary data. But the industry has come a long way in recent years, said Adam Marsh, the vice-president of technical solutions at LeoLabs, a commercial SSA company.

Marsh said most satellite operators are now comfortable sharing live tracking data. But the new FCC rules take another key step by making the data-sharing mandatory and requiring that the information is “accurate and timely.”

Providing quality data is essential, the FCC argues. If SSA systems are forced to rely only on their limited observational data, they could remain blind to sudden or subtle movements that the operators can track with ease. Then, when there is a chance that two things in space might collide, experts have a difficult time hashing out exactly how high the risk is.

The new FCC rules aim to prevent that scenario. And they ask satellite operators to share the data with government SSA operators or specific satellite-tracking companies to be identified by the FCC.

One such company that could be identified as an SSA provider by the FCC is LeoLabs, which since 2016 has used a network of ground-based radars to scan the skies for potential satellite collisions. LeoLabs already collects real-time data from willing satellite operators.

Exactly how the new rules will be implemented and how the FCC will identify specific SSA companies remains to be seen, Marsh said. But LeoLabs welcomes this move, saying that creating safeguards in space is growing in importance as more satellites arrive in orbit.

“We’re all witnessing what’s going on, and the fact that the growth is very immense — we all just want to be on the page of being safer,” Marsh said.

“It’s all one big neighbourhood up there,” he added, “so something goes wrong, it impacts everybody.”

Modernizing space rules

It’s not clear what would happen if the Department of Commerce began making conflicting or competing space safety rules of its own.

But for now, the satellite operators themselves are largely in favor of the FCC’s proposal.

“I think what is being outlined is a great first step, and I think we should, as a community, try to better understand what else could be done,” said Derek Huerta, a former Starlink senior manager at SpaceX who now runs a startup called Eclipse Space.

And there’s another big bonus for the industry: The satellite tracking rules are tucked inside a 200-page document with sweeping regulatory reforms aimed at making it easier and cheaper to get satellites to space.

The processes in place today are outdated, the industry has long argued, and that has been a hurdle for satellite operators big and small. Arduous technical reviews, paperwork and rigid, step-by-step requirements can take months to work through.

Huerta remembers when he was a student at California Polytechnic State University in the early 2000s, for example, and a team of engineering students were seeking approval to launch a small, experimental satellite that would test new energy dissipation technology.

The process was maddening, Huerta said, and took him and his classmates over a year.

The system was designed to serve the satellite market as it looked decades ago, Stroup said, when “the industry launched a few satellites a year.”

Today’s market is far different, however, with the vast majority of new devices coming from megaconstellation operators such as SpaceX, OneWeb, Planet Labs or Amazon, which aim to put thousands of small satellites in low-Earth orbit.

The new FCC rules aim to move away from the old, “prescriptive” way of approving satellites — in which the FCC has required companies to use specific paperwork and analysis to show how they would meet safety standards — in favor of “performance based” rules that give companies more flexibility with how they prove they can meet those standards.

This change, the FCC says, will allow the commission to “dramatically accelerate” the licensing process. The streamlined approach will be “a big win for smaller startups and smaller companies,” Huerta said, not just the SpaceXs and Amazons of the world.

What’s more, the licensing process has been prohibitively expensive, Huerta explained, and the new rules would reduce that barrier to entry.

“There’s these bonds that you would have to post if you were part of a processing grant,” he said. “You have to put up US$10 million or so, and coming up with $10 million is pretty easy when you’re Amazon or a SpaceX. But as a lowly entrepreneur just trying to start out, that could literally be all the money the company has raised.”

Overall, Huerta said, the new FCC rules will be “fantastic” for the burgeoning industry.

“It just makes things a lot more clear cut and makes it so that you can actually plan around getting your licenses,” he said.

Stroup added that this rulemaking effort from the FCC is a clear indication of how activities in space are growing in national importance.

“With the growth of the industry comes this recognition of the importance of space and the tremendous opportunities that are being created,” Stroup said. That rapid growth can create issues, Stroup acknowledged, “but you could say these are problems that are worth solving.”

By Jackie Wattles, CNN