Each year, SpaceNews selects the people, programs and technologies that have most influenced the direction of the space industry in the past year. Started in 2017, our annual celebration recognizes outsized achievements in a business in which no ambition feels unattainable. This year’s winners of the 8th annual SpaceNews Icon Awards were announced and celebrated at a Dec. 2 ceremony hosted at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. Congratulations to all of the winners and finalists.
In 2018, the first Trump administration directed the development of a civil space traffic management system led by the Department of Commerce, taking over work that had for years been handled by the Defense Department. In 2025, that effort reached the finish line following years of procedural and financial challenges. It came even as the second Trump administration proposed canceling the program instead.
The development of the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, got off to a slow start because of a lack of funding from Congress and skepticism that the Commerce Department was the best place to handle space traffic coordination. A 2020 report by the National Academy of Public Administration, concluded Commerce was the best agency for the job rather than NASA or the FAA. But it wasn’t until fiscal year 2023 that the Office of Space Commerce received the budget increase it needed to accelerate work on TraCSS.
Once funding started, the office moved quickly to scale up and start putting TraCSS together. Leaders took on an agile development approach commonly used in software development to TraCSS, focusing first on making a basic “minimum viable product” and then incorporating new features and changes based on feedback.
Besides the technical work needed to set up TraCSS, the Office of Space Commerce also had to build up relationships with the Space Force, which would be supplying the data for the system, as well as with companies that could also offer data and services. That included making sure that the basic and free space safety services that TraCSS would offer, such as notices of potential collisions, did not compete with more advanced offerings from those companies.
In September 2024, the office started phase 1.0 of TraCSS, a beta test involving several satellite operators. Over time, more companies joined the test, including SpaceX, by far the largest satellite operator in the world with its Starlink constellation. The office started adding features to TraCSS in preparation for entering full service in early 2026.
All that has taken place despite political headwinds in the last year. A move by the Commerce Department to lay off probationary, or new, employees in February temporarily included the TraCSS program manager, Dmitry Poisik, until he was brought back several days later. The fiscal year 2026 budget proposal for NOAA, which includes the Office of Space Commerce, proposed terminating TraCSS entirely, arguing private companies could handle the work.
The commercial space industry has rallied behind TraCSS, saying it is essential to safe space operations. House and Senate appropriations bills would restore some of TraCSS budget. That’s enough, Poisik said in August, to do the “basic mission” of TraCSS, which has become more essential as the number of satellites in orbit grows.
This article first appeared in the December 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.