SpaceX has disrupted the launch business with the Falcon 9 and the satellite communications business with Starlink. Now it may be taking aim at the emerging space situational awareness (SSA) field.<\/p>\n
In late January, SpaceX announced Stargaze, a new SSA service. Stargaze uses data from star tracker cameras on its Starlink satellites to track satellites and debris in low Earth orbit (LEO). The company says the nearly 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit can provide 30 million observations of objects each day.<\/p>\n
Since the number of objects in LEO currently number in the tens of thousands, that means each object could be detected hundreds of times a day, a quantum leap over the far less frequent detections made by ground-based telescopes and radars.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you know anything about SSA, that\u2019s extraordinary,\u201d said Marco Concha, flight dynamics engineering manager at Amazon Leo, just after the announcement. \u201cIf that\u2019s true, this is a game changer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stargaze could also be a threat to other SSA companies, though. SpaceX said it will offer Stargaze to other satellite operators for free, provided those operators are willing to share their ephemeris, or maneuver plans, for their satellites.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will be keeping my eye on the impacts this and similar free services will have on smaller companies that have paid-data models,\u201d said Gabriel Swiney of the Office of Space Commerce, which is developing the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, a civil space traffic coordination system.<\/p>\n
TraCSS will use data from commercial SSA providers, and Swiney noted at the SpaceCom Expo conference that his office has a mandate to help the SSA industry grow.<\/p>\n
There is one element missing from the discussion about the benefits and impacts of Stargaze: Are the data from it any good?<\/p>\n
A month after the SpaceX announcement, it\u2019s still not clear. SpaceX said it has performed a closed beta test of Stargaze with more than a dozen other operators, but has not disclosed those companies. SpaceX said it will open Stargaze to other operators in the spring.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen [Stargaze] came out, I thought it was really amazing, but at the same time I take pause,\u201d Moriba Jah, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, said of Stargaze during the 12th Annual Space Traffic Conference at the university in mid-February.<\/p>\n
The pause, he said, came from the lack of information about the service. \u201cWhere\u2019s the independent assessment of the stuff that SpaceX is putting out there?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n
He added his concern that the scale of Stargaze might make it the default SSA service. \u201cAnyone who refutes that will be challenged to provide the burden of evidence. That\u2019s a bad position for the space community.\u201d<\/p>\n
Others at the conference said it was incumbent on all SSA providers, not just SpaceX, to share information about the quality of their data.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to show our work to get confidence in commercial SSA,\u201d said Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow at LeoLabs.<\/p>\n
More SSA data is better, but there has to be a way to validate it, noted Kevin O\u2019Connell, a former director of the Office of Space Commerce. Simply combining data from various sources results in an answer \u201cno better than the worst piece of information in the chain,\u201d he warned.<\/p>\n
Instead, he advocated for deeper integration of the data, understanding when some sensors or systems provide more accurate results and only using them at those times.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe validation piece is a government piece,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cValidation and curation is an important role,\u201d agreed Stewart Bain, chief executive of<\/p>\n
NorthStar Earth & Space, a Canadian SSA company. He acknowledged that he had not thought much about who should do it, but \u201cthere\u2019s always a role for government.\u201d<\/p>\n
SpaceX is motivated to make Stargaze as accurate as possible since it is also a customer of the service. But more data, and more insight into the data, is needed, Jah said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI ask my students, how do you know you have the world\u2019s most accurate clock? The answer is you have hundreds of them,\u201d he said. \u201cIndependent observation is what lends itself to credibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
This article first appeared in the March 2026 issue of SpaceNews Magazine<\/p>\n
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