US Military grants SpaceX restricted space tracking data access

The Map in the Locked Drawer

There is a woman (I do not know her name, but she works at every small satellite company in this country) whose job is to keep a few dozen spacecraft from colliding with things she cannot fully see. She has her own telescopes, or rents time on someone else’s. She has the public catalogue, which is good but not complete. She does her arithmetic, files her maneuver plans, and lives with the margin of error that comes from knowing only part of what is up there. This month she learned that the US military has given SpaceX access to restricted space tracking data, the part she has never been allowed to see. Her work has not become impossible. It has become a different kind of work.

That difference is what I want to examine, because it is easy to miss.

The first instinct is to treat this as a story about SpaceX, about a large company growing larger, a founder with friends, a corporation creeping toward control of the sky. People who fear that have reason to, and the national security worries are not foolish. But they put the trouble in the wrong place. A company that receives a valuable thing is doing what companies do. The trouble begins earlier, when knowledge of where objects are in orbit, knowledge that matters to everyone who flies there, is put in a locked drawer and handed out one key at a time.

Consider what the drawer does to the woman’s day. Before, her energy ran in one direction: better sensors, better software, better judgment about when to fire a thruster. Her competitor at SpaceX was solving the same problem with the same partial picture, only at greater scale. They were racing, and a race is a good thing for everyone downstream of it. Now the race has a gate in it, and the gate is in an office she cannot enter. The rational thing for her firm is no longer to build a better telescope. It is to hire someone who knows how to ask for a key. Her company’s engineers will spend fewer hours on orbits and more hours on applications, and there is no line on any budget that records what they would have built instead.

The strongest argument on the other side deserves to be stated fairly. SpaceX operates more satellites than anyone else. If any operator needs the fullest picture to avoid collisions, it is the one with the most objects in the sky, and a collision there would scatter debris that endangers everybody, the woman included. On this view the military has not granted a favor. It has made orbit safer for all of us by giving the best data to the operator most likely to cause a catastrophe without it. There may be other plain explanations too: perhaps SpaceX already holds the clearances and secure systems that make such sharing practical, and the others simply have not been vetted yet. I cannot tell from the facts available which reasoning governed the decision, and I will not pretend to.

But follow the safety argument where it leads. If accurate tracking data prevents collisions, then every operator’s ignorance is a hazard to every other operator. The woman’s satellites, steered half-blind, are a danger to SpaceX’s satellites. The logic that justifies opening the drawer for one company argues for opening it for all, or for explaining precisely which pieces must stay shut and why. A safety measure that reaches one firm is not yet a safety measure. Right now it is a privilege that has borrowed a safety measure’s clothes.

And privileges have a way of becoming permanent, because the people holding them build on them. SpaceX’s engineers will design routines around data no one else has. Those routines will become a real advantage, then a dependency, and then an argument that the arrangement cannot be disturbed without risk. Meanwhile the drawer’s keeper gains something too: every operator in American orbit now has reason to stay on good terms with whoever holds the key. Fear of corporate control is reasonable. It misses the subtler change, which is that the companies have been given a new master to please.

The frontier I grew up hearing about was dangerous because nobody had a good map. Nobody wished for a frontier where the map existed and the government decided who could look at it.

Somewhere tonight, the woman will run her conjunction analysis and see a fuzzy smear of probability where a sharper picture exists. She will fire her thruster a little early, to be safe, and spend fuel she did not need to spend, shortening her satellite’s life by some small amount. No one will ever list that fuel as a cost of the decision. It is one.