WASHINGTON — The Office of Space Commerce has selected Parsons Corporation to develop key elements of its civil space traffic coordination system.
The office, located within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said March 18 it awarded a $15.5 million contract to Parsons to provide system integration and cloud management services for its Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS. The one-year contract includes an option for another year that would increase its total value to $26.9 million.
Under the contract, Parsons will develop what the office calls the “software backbone” for TraCSS, incorporating both the OASIS repository for space situational awareness data and the SKYLINE application layer. The contract also covers cybersecurity, cloud management and system administration.
“We look forward to leveraging Parsons’ expertise across the national security sector and our operational experience in space domain awareness supporting flight safety of all active satellites on orbit to support the Office of Space Commerce as it takes over this crucial mission from the Department of Defense,” Carey Smith, president and chief executive of Parsons, said in a statement about the TraCSS award.
The award to Parsons is part of the office’s efforts to build up TraCSS, which will be developed in a phased approach with an initial operating capability ready by the end of the current fiscal year. TraCSS will eventually take over civil space traffic coordination services from the Defense Department, as directed by Space Policy Directive 3 in 2018.
“We’re very much in the process of building the next generation space traffic coordination system, and we’ll be relying heavily both on commercial partners in the U.S. and on our allies and friends around the world,” Richard DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, said during a panel discussion at the Satellite 2024 conference March 19.
The award to…
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