Brandon Karpf
When encryption meets enforcement. (Source: The CyberWire Daily Podcast)
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Brandon Karpf joins The CyberWire Daily Podcast with Dave Bittner and Maria Varmazis to explore how space safety depends on a fragmented patchwork of tracking systems and why a single source of orbital truth still doesn’t exist.
They discuss the Department of Commerce’s TraCSS effort, the rapid scale-up from thousands of objects to tens of thousands of satellites, and the explosion of daily conjunction alerts that make manual oversight impossible.
The conversation also examines the policy shift toward making traffic-management data broadly accessible, raising questions about data provenance, governance, and how commercial capabilities will shape strategic space operations.
Key topics
- Fragmented Space Awareness: No single authority tracks everything on orbit, leaving operators to stitch together partial data from governments and private firms.
- TraCSS And Governance: The Commerce Department-led system is positioned as a central hub, but funding, ownership, and scope remain unsettled.
- Alert Saturation: Conjunction warnings have surged into the hundreds of thousands per day, forcing automation and prioritization akin to cybersecurity SOCs.
- Strategic Transparency: Making orbital data widely available could improve safety, but it also reframes space situational awareness as a strategic asset.