The Commerce Department could take over the U.S. military’s job of managing dangerous space junk within a year, Secretary Wilbur Ross said on Friday.
Commerce Department officials are already planning trips to military bases to figure out how to manage space traffic and advise the public on the tens of thousands of pieces of orbiting debris, a role the Pentagon has handled since the Cold War, Ross told House lawmakers.
President Trump issued a directive this week that shifts much of the responsibility over civilian space management to the Commerce Department, just as he is also pushing the military to create a separate Space Force military service.
“Hard to predict exactly what the timeline would be, but it’s probably something more or less on the order of a year to make a seamless transition between the two,” Ross said in testimony to a joint hearing by members of the House Armed Services and Science, Space and Technology committees.
The administration hopes the change will help stoke the burgeoning commercial space industry and relieve some pressure on the military. Ross said the number of U.S. space satellites is expected to grow from 800 to more than 15,000 over the next few years, and other nations are also racing into space.
The increasing number of satellites is fraught with danger due to the more than 20,000 softball-size or larger pieces of man-made space junk hurtling through orbit, Ross said.
“These objects fly around Earth at dangerous speeds of up to 17,500 miles per hour, about ten times the speed of a small bullet,” he said. “Even more concerning are the estimated 600,000 smaller objects that could still cause significant harm if a collision occurred.”
The top U.S. military official charged with monitoring the junk and providing information to the public said Friday that the Pentagon should not be in charge of space traffic management.
But the hand off to the Commerce Department needs to be done carefully, Gen. John Hyten, the leader of U.S. Strategic Command, said during his testimony to the joint hearing.
“As we go into this different sharing arrangement though, I think the first rule that comes to mind is the first rule of wing-walking, and that is you don’t let go of the strut until you have a good hold of the next strut, which means we can’t let loose of what we have now and what we are doing until we know what is on the other side,” Hyten said.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon will continue monitoring adversaries in space and collecting the kind of data needed for national security, he said.
“That will not change for as far as I can see into the future, because we have to know that information to defend ourselves against potential threats. That’s why we started doing this business back in the Cold War days to begin with, so we are going to continue that,” Hyten said. “But we don’t have to be the public face to the world. That’s what the new decision is, to have the Department of Commerce be the new public face to the world.”
