Libre Space Signs Agreement with US Space Command

All observation results submitted by stations to SatNOGS are licensed, by the station owner, under CreativeCommons Attribution-Share Alike (CC BY-SA). This happens as users agree to submit to network, see SatNOGS Network - About . As such it is public data and available to everyone to download and use (under this license). The agreement doesn’t change this (of course!).

Please check what data SatNOGS observations include. The agreement doesn’t change this either.

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Said that, I do agree that, based on our aspiration to be built on Open Governance as codified in the Libre Space Manifesto, the content of the agreement really should become public in the foreseeable future and LSF should publicly speak about this, as we do with any other projects.

In my view this agreement is something we should celebrate! It finally allows SatNOGS to officially redistribute the TLEs produced by USSPACECOM and fetched directly via space-track.org (“US->LSF->users”).

@pierros: Do you have any timeline when LSF will be able to release it or a statement about its content publicly? If not (or if the date is in the far future), can LSF speak about the general content? After all it is already signed for some months.

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No stations - no observations. At the moment, most stations are useless - most stations are located in the US and EU. And their observations duplicate each other.

Indeed, SatNOGS is lacking stations from some huge parts of the world, china & russia are two of them. But as far is I know this was also the case before the agreement. I’d love to discuss any problems or concerns for/by potential station owners in general in this new thread. Maybe you would like to recommend something for LSF to do to overcome issues.

It was already explained here why this agreement is a benefit for all SatNOGS users, the network was in part built utilizing the TLE data from US Space Command distributed via CelesTrak. Now this usage is officially recognized and we do not have to fear this still important source for TLEs to become unavailable anymore).

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This is not true at all. On large deployments we need areas of the world with dense station coverage to be able to do parallel tracking of multiple objects from the same launch. For what is worth: the density in EU and US is not even enough for many of the launches we track! :slight_smile:

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Hi, is there any update?

I just pinged them again.

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I am in the happy position to report that we can share the full text of the agreement publicly. Here it is:

USSPACECOM - Libre Space Foundation SSA-Sharing-Agreement - FINAL Signed 29 Jun 2021.pdf (357.8 KB)

Make special note of the last sentence in section 7.2.1 : “Derivative SSA data produced by Libre Space Foundation after processing USSPACECOM information are not subject to any limitations”. Since we release all our produced data with open licenses, this sentence is a huge win for the open data for space and a significant precedent for openness of orbital data. :partying_face:

Keep in mind that we also have an ODR in place for sharing the space-track.org catalog through SatNOGS.

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