This RFI asks specifically what the US Gov should provide as basic SSA Basic Services while leaving Advanced Services to the commercial market. Apparently anyone can respond as I will. As you may know the public side of US SSA is moving from space-track to NOAA.
I’m surprised nobody is concerned that TLEs aren’t in the RFI. They can disappear.
Maybe you can explain what it is there.
I have read it several times and suspect that because I am not American and American is not my native language it is not clear to me.
1 Like
Hi Jan,
this Request For Information asks the public what Free basic services the US Office of Space Commerce will offer. The RFI asks about services but no so much on products. space-track.org will disappear, at least for public use. TLEs are not in the list of suggested products and TLEs are very important to the Open Source and Fledgling SSA companies. TLE’s have essentially been replaced by GP (General Perturbations) with a JSON format, also not listed, nor are OEMs.
I plan to respond and suggest that they consider offering basic products such as TLE (to be deprecated), GP, and OEM. I think folks from other countries can respond to this RFI, and i do encourage US Citizens to reply.
3 Likes
Most open-source space systems rely on the US Gov. TLE for some aspect of SSA. satnogs gets data from celestrak, who in turn gets data from space-track. The TLE is going away in the near future because the data field for the catalog number has become too large. However, Space Force adopted the Alpha-5 TLE that will accommodate the larger numbers. However, users are urged to go with the General Perturbation (GP) data type in JSON.
There is no current US Gov decision on what space catalog services should continue being free or even available. This RFI, open to all, is one of the US Gov attempts in finding what needs to be in the free catalog.
1 Like