OSC Announces Awardees of the Commercial COLA Gap Pathfinder
On June 11, 2025, the NOAA Office of Space Commerce announced the selection of awardees for the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) program’s Commercial Collision Avoidance (COLA) Gap Pathfinder effort, originally posted on the Global Data Marketplace.
Together, these awards amount to a total of $10.1M.
“These awards mark meaningful progress toward enhancing U.S. space situational awareness capabilities for safer space operations in support of industry through focused commercial engagement,” said Janice Starzyk, Acting Director of the Office of Space Commerce.
The “COLA gap” represents a critical challenge in space situational awareness (SSA): the period immediately after launch when traffic coordination services have uncertain or incomplete positional data on newly deployed satellites. This creates a window of elevated collision risk, in which reliable screening for conjunctions is limited — posing challenges for satellite operators, launch providers, and space traffic coordinators alike.
Through this pathfinder, the Office of Space Commerce sought innovative commercial approaches to address this operational blind spot. After evaluating a strong pool of proposals from across the SSA industry, the program has awarded contracts to a select group of vendors whose collective capabilities show considerable potential to close the COLA gap and improve safety during the earliest phases of satellite deployment.
The awardees are:
Data Providers:
- LeoLabs
- Slingshot Aerospace
- Maxar Intelligence Inc
- Turion Space
- Silentium Defense
Orbital Determination Provider:
- GMV Innovating Solutions Inc
Data Quality Monitors:
- SpaceNav
- a.i. Solutions
“We’re encouraged by the energy, expertise, and creativity we saw across all the proposals,” said Dmitry Poisik, TraCSS Program Manager. “We sincerely thank every company that submitted for their contributions to this important challenge. The selected awardees represent a diverse range of technical solutions, and we’re excited to work closely with them to evaluate these capabilities for future integration with TraCSS.”
The Commercial COLA Gap Pathfinder is one in a series of targeted, agile acquisitions under the TraCSS program that support the implementation of Space Policy Directive-3 and the Office’s mission to foster safe and sustainable commercial space activity. Past pathfinder efforts have included the “Consolidated Pathfinder,” the “SSA Data Quality Monitoring Pathfinder,” and the “Improved O/O Ephemeris Pathfinder.”
The results from these pathfinder efforts are shaping how TraCSS is leveraging — and will continue to leverage — commercial SSA providers’ capabilities to advance the goals of Space Policy Directive-3.