Houston, we have a problem. Who’s controlling space traffic?

There’s always been a whole lot of objects flying around space, but people are launching more things into orbit than ever. Air traffic control towers handle flying objects down here, but who’s controlling all that traffic above the atmosphere?

The answer is complicated because numerous agencies, countries and more make sure things don’t collide.

And with the latest space race in full effect and many more space missions planned, managing the outer-space gridlock will become more important over the next several decades.

Space traffic control

 “There isn’t one sort of universal air traffic controller per se, right throughout the planet,” Jekan Thanga, associate professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona, told Straight Arrow.

SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA, Rocket Lab and more are all launching various things into space. And not in small numbers.

There are tens of thousands of satellites flying around our planet as well as the International Space Station and, of course, all the things that were already out there before humans figured out how to break into the final frontier.

So, who’s controlling all that traffic?

“That’s a very good question,” Roshan Eapen, associate professor of aerospace engineering at Penn State University, told Straight Arrow.

At this point, there are several players trying to navigate these machines, and occasionally humans, through space.

First there’s the U.S. Space Force.

“The Space Force has been keeping track of all the objects that are out there in space,” Eapen said. “That includes active satellites. That also includes spent rocket bodies and debris as well.”

But the Space Force has only been around for seven years. Before President Donald Trump created that branch, the agency doing most of that tracking was the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.

But in July 2026, NORAD’s catalog reached its limit of 99,999 objects and could no longer keep track.

Then there’s NASA Horizons and NOAA Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCCS. But those mostly just try to keep track of where things are and how they’re moving as opposed to controlling traffic.

Of course, the U.S. isn’t alone in the hobby of launching things into space.

China and Russia have been just as busy, and have agencies similar to the U.S. Space Force that monitor traffic.

“There’s a Chinese equivalent as well that I think is considered sizable in their capacity,” Thanga said.

While this is clearly a global issue, it’s also something the U.S. government is heavily involved in.

NASA has canceled plans for a lunar Gateway, which was a planned space station that would’ve orbited the moon and heavily increased space traffic. Instead, the plan is to set up a lunar base on the moon with boots on the lunar ground by the early 2030s.

“The United States has taken a de facto leadership position to maintain ‘law and order,’ and I think generally speaking, the world has gone with that because it’s been net positive for all spacefaring entities and organizations, and generally speaking they’re pretty cooperative, especially with space traffic issues,” Eapen said.

The concerns

While America has taken the lead, no one has crowned one centralized agency or entity as the chief traffic cop of space.

With thousands of objects hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour, there’s some inherent danger in that.

“There is definitely danger if you do not know what’s out there,” Eapen said. “It increases the chances of collision between two satellites. And in fact, if you look at many of the conjunction events that are being reported, there are probably 50-100 alerts being generated every day, maybe even more.”

Conjunction events are when celestial bodies closely approach each other. SpaceX has reported this happens with their Starlink satellites thousands of times each month.

There are also natural celestial bodies, some as small as a golf ball but some are much larger asteroids. They all must be monitored to keep space travel safe.

“We have early detection systems that actually are tracking asteroids as they are coming closer towards the Earth, or if they cross the lunar orbit, or if they come even close to the lunar orbit,” Eapen said. So, there are dedicated agencies that are looking at these specific different types of space objects, man-made or otherwise.”

Without a centralized system, the people watching the space traffic must be in constant communication with several others. That includes officials and scientists from other countries.

Objects in space are often moving faster than a bullet, which doesn’t leave a lot of time to correct course when something doesn’t look good.

“Quick reaction is perhaps not possible in the current system,” Thanga said. “They can make a prediction that this object is going to collide with another object one week before it occurs, and so they would make a telephone call to each operator to say, ’look, we’ve made an estimate here, and in the next week, we think your satellite and our satellite are going to crash into each other. Please try to make evasive action.’ And that’s sort of the current approach.”

When you’re trying to maneuver spacecraft, it’s not as simple as hitting the turn signal and changing lanes.

Experts say these decisions often need to be run up a chain of command, sometimes as high as the leader of whatever agency is having to make that decision.

Rarely do these decisions ever involve human life at this point. That can make some of these choices tougher since there’s not a clear choice to save a life.

Eapen said the three choices boil down to doing something, doing nothing or investigating further. All of those have downsides.

“If you do not maneuver and you end up hitting, you create debris,” he said. “If you end up maneuvering, but you were not going to hit, then you ended up wasting fuel, which reduces the lifespan of the satellite. And if you choose to investigate, then you are cutting it too close.”

As more things crash and create debris, there is concern over what’s called Kessler Syndrome. That’s a theoretical chain reaction in which collisions between space debris create more debris, triggering further collisions and potentially making certain orbits unusable.

The future

The number of launches across the globe keeps increasing and could even quadruple every year under a new policy.

Both experts Straight Arrow spoke with agreed that at some point, one centralized agency to monitor all this traffic might be necessary but would definitely be helpful.

“I think the concern is very real, with this uncontrolled space traffic,” Thanga said.

One issue will be finding the necessary number of people to monitor this traffic.

“One spacecraft operator or one analyst is responsible for maybe a subset of 20 or 40 satellites today,” Eapen said. “Maybe 10 years down the line or five years down the line, they are going to be responsible for much, much more than that.”

Being an air traffic controller and monitoring air traffic on Earth is certainly a difficult job. There are more than 14,000 of them in the U.S. and as many as 80,000 worldwide.

Those controllers go through rigorous training to qualify for the job. But that doesn’t mean they can just switch from 747s to satellites.

“The physics of air traffic versus space traffic is completely different,” Thanga said. “So, for people to do space traffic management, they would have to have degrees in astrodynamics, trajectory design, and so on.”

Finding aerospace engineers has also gotten tougher in the age of artificial intelligence.

Many earthlings have spent decades building systems and training to keep our skies from becoming chaotic.

Now humanity is building a new highway outside the atmosphere. And with the traffic only getting heavier, the rules of the road will eventually need to become clear.

“It’s an interesting time to see how this is going to play out and evolve,” Thanga said.

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