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1/ The @napawash study directed by Congress on how to implement space traffic management under SPD-3 is out. Thread with some of the highlights: https://www.napawash.org/studies/academy-studies/united-states-department-of-commerce-office-of-space-commerce
2/ Overall task was to assess which of four federal agencies should have the civil SSA and STM mission
3/ Report notes that, as many of us have said, there is no clear-cut choice for this and every agency has pros and cons
4/ That said, the NAPA study finds the Office of Space Commerce is the best fit out of all the available options, which backs up what the Trump Admin proposed in SPD-3, but also says they will need to work with several other agencies
5/ This chart shows how close some of the scoring was and AST probably could have scored even higher given slightly different criteria and/or weighting
6/ The study also endorsed elevating OSC to a higher level, similar to the Bureau of Space Commerce also outlined in SPD-3
7/ Finally, the study made a clear, urgent call to Congress to give OSC the authorities and budget necessary to start building a civil SSA/STM capability
8/ The report also talks about key areas of Earth orbit as Common Pool Resources (CPRs)
9/ Note that several years ago some colleagues and I wrote a series of papers looking at how Elinor Ostrom's work on sustainable governance of CPRs might apply to space: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265964612000604 and https://swfound.org/media/205662/iac-13-e342-fsss-paper.pdf
10/ The NAPA report extends our work by explicitly using Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Design (IAD) framework to examine space governance and the need for STM
11/ The NAPA report affirms that basic SSA/STM data are a public good and that the government should play a role in disseminating them to the community
12/ But the report also strongly backed govt purchase/use of commercial SSA data, giving this vision for what a near-term STM system might look like
/13 All said, I think it's a really good report that confirms and adds to the existing research. There should be no excuse for Congress to act ASAP and implement SPD-3 so we can start to move forward on this important issue /fin
