Blue Origin’s new Glenn Rocket fell into orbit after launching from the Kennedy Passion Center from the Kennedy Passion Center on January 16, 2025 from the Kennedy Passion Center from the Kennedy Passion Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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According to people familiar with the matter, the Trump administration fired a system that is building a system to manage space satellite traffic this week, weakening the desperately needed efforts advocated by the U.S. space industry and the president’s first administration, according to people familiar with the matter.
About one-third of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 25-person Space Trade Office, a little-known agency that ended several hours of notice Thursday after the termination.
Their termination could undermine efforts to complete essentially a space-space transportation coordination system, which is currently operating in the pilot phase as global demand for critical satellite services grows, which will dramatically increase the number of spacecraft in Earth’s orbit.
A NOAA spokesperson declined to comment on personnel matters. The layoffs were among hundreds of employees fired at NOAA on Thursday, which also provided U.S. government weather forecasts and hurricane warnings.
One of the sources said that space traffic coordination system Dmitry Poisik was one of the employees who were fired. He could not be contacted to comment.
The personnel who cut space traffic plans are currently warning satellite operators that potential collisions with debris or other spacecraft have caused years of effort to migrate to those alerts starting from the Pentagon and could cause confusion among early users of the system, two sources said.
Donald Trump, who served as president in 2018, issued a space policy directive calling on the Space Business Office to build its own traffic management system, acknowledging an increasingly crowded orbital environment.
Elon Musk’s government efficiency efforts have led to thousands of layoffs in the federal government, undermining government actions across the country. Musk, who leads Space Company SpaceX, has long criticized space regulations for being too slow and outdated.
“These are like space traffic controllers, which handle space traffic coordination to prevent collisions,” one of the sources said. A collision notification is an alert that a satellite can collide with another object in space.
“We’re not talking dozens of them every year. We’re talking about thousands of people,” the source said. “It’s like the chicken game there.”
The layoffs also subvert the agency’s core capabilities of licensed commercial image satellites. By Friday, companies seeking permission or raising regulatory issues by email met a reply stating that NOAA lawyers would handle all of these communications, according to an email seen by Reuters.
“This is a temporary arrangement that addresses the continuity of operations, as no senior staff remains in the office due to effective reductions,” the email reads.
The shooting of one of the most important space permitting agencies in the United States was attacked at a specific time in the booming U.S. space industry, and has long pushed for a more flexible, streamlined satellite regulation process, a bipartisan driving force for lawmakers and agent leaders.
But the entire space industry and U.S. government sources and other individuals who spoke with Reuters could trigger a lot of delays that would get spacecraft approval for launch.
The Federal Aviation Administration signed a rocket payload and could not approve the launch of satellites requiring NOAA license without obtaining a NOAA license.
