Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and debris mitigation can be seen as just “another high-end data analytics problem,” says Kevin O’Connell, of the Commerce Department.

House appropriators rejected Trump’s plan to put satellite regulation under the Commerce Department and chide Secretary Wilbur Ross for his refusal to testify on the 2020 budget request.

“I think it will be incumbent on governments pretty soon to force operators to have some way to get their  satellite out of the way [when it fails] and get it into a proper graveyard orbit,” says Michael Pollack, who does business development for Effective Space.