Space Situational Awareness: How The Aerospace Corporation Tracks Every Object in Orbit

Space Situational Awareness (SSA) — the ability to detect, track, characterize, and predict the behavior of every object in Earth orbit — has become one of the most strategically critical capabilities in modern national security, and The Aerospace Corporation sits at its technical core.

With over 27,000 tracked objects in Earth orbit (and hundreds of thousands of smaller debris fragments), the ability to distinguish active satellites from dead ones, predict conjunctions, and attribute unexpected maneuvers is now essential to military space operations. The Aerospace Corporation provides the independent technical analysis that informs U.S. Space Force decisions on satellite protection and debris avoidance.