With the decrease in launch and satellite manufacturing cost, within 10 years the number of active spacecrafts on orbit has reached 12,300 in the beginning of 2026, which is 7-fold increase in the past 10 years. The majority of the spacecrafts are in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), around 500 km altitude, leading to conjunctions between active satellites. Historically, conjunctions have been caused by an accelerating rate of debris generation caused by on-orbit fragmentations from explosions and collisions. Satellite operators reacted to the increasing threat by utilizing Space Situational Awareness (SSA) providers to gain insight and protect their missions by performing collision avoidance maneuvers.

New challenges arise due to the need to coordinate between operators. Operators resort to email or other conventional methods to communicate with their conjunction partner, which is prone to miscommunication and loss of mission time, if communication is achieved at all. Space Traffic Management (STM) has been established as discipline to solve this problem by empowering the operators to communicate and share data. As part of STM a common understanding is created including a joint timeline with actions both partners can take and agree on. Transparency from sharing orbital data and understanding each other’s processes leads to building trust between operators and increasing space sustainability.

The architecture of an STM system is designed to be SSA provider agnostic and the challenge of data sharing in a global context in mind. The interface allows (a) exchange satellite and orbit information (b) trigger SSA services via APIs. A traceability requirement is applied to document all actions performed by the operators and values provided from the SSA interface. In addition, the system needs to be auditable by a monitoring entity. The paper gives an overview of the OKAPI:Astrolabe Space Traffic Coordination platform.