SpaceX just received access to the US military's most sensitive space tracking data, and critics say it hands Elon Musk's company an effective veto over who moves freely in Earth's orbit.

The Space Force signed a new contract giving SpaceX data from its high-accuracy catalogue of satellites, debris, and spacecraft. That database helps prevent up to 50,000 near-collisions daily, across thousands of objects circling the planet. No other commercial competitor has received equivalent access.

How orbital traffic control works, and why it matters

Right now, managing the risk of satellites crashing into each other is a government function, similar to air traffic control. The federal program built to handle this commercially is called the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or Traccs. It was designed to give every company operating in orbit the same baseline information, so no single player had an edge in knowing when to move a satellite or when to hold.

The problem is that Traccs has never fully launched. It has been underfunded, understaffed, and, according to former employees, deliberately weakened. Musk's DOGE operation fired much of its staff in 2025. The administration then tried to cut its $65 million budget to nearly zero in fiscal year 2026. Congress pushed the money back in. The administration proposed the same cut again for 2027. Congress pushed back again. Now the military has handed SpaceX the data that Traccs was supposed to distribute neutrally.

Cole Donovan, a former Traccs employee now with the Stand Up for Science nonprofit, put it plainly: "It's like giving a trucking company control of all the traffic lights, which they can switch to red whenever it's their competition's turn to go."

A $2 trillion market, with one company at the controls

The commercial US space market is projected to reach nearly $2 trillion in value over the next decade. That growth depends on thousands of satellites launched by dozens of companies, all of which need to coordinate their movements to avoid catastrophic collisions. Whoever controls the most precise collision-warning data holds real power over that coordination.

SpaceX already dominates launch services. Its Starlink constellation is the largest satellite network in orbit. It has deep and growing ties to federal contracts. Multiple industry observers quoted by the Guardian have warned about a "vendor lock" scenario, in which the government becomes so dependent on SpaceX, and SpaceX becomes so embedded in space infrastructure, that switching away becomes practically impossible.

The Space Force, in a statement to Breaking Defense, framed the deal as a straightforward data exchange: access to commercial data sources in return for access to the military's more precise catalogue. That framing implies SpaceX is one of several companies in the arrangement. But the company's existing scale gives it a different kind of leverage than any of its competitors would have with the same deal.

Not everyone sees the arrangement as sinister. A former official from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, speaking anonymously to the Guardian, said SpaceX has generally been "remarkably responsive to space safety concerns" and that the deeper problem is the government's failure to build a coherent framework in the first place.

That last point is worth sitting with. The concern here is not simply that SpaceX is acquiring influence. It is that a gap in public governance, created partly by deliberate budget cuts, is being filled by a private company with a direct financial interest in the outcome. That is a different kind of problem than a contractor doing government work. It means the rules of a $2 trillion industry may end up being written by the company with the most to gain from writing them.

For anyone who launches satellites, uses satellite internet, or depends on services that run through orbital infrastructure, that is not an abstract risk. It is a question of who sets the terms.