Space Situational Awareness and Space Traffic Management: Towards Their Comprehensive Paradigm

The efficiency of the Space Traffic Management heavily relies on the proper implementation of another not less sophisticated concept, i.e. the Space Situational Awareness. Both of them are interrelated and complementary for the purposes of security and sustainability in space. The challenge, however, they face starts with absence of their officially recognized definitions that leads to inconsistency and somewhat ambiguous interpretation. This is coupled with lack of a common understanding about what is seen as the key building blocks of those concepts. The paper will try to define them, distill their constituent elements and highlight the international legal initiatives that directly or indirectly touch the issue. It will also envisage the efforts made by the private industry with regard to space data-sharing and the most recent topical studies generated by academia. Finally, it will analyze the pros and cons of centralized vs decentralized model of their implementation, determine main trends and key authorities that might play the growing role in a capacity-building of those systems. Key words: STM, SSA, space law capacity – building, recent space law developments, space security, space sustainabilit