SpaceX officially introduces its Space Situational Awareness System- Stargaze; Will be made available to all data operators free of charge
Today, SpaceX officially revealed that it has developed a novel Space Situational Awareness System called Stargaze. This system is designed to enhance the safety and sustainability of satellite operations in low Earth Orbit.
SpaceX has developed a novel Space Situational Awareness (SSA) system, called Stargaze → https://t.co/vE0qSpfDt2
To maximize safety for all satellites in space, @SpaceX will be making Stargaze conjunction data available to all operators, free of charge. By providing this… pic.twitter.com/N7St7dvpz2
— Starlink (@Starlink) January 30, 2026
Space Situational Awareness System- Stargaze
According to the company, practices such as leaving rocket bodies in low Earth orbit, operators maneuvering their satellites without sharing trajectory predictions or coordinating with other active satellites, and countries conducting anti-satellite tests have heightened the risk of collisions, increasing the need for improvements in space-traffic coordination.
To work on this issue, Stargaze delivers a several-order-of-magnitude increase in detection capability compared to conventional ground-based systems. This system is said to use data collected from nearly 30,000 star trackers, each of which makes continuous observations of nearby objects, resulting in approximately 30 million transits detected daily across the fleet.
SpaceX has developed this system to provide conjunction screening results within minutes, compared to the current industry standard of several hours.
It is revealed that in late 2025, a Starlink satellite encountered a conjunction with a third-party satellite that was performing maneuvers, but whose operator was not sharing ephemeris. Until five hours before the conjunction, the close approach was anticipated to be ~9,000 meters—considered a safe miss-distance with zero probability of collision. With just five hours to go, the third-party satellite performed a manoeuvre that changed its trajectory and collapsed the anticipated miss distance to just ~60 meters. Stargaze quickly detected this maneuver and published an updated trajectory to the screening platform, generating new CDMs which were immediately distributed to relevant satellites. Ultimately, the Starlink satellite was able to react within an hour of the maneuver being detected, planning an avoidance maneuver to reduce collision risk back down to zero.
The company has mentioned that the Starlink ephemeris is updated and shared publicly every hour, and all other operators should do the same.
Availability
SpaceX will be making Stargaze conjunction data available to all operators, free of charge, via its space-traffic management system. This platform has been in a closed beta with over a dozen participating satellite operators, allowing low-latency ephemeris sharing and conjunction screening.
Starting this Spring, operators that submit ephemeris (trajectory predictions) to the platform will also receive Conjunction Data Messages (CDMs) against Stargaze data, in addition to ephemeris from other participating operators.
