Day-to-day services, from weather forecast to logistics, rely on space-based infrastructures whose integrity is
crucial to stakeholders and end-users worldwide. Current trends point towards congestion of the near-Earth space
environment increasing at a rate greater than existing systems support, and thus demand novel cost-efficient approaches
to traffic detection, characterization, tracking, and management to ensure space remains a safe, integral part of societies
and economies worldwide. Whereas machine-learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have been extensively
proposed to address congestion and alleviate big-data problems of the future, little has been done so far to tackle the
need for transnational coordination and conflict-resolution in the context of space traffic management (STM).
In STM, there is an ever-growing need for distributing information and coordinating actions (e.g., avoidance
manoeuvres) to reduce the operational costs borne by individual entities and to decrease the latencies of actionable
responses taken upon the detection of hazardous conditions by one-to-two orders of magnitude. However, these needs
are not exclusive to STM, as evidenced by the widespread adoption of solutions to distributing, coordinating, and
automating actions in other industries such as air traffic management (ATM), where a short-range airborne collision
avoidance system (ACAS) automatically coordinates evasive manoeuvres whenever a conjunction is detected. Within
this context, this paper aims at establishing a roadmap of promising technologies (e.g., blockchain), protocols and
processes that could be adapted from different domains (railway, automotive, aerial, and maritime) to build an
integrated traffic coordination and communication architecture to simplify and harmonise stakeholders’ satellite
operations.
This paper is organised into seven sections. First, Section 1 introduces the problem of STM, highlighting its
complexity. Following this introduction, Section 2 discusses needs and requirements of various stakeholders such as
commercial operators, space situational awareness (SSA) service providers, launch-service providers, satellite and
constellation owners, governmental agencies, regulators, and insurance companies. Then, Section 3 addresses existing
gaps and challenges in STM, focusing on globally coordinated approaches. Next, Section 4 reviews technologies for
distributed, secure, and persistent communications, and proposed solutions to address some of these challenges from
non-space sectors. Thereafter, Section 5 briefly covers the history of STM proposals and presents the state-of-the-art
solution being proposed for modern STM. Following this review, Section 6 devises a step-by-step plan for exploiting
and deploying some of the identified technologies within a five-to-ten-year timeline to close several existing gaps.
Finally, Section 7 concludes the paper