REUTERSThe Trump administration this week fired employees who were building a system to manage satellite traffic in space, weakening a badly needed effort championed by the US space industry and the president's first administration, according to people familiar with the move. The layoffs were among hundreds of employees fired Thursday at NOAA, which also provides the US government's weather forecasts and hurricane warnings. The chief of the Traffic Coordination System for Space, Dmitry Poisik, was among the employees fired, according to one of the sources. Donald Trump, as president in 2018, released a space policy directive calling on the Office of Space Commerce to create its own traffic management system, acknowledging an increasingly congested orbital environment. "These are like air traffic controllers for space, they handle space traffic coordination to prevent collisions," one of the sources said, adding the layoffs come at a bad time given the number of collision notices sent out.
