A major gap in satellite collision warnings appears to be closing somewhat with unprecedented outreach recently by once-silent Chinese space interests.
The Chinese National Space Administration, the country’s civilian space agency, emailed NASA in October 2025 about a potential collision that read, “We would like to recommend you hold still and we’ll do the maneuver.”
The communication was revealed the next day by Alvin Drew, NASA space sustainability director and a former astronaut, during a panel discussion at the International Astronautical Congress in Australia. “That’s the first time that has ever happened,” Drew said. The revelation was reported by SpaceNews and widely repeated online.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ranks second in space launches only to the United States during the past five years and has more than 5,830 objects on orbit — the majority of them space debris, according to the U.S. Space Force website space-track.org. The U.S. has more than 15,820 objects, most of them active payloads.
Chinese and western commercial satellite operators such as OneWeb and SpaceX also are beginning to share messages, Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow for space tracker LeoLabs, said at a September 2025 space sustainability session. McKnight sees international space groups as a forum for expanding on these first steps toward outreach.
Space Force traffic watchers issue warnings of close approaches on orbit to satellite operators and national agencies, including the CCP. U.S. Space Command said in 2023 that these conjunction data messages never were acknowledged by the CCP. Then, in a 2024 update, the command said the CCP had reached out twice “proactively” on space safety issues.