Space situational awareness providers give conflicting conjunction alerts because they use different sensor networks, catalogs, and analytics, causing operator alert fatigue

Multiple commercial and government SSA providers now issue conjunction data messages (CDMs) to satellite operators, but these providers use different sensor networks, tracking catalogs, and analytical models, producing overlapping and often contradictory alerts. The U.S. Space Force's 18th Space Defense Squadron screens its catalog three times daily, while commercial providers like LeoLabs, ExoAnalytic, and Slingshot Aerospace maintain independent catalogs with different object populations and positional accuracies. NOAA's Office of Space Commerce is building TraCSS to replace the DoD's Space-Track system, adding yet another data source. The result is that operators receive multiple alerts for the same event with different probability estimates, or miss events tracked by one provider but not another. Why it matters: Conflicting conjunction alerts force satellite operators to spend engineering time reconciling data instead of making timely decisions, so operators either over-maneuver (wasting propellant and reducing satellite lifespan) or ignore alerts (increasing collision risk), so the trust placed on any single alert system erodes, so operators develop ad hoc internal risk models that are not validated against the broader population of space objects, so the overall space safety posture degrades even as tracking technology improves. The structural root cause is that space situational awareness evolved as a U.S. military capability during the Cold War, and the transition to a civil and commercial multi-provider ecosystem has occurred without establishing a common data standard, shared catalog, or authoritative source of truth -- so each provider optimizes for its own sensor network and customer base rather than interoperability, and no entity has the mandate or incentive to reconcile discrepancies across providers.