The US government needs to improve its procedure for  generating the
list of its satellites that it registers with the UN.
This will be a long, ranty, thread.

Since the start of the space age it has been standard practice
that all Earth satellite launches, even `secret' ones, have been
publicly announced.

In 1962, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis,  the US was
alarmed when it discovered the USSR had launched several unannounced
satellites into low orbit. Were they, perhaps, orbital nukes? No, it
turned out, they were failed interplanetary probes. Nevertheless this
reinforced the idea that unannounced launches were a bad idea.

Relatedly, a UN register of space objects was established;
UN Resolution 1721B and, later, the UN Registration Convention
came into force. The US has mostly, but not perfectly, complied
with the requirements of the convention.


Recently there's been a new problem in the US registrations. The
registration documents are clearly generated from the US satellite
catalog maintained by SpaceForce 18SPCS. This is not good enough. Why?

Let's look at an example - the Electron 4 mission of Dec 2018, launch
2018-104. This placed 11 United States payloads in orbit, and two New Zealand
rocket stages. All 13 objects are being tracked by Space Force,
and we know which 2 objects are the rocket stages. 
So, we have 11 tracked objects that we know are the 11 US payloads.

But, for 5 of these payloads we don't know which object is which.
Tracked objects E, F, K, L and P are the satellites
Ceres, RSat, Cubesail, Albus and NMTSat in some order, but we don't
know which order. In the US satellite catalog, catalog numbers
corresponds to objects being tracked, and they only get a name associated
with them if Space Force knows what the tracked object is.
So, if you search for the NASA 'Albus' satellite or the New Mexico Tech 'NMTSat'
in the satellite catalog you won't
find anything. If you count the number of US payloads launched in 2018,
these won't be included and you'll get too low an answer.

More recently, there are the V-R3X payloads from launch 2021-006
which aren't even identified as US objects in the catalog, even though
we know they are objects BC, BG and DQ in some order. So, they are not
included in US registration document ST/SG/SER.E/977 - but they should be.

This is (arguably) not Space Force's fault. It's their catalog and  this
is what works for them, I guess. BUT:  the requirement on the State
Dept. for UN registration is NOT 'tell me which of your satellites you
are tracking'. It's 'tell me which satellites you have put in orbit'. So
it is NOT OK for them to use the satcat as a complete list for this
purpose - because it is not OK for them to leave out satellites like
Albus just because we don't know
which catalog number it is. We know the US launched Albus and it is in orbit,
so it should be registered with the UN. I would argue the same is true of the Thinsats
deployed from Cygnus even though SpaceForce decided they weren't going to bother
cataloging them at all because they reentered after a few days. They met the usual
criterion for registration with the UN and should be registered.

This used not to be a big problem because very few launched US payloads were
not identified with a catalog number. But now with all these cluster cubesat
launches, it's much more common. I estimate there are 28 unregistered US satellites
in 2018, and 9 in 2019, although only 1 in 2020. There look to be a bunch in 2021
but not all the reg documents are in yet.

One possibility is that Space-Track could maintain a separate public table of
object information versus launch number for objects known to be in orbit
but not associated with a catalog number.

It shouldn't be too hard to do better. I keep a list of the unregistered
satellites on my website (objects marked [US] in square parentheses in
https://planet4589.org/space/gcat/data/cat/psatcat.html If one person
can do this in his spare time, it seems like the US government should be
able to manage it. Do better, America!  End of rant.