China recently reached out to NASA over a maneuver to prevent a possible collision between satellites, a space sustainability official said, marking a first for space traffic management.

"For years, if we had a conjunction, we would send a note to the Chinese saying, 'We think we're going to run into you. You hold still, we'll maneuver around you,'" Alvin Drew, director for NASA Space Sustainability, said during a plenary session at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, Australia, on Oct. 2.

A big shift had come a day earlier, Drew revealed. "Just yesterday, we had a bit of a celebration because, for the first time, the Chinese National Space Agency reached out to us and said, 'We see a conjunction amongst our satellites. We recommend you hold still. We'll do the maneuver.' And that's the first time that's ever happened," Drew said.

The move by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) comes as both the United States, notably through SpaceX's commercial Starlink constellation, and China, in the shape of the Guowang and Thousand Sails megaconstellations, are rapidly increasing the number of satellites they have in orbit. This means an increasing need for satellite operators to coordinate to limit the chances of collisions between satellites and prevent events that cause new clouds of space debris.