Under Space Policy Directive Three (SPD-3), the Department of Commerce (DOC) is taking on leadership of STM. With increasing activities in commercial space in a contested and congested domain, this mandate requires DOC to innovate approaches to space traffic management and its supporting technology to maintain and improve upon DoD’s long history of successful, safe, and reliable on-orbit operations. We believe that this is most effectively done using a testbed approach, one that is vertically-integrated and transdisciplinary to ensure that new contributions are recognized, peer-reviewed, and make their way into operations in a transparent fashion from research to operations.