The data center, which goes into operation on January 1, 2009, will be run by the Coast Guard for the Long-Range Identification and Tracking system until December 31, 2010. It has not yet been decided as to what will happen to the data center after that date.

The service's identification and tracking applies to ships on international voyages that come within 1,000 nautical miles of US region, which includes passenger ships holding 12 or more people. The Coast Guard says the rule applies to roughly 3,000 vessels a day, in which most of these ships are not US-owned.

The Coast Guard says it anticipates investing about $1 million a year to pay for the ship owners' costs of instantly transmitting the vessels' global positioning data by satellite to the facility, based on each ship transmitting four times a day.

The International Maritime Organization's Maritime Safety Committee will meet on May 7 to consider a proposal to decrease the required number of transmissions to two per day.

"Reducing required transmissions to two per day would reduce the communications cost of transmissions from ship-to-data-center by half," says the Federal Register notice. "The Coast Guard believes this proposal deserves serious consideration as a cost saving vehicle that has little, if any, adverse impact on the maritime domain awareness benefits to be derived from LRIT."

The facility's need for identification and tracking systems, and geospatial positioning systems, including radios, networks, software and storage systems, will open some key contract opportunities to the private sector.