Fifty years ago, Mike Sanders watched with awe and anticipation as the crew of Apollo 11--Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins--splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Landing men on the moon and returning them safely to the earth was a seminal moment in the history of flight, and it had a profound effect on then 7-year-old Sanders, who now heads the Lone Star UAS Center of Excellence & Innovation at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. Looking back, Sanders says he never expected the day to come when he would be working with NASA on anything, let alone another chapter in the history of flight. But this year, he landed in the middle of one of the most important aeronautical projects of this generation: an effort to build a safe and effective unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) platform. In August, Texas A&M–Corpus Christi's Lone Star UAS Center of Excellence and its partners' workers stood alongside NASA scientists and engineers as they flew 22 small physical and digital drones above and between tall buildings in five areas of Corpus Christi. The low-altitude test culminated a five-year effort to learn what it would take to build a nationwide system for managing low-altitude drone traffic.

Who's flying that drone over my house, and what exactly are they looking for? Is the pilot a police officer, a search-and-rescue volunteer, or Creepy Steve from four doors down? These concerns over the origin and intention of small drones have bedeviled the drone industry for as long as it has existed. Our inability to figure out who is piloting the weird quadcopter over our neighborhoods surely has a lot to do with why so many still distrust drones. People are working on it, though.

We have no flight-tracking system for the lower sky. There are rules and charts for keeping track of larger aircraft that carry human passengers and are piloted by humans onboard, but drones are small and fly low, which means we have to trust in drone pilot good behavior to keep drones away from risky places, like airports. Small drones, unlike other aircraft, don't broadcast their location, so tracking them in the sky is tricky. That's why the FAA is working with NASA to come up with an Unmanned Aerial System Traffic Management system. Earlier today, NASA tested the system at six different FAA test sites.