Abstract
Unknown thrust degrades space-target tracking, while laser ranging consumes measurement time. We study the trade-off between ranging occupancy, average tracking error, and transient error using optical alerts, adaptive estimation, and guarded ranging. The multiscale-consistency-driven guarded prediction (MSC-GP) configuration is evaluated as one design within a hypothetical sensor interface. An 800 km observer tracks 60 s thrust events with 100 microradian angular RMSE, 50 m range RMSE, and synchronous 5–20 Hz effective measurements. In the original 10 Hz middle-tier comparison with the refined periodic baseline, savings are 19.60% and 18.63% over the 670 s post-initialization interval, and 9.66% and 9.17% over the full 700 s arc, for original and held-out targets, respectively. Both controls have no observed violations in these samples. A further 64 disjoint targets test six commonly tuned controller families at 10 Hz. On the nominal middle-tier confirmation set, MSC-GP uses 23.34 s of post-initialization ranging with 95.80 m RMSE; a six-second optimization baseline uses 24.29 s with 85.90 m RMSE. Neither violates the limits in 192 trajectories. SS8 remains competitive, and longer or impulsive maneuvers expose failures. These results support conditional error–occupancy trade-offs, not universal multiscale superiority or a probabilistic safety guarantee. Occupancy is effective time