 Hello everyone. My name is Victoria Samson. I'm the Washington Office Director of the Secure World Foundation. I'd like to welcome you to the event we are delighted to be hosting with Unidear, Seeing Space Security, the role of Space Institutional Awareness for Verification of Speech or Space Arms Control. Space capabilities are a crucial enabler for national security. The growing reliance on space and proliferation of counter-space capabilities have increased concern about how to protect and defend space capabilities in future conflicts. While the 1967 Outer Space Treaty includes a ban on the placement of weapons of mass destruction in outer space, there are generally no specific restrictions on testing for deployment of weapons in space. And while the UN Charter prohibits aggression in space, there is no consensus on what constitutes a use of force or armed attack against space capabilities or the application of international humanitarian law to an armed conflict that extends into space. There are no agreed-upon norms of behavior from conducting military activities in space during peace time. As a result of these ambiguities, the new governance mechanisms are necessary to make sure that the space domain is predictable, reliable, and usable for the long term. While multilateral fora and legally binding documents are still possible for future space governance, it is becoming increasingly difficult to come to agreement among all countries involved in space. So perhaps it would be beneficial to focus attention on specific actions or behaviors. We would start to work together to establish what is considered acceptable or unacceptable behavior in space and how these behaviors will be jointly measured and assessed. This may then and over time evolve into widely accepted norms of behavior amongst all space-faring nations. These norms may then be enshrined into agreements among a few or many states or lay the foundations for future treaties that have robust verification regimes. How do you determine responsible behavior in orbit? How do you verify that any agreements made to ensure the security and stability of space are being followed? SSA is the ability to accurately characterize the space environment and activities in space. Civil SSA combines positional information on the trajectory of objects in orbit, mainly using optical telescopes and radars, with information on space weather. Military and national security SSA applications also include characterizing objects in space, their capabilities and limitations, and potential threats. Today's discussion will talk about SSA, its strengths and limitations, and then use lessons learned from other domains that were able to verify behavior to see if they are applicable in this case. Next slide, please. So just a really quick discussion of the Secure World Foundation for those of you who are familiar with my organization. We are a private operating foundation that focuses on the long-term sustainability of outer space. We promote cooperative solutions for space sustainability. Our vision is a secure, sustainable and peaceful use of outer space that contribute to global stability on earth and we like to work with the governments, industry, international organizations, and civil society the idea that we will cooperate to create ideas and actions that cure the secure, sustainable and peaceful use of outer space for earth and all peoples. Next slide, please. So for those of you at this point in the game, there aren't many people who have not used Zoom before, but those of you who are familiar, we will be having a Q&A function, a question answer function. So this slide goes over very quickly, how to answer questions. First of all, find the Q&A button and click on it. Look and see if other people's questions are there, if you like how they phrased it, up both theirs, if not, put yours in and we'll see if we can guess as many as we can during today's Q&A. There will also be a chat as well. We ask that you keep questions for the Q&A and chat in the chat. Please keep in mind that today's event is being recorded. It will be transcribed in the video and the recording will be put up on our website as will the transcription. We'll be downloading copies of the Q&A in the chat. So just know your participation in this is being recorded. So our next slide talks about how to show closed captions. So basically find the closed caption button, click on it and then click show subtitles. Hopefully that's pretty easy. As you can see, we've been doing Zoom for a while, but there's always lessons to be learned how to do that, so we apologize for that hiccup. But we're really excited because this gives us time to go into what I think is going to be a fascinating panel talking about panel one. What can we see? A technical analysis of current SSA capabilities. So I'd like to go through and just quickly introduce our speakers. We have Dan Sepperly. He is the CEO and co-founder of Leo Labs, which is created to drive advances in space traffic safety, space efficient awareness, SSA, and preservation of space environment through actionable real-time information. I will say we'll have longer bios on our website as well. We have Doug Hendricks, who is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Exoanalytic Solutions Inc. For 25 years, Dr. Hendricks has developed advanced software solutions to enable the United States to maintain its technical superiority and EOIR sensing for missile defense and space efficient awareness. We have Mariba Jha, who is an assistant professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he's the holder of the Mrs. Perley-Dashall-Handerson Centennial Fellowship in Engineering. He's the director for the Computational Astronautical Sciences and Technologies, a group within the Odin Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, as well as the lead for the Space Security and Safety Program at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law. And finally, we have Regina Peltzes, who's a Senior Policy Officer with the German Space Agency, DLR Space Administration, currently secunded to the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy, where she focuses on space security and space surveillance in the national, European, and international context, and sits on the shadow committee overseeing the space efficient awareness component of the upcoming European Union Space Program. So with that, I'd like to start with our first speaker, Dan Seppeli. Dan, you have the floor. Thank you very much, Victoria. It's a pleasure to be here. So I'd like to start by tossing out a notion for consideration. In space, and in particular, low Earth orbit, we may be able to achieve perfect transparency. Unlike any other domain, we can envision a future where the locations of all the objects, spacecraft, and debris are known. All launches are known, all maneuvers are known, there would be no place to hide. This means the information feed about space would be always on. This data environment would be a compelling foundation for arms control verification. And in fact, perfect transparency may be the closest we get to perfect deterrence. This also drives another consideration. It would mean there would be a new point of innovation. The innovative activities would be building on top of the information produced for perfect transparency. The innovation would be to build data driven norms, policies, and frameworks for everyone working in space. And the data generated by perfect transparency would open up a new realm for data analytics. So I'm suggesting the space industry could go in the direction of perfect transparency. Turning to Leo Labs, we're taking a step in that direction. By way of introduction, Leo Labs is the commercial platform for space situational awareness in Leo. The company was founded to deliver a new level of SSA and space traffic safety for the revolution that's underway in the space industry today. New launches, both ride share launches and smaller launch vehicles, and also many new rockets on the drawing board, are being launched from many places around the world in carrying new satellite fleets into space. These are the mega constellations, fleets of CubeSats, and satellites of many sizes in between. This adds up to a lot of new traffic because Leo is a growing economy and 2020 is its tipping point. All this activity means we need more data about what's going on in space. That's the big challenge Leo Labs was founded to solve. We started the company to solve this data problem. Leo Labs is built on two technologies, a global radar network and a big data pipeline. I'm going to switch over and show a few images here. First off, the image I'm showing here is the Kiwi space radar, the newest radar in Leo Labs network. It's an S-band phased array radar located in New Zealand. It watches satellites and space debris flying overhead around the clock through the daylight, through clouds, through rain, and at night. It's actually the third radar in our network. We have three operating today and a fourth under construction in Costa Rica. In about a year, we'll have grown out to six radars in total and we'll be tracking debris as small as two centimeters. So this network of radars pumps all its data into the second piece of technology that Leo Labs is built on, a big data pipeline. This is a system based in the cloud that processes all of the data as it comes in in real time, scans it for interesting events, performs analytics on it, looks for things like maneuvers, launches, breakups, and the like, and then delivers that to our subscribers. And it provides this information in the form of alerts, dashboards, reports, and the like. So for the next minute or two, I want to share a few examples of some data products that may have some bearing on verification and arms control. They really address three big questions. What's entering orbit? What activities are occurring in orbit and what new objects are being generated? So I'm switching over to an image here. The first topic, what new satellites are entering space. So Leo Labs spends a lot of time these days tracking newly launched satellites. In the data you see on the slide here comes from a recent launch that we tracked, a ride chair mission from June of this year. That particular rocket had a few sky sats from Planet on it and a stack of Starlink satellites on it as well. And the data comes from a single radar pass. Each slash here represents one of the objects that was launched into space. And from a single radar pass, we're able to get account of all the payloads that were delivered to orbit and fit orbits to them. So we know where to look for those satellites in the future and when we're able to follow up with future radars. So the second thing I want to focus on is activities that are occurring in space. And for this, I want to look in particular at conjunctions. And there's a lot of discussion about conjunctions in terms of high speed collisions, pieces of debris that may hit a satellite with closing speeds of 10 kilometers per second to 15 kilometers per second. And we're tracking many of those each week. And in fact, this display shows all of the conjunctions that we're tracking over a one week period. And there's a fair amount. But there's a little more nuance to this dataset than just conjunctions. These conjunctions break down into two categories, low speed conjunctions and high speed conjunctions. The high speed conjunctions were what I just mentioned. The low speed ones are also interesting though because they indicate a kind of new category or new categories of activities in space. Low speed conjunctions are things like proximity operations. They're pairs of satellites that may have been launched on the same rocket. And they're formation flying satellites. In the future, active debris removal missions and satellite servicing missions will show up in this category as well. So going over to a second display, we have another display that keeps track and lets us visualize proximity operations and other low speed conjunctions. And in particular, what I pulled up here is a display that is focused on a cosmos satellite, actually a pair of cosmos satellites that are flying close to one another, cosmos 2535, 2538. And in the red plots over here, we see the relative motion between those objects with one satellite and red orbiting around another in blue. And they're approximately 100 meters apart in this case. So the last piece of information that I'd like to share is what new objects are created by these activities or some activities in space. And in particular, new objects could come from things like breakups, which is shown in this slide, collisions or ASAP weapons tests. So in particular, this piece of data shows information from a rocket body that broke up back in July. It was originally an H2A rocket body, but it turned into a group of at least 15 pieces of debris. And the information you see on this slide comes from a single radar pass. And each one of those slashes shows an individual piece of debris. And there were approximately 15 in total here. And they were detected by a radar over the course of about 10 seconds. So that's it for kind of introduction of Leo Labs and some of the data that we're collecting about Leo. So Leo Labs is solving the data problem for low-earth orbit and bringing a new level of transparency to space. And I'd also like to thank the organizers for inviting me to this excellent discussion. Thank you, Dan. We appreciate having you here. And you've already gotten some questions in the Q&A, which we hope we'll be able to get to after everyone's done their presentations. Our next speaker is Mariba Jha. Mariba. Hello, everybody. Hope you can hear me. So, yep, I want to follow up on, you know, a lot of the stuff that Dan said here. Clearly, if we want nearer space to be safer, more secure, and more sustainable, there's three lenses that we're trying to use and let's say yardsticks to measure ourselves with. One is, is there anything that we're doing to make the domain more transparent? What is it capable of doing? That sort of stuff. Is there anything that we're doing that can make the domain more predictable? Not just due to natural motion of stuff, but things that people are controlling. And Dan spoke about some of these things, like the star links and other constellations in lower orbit. Even common scenarios. I mean, we have a series of legal instruments, treaties, and that sort of stuff. And it's not like everybody interprets these things in the same way. So there's individual interpretation, but it's not a common, a common practice in how this stuff gets implemented. So that's part of the predictability problem as well. And that has cultural nuances to it. And then the last thing is, can we develop a body of evidence that can help people be safer and maybe even hold people accountable for their behavior in this common resource, which is nearer space? So I'm going to share my screen and just show you folks a few things here. It says this, okay, here we go. Of course, technology always works. So this is Astrograph. It's a crowdsourced, multi-sourced knowledge graph database, which basically combines several sources of information. One of the cool things that I want to show you here is that we have things from US space commands, the Russian JSC Vimple catalog. We even have some data from Leo Labs, which we're very, very happy that Dan and those folks can contribute some of their data to this as well. And it serves a good purpose to just be able to compare and contrast things. And so what I mean by that is this. I mean, we talked about this idea of transparency. What's up there? Who does it belong to? That sort of thing? Well, so this is looking at all the stuff combined. But if you just looked at US space comms database, even if you load in what they call rocket bodies and debris, your space traffic map might look a little something like this. So there it is. Dots are not to scale with size. But if you ask the Russians what their opinions are, ah, that doesn't look quite the same. In fact, it looks pretty different. And so even common objects, even common objects have multiple opinions. And this is one of the things that Dan was kind of alluding to in terms of understanding where these things are. If, for instance, we just look at a single object, let's say, I don't know, Flock 1C10, which belongs to Planet. Let's kind of zoom in on this object. And there's multiple opinions about the same object. Now, these opinions seem to be pretty close to each other so far. So that's nice. Are they exactly the same? No. And there's several reasons for that sort of stuff. But if I just pause this really quick just so that I can try to zoom in even closer, basically, you have the opinion of the US government. You have the opinion of the owners. You have the opinion of Dan and those folks at Leo Labs. You have my opinion processing some of Dan's data. And, you know, these things aren't necessarily stacked on top of each other. So here you have the public catalog as number one. And then you can kind of see everybody else's opinion is kind of stacked on top of each other. That's good because it shows that there's some consistency. But you might say, okay, so here's where the owner says, here's where Dan says, here's where I say these things are probably within tens of meters kind of thing from each other. So that's great. But this is the sort of thing that we need to do is reconcile, have a way to reach consensus when it comes to these opinions. When we talk about conjunctions, Dan talked about this as well. So we have this conjunction streaming service. And he talked about low velocity type stuff, which we have reflected here. These are these flat liners as we call them. And basically this is just showing in the next 20 minutes, the predicted conjunctions, things that are going to come within 10 kilometers of each other in the next 20 minutes continuously, taking the full catalog public catalog and comparing against each other. Qualitatively, I got to tell you, it's kind of busy up there. Do these mean collisions? No. Does it mean that stuff crisscrosses each other with frequency? Yes. So traffic is busy, and we don't have space traffic rules. We want to understand, again, how people implement stuff. It's not the same. We took a stab at this. We actually started looking at the UN registration of space objects to understand how different countries interpret register your object as soon as it's practicable. Let me tell you something, folks. This is in days. 2000 days is about five and a half years. Some people are registering their objects over five and a half years after the stuff launches. Does that make sense? Is that the sort of thing that we want to see happen? No. So this helps, gives us some insight into how people are implementing things, and we have to understand, even when we sign documents and agree to a common set of words, how we interpret those things may differ. So I'll stop there, and thank you very much. Thank you, Reba. Our next speaker is Regina. Hi. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Victoria for the introduction and for having me today, and good afternoon to everyone on our panel and in the audience. So we've just seen some really interesting, fascinating ways of using SSA capabilities, and we're going to have another one also from Doug and previously from Moriba and Dan in industry and academia. And what I'd like to do is to add one perspective of government agencies and from across the pond with some thoughts on the intersection of technical SSA capability and policy and how we use emerging capabilities that we have over here to different ends and where also our limitations are in that regard. And my remarks will be informed primarily by our activities in Germany regarding SSA on an interagency national level and how we slot into two multilateral collaborations on the transatlantic context and on the European side. So I'll give two examples. And right now in Germany at this point we have emerging capabilities and SSA which have been developed over several decades. So we've got Tira, the tracking and imaging radar, which some of you may know, which we've operated for some time, which is imagine a large antenna inside the dome, which is rigid and stays put and you can make images and really record objects in orbit and really show in rather good detail, for instance, large objects such as the ISS, different solar panels and so forth. And we also in the process of commissioning GISTRA, which is our experimental surveillance and tracking radar. It's a more nimble system, which is designed in smaller container shelters and they are designed to be a network and you can put them and network them together and put them in different locations. And this type of data from these kind of sensors then goes into an SSA center. We've been building up for the past decades, GSAC, the German SSA center, which came out of an agreement between two ministries, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Economy. And because we wanted to use SSA data for different purposes, civilian, military and the security side. So this is jointly operated by staff from our civilian space agency and from the Air Force. And so they literally sit together in the control room using the data from the sensors, look at similar kinds of products that we've just seen in the control room together. And this idea of civil military cooperation in that context is going to be a little bit, it's going to be important later on when I talk about the limitations. So we have an interagency approach to SSA. And the first example I want to give is how we use this type of SSA capability and in what context to monitor events in orbit and then afterwards also where our limitations lie. So for monitoring events in orbit, we've just come out, for instance, on the national side from Shreva War Games, a tabletop exercise hosted by the U.S. Space Force with eight partners which addressed our handling of security related events in orbit amongst other aspects. So essentially we come together and we look at a fictional scenario of an event in orbit and all the participants look at how we can use our different resources, including SSA data and SSA sensors to make sense of what's occurring and to devise a path forward and how to handle or potentially respond to this type of event. So in practical terms, on the German side, as one state active participant, that means we think with the different agencies and actors internally involved in SSA. So that's the Coastal Ministry of Defense, Air Force, but also Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Economy on how we exchange SSA information internally through our center and also with other partners. So these kind of events we address in these kind of laboratory environments of thinking through how we would handle, observe and also monitor. So that's one example of using SSA directly for security and monitoring events. But just because you have this SSA capability, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can or that you have decided to automatically use it for all kinds of purposes, civilian and security related in arms control, for instance. This is the second point I'd like to highlight. The limitations of SSA, not so much in terms of technical feasibility. That means how often and how accurately you can see an object in a certain kind of orbit, but what we're using the capability for, in which form and to what extent. Since we're in a dual domain, we need to think about and be really quite clear about where the boundaries between safety and security lie. And this is my second example. I want to highlight the collaborative operations on the European side in SSA. So some of you will know EU SST, the European Union Space Availance and Tracking Initiative, which is a European Multilateral Capability in SSA and SUNA program as part of the new EU space program. And the objective of SST is to fuse existing sensors together and the capabilities that the different member states that participate already have in order to safeguard European infrastructure, increase resilience, and attain a higher level of autonomy for SSA in Europe, because we do extend, depend to a large extent on US data. So we've begun to establish a growing sensor network of about 50 sensors at the moment, radar, telescopes, and lasers, and we extend this as we go along and integrate new member states. And the output on the objective of this effort, of this SSA capability is to fuse our sensors to shared data and to provide SSTM-like services, such as collision avoidance, reentry and fragmentation service. And this is the crucial aspect here in this civilian context. We do not characterize objects in EU SST. So even do we use the same type of, in some cases, the same sensors that we use for arms control verification within EU SST in this joint endeavor, we don't characterize. And this limitation is set by our legal basis, a decision that was passed in 2014 by the European Parliament and the European Council, which basically means that sets out the services that we can provide and means that we don't cross into this domain of characterizing. What we can say in SST as part of our fragmentation or collision avoidance service is, okay, there's supposed to be one object, and now there are two, or there are no, there's no object where there should be one at a certain time. And but anything above or beyond conjunction behavior or having had a fragmentation would be eclipsing our mandate. So anything regarding behavior intent of a certain object goes beyond the mandate that we've set ourselves jointly in Europe for this particular SSA capability. And rather that would then be the remit of other national SSA operators, for instance, or indeed other multilateral fora like combined space operations, for instance, that are specifically designed to address these types of conversations. And in order to understand and manage this threshold, even a civilian capability of ESST, we have a security body that includes military stakeholders formally in our governance so we can understand and manage this type of mandate really well. So we don't cross from the civilian into the security side without the right checks and balances. And I'd argue that even though we don't necessarily use this SST capability of arms control per se, it operates at this crucial intersection of safety and security that can sometimes even be a gray area. And even though we don't do verification, but collision avoidance, we can promote transparency, which then in turn helps us to avoid misperception, miscalculation, and misinterpretation. And I'll leave it at that for now and look forward to discussion. Thank you. All right. So I'm going to talk a little bit about, kind of a little bit about what Dan and Marita talked about, which is I do also believe that there is the ability to or we should at least strive towards perfect transparency in space situation awareness. And I think we can do it. At ExAnalytics, we did build a system we think to provide this for orbits above Leo and let's just say Mio and beyond. We have a network of 350 telescopes, which I will tell you is not enough for perfect transparency, but it does allow us to search the sky for new things and keep track of pretty much everything that's happening up in space in, you know, beyond the Mio region, which is about, let's say 20,000 kilometers, and allows us to know anything that's going on. Let's just say for objects, 10 centimeters and larger. So one UQ size and larger. So we think that this is the right system for providing transparency, which leads to accountability so we can do verification of actions in space. Just a little slide here showing every object that is being put out there by spacetrack.org as well as our telescope network. And what you can see here on the screen is there's a thing that we call a solar exclusion, which is the vein of ground-based optical observing, at least in the visible, where we can't see for between four and eight hours a day objects that are in this this pie wedge here. You can also see the orbital regimes that we're talking about. Leo here is where Leo Labs redars are very effective. Right here you can see the latest Starlink, a couple of the latest Starlink launches, they look like little trains across the earth. And then the geo region is way out here. Lots of satellites in this very valuable region. And then in Mio here, that's where most of your GPS, at least the US GPS and some Russian Chinese GPS, exist. I'm going to switch over to a tool that we use to collect the data. And I want to show you how we collect it. So we have 350 telescopes, they're all robotic, they're doing their thing. And I can look in at what they're doing. This data is coming in live. So for example, the one I have selected here is in Australia. And it is currently looking at a satellite called Venosat-1. And that's a satellite that we alerted the world to just earlier in the year that they had lost stability of the satellite. And so that brings me to a very important component of transparency and verification, which is you have to be able to find events that no one knows about, alert others to them, and then have other folks come in and say, yes, we see the same thing. We believe that we see the same thing. Which brings me to our next tool that I'm going to pull up here. And like Dan and Mariba, we do have a tool where we bring all the data into. We call it ExoMaps. And it allows us, number one, to visualize everything that's being tracked. And I can switch over to another view. And I can look at the actual data that's being collected. And this data is fully historical. So I can zoom back and look at everything we collected for the last month or the last year or the last 10 years. What I'm going to focus on now is received in June on a satellite, for example, Cosmos 2473. And our alert system let us know that it had lost stability. And we can tell us by looking at the light reflected off of that satellite. So right here, you can see this, this is not a normal here. I'll go ahead and click on a satellite that is not behaving normally. Normally the light reflected off the satellite shows a very regular pattern. It gets the brightest at local midnight and it's dim near dawn and dusk. And when we see this very wild variation in the signature, we know that that satellite is no longer maintaining its access towards the sun. And we can also tell whether the satellite has maneuvered or not. And we can see very clearly with this satellite that it is not maneuvered. And we can look at different measurements of the how well we understand the orbit and whether it has changed its orbit. So there's a lot of things that we can do sort of within our tools very quickly to tell what's happening in space. What this allows us to do is, I'm just going to zoom forward here, is to take the data, what we call astrometry, which is the object's angular positions in the sky. And the photometry, which is its brightness that we just looked at with that satellite, for example, in the imagery. So we can look at the actual images. And we can tell whether or not there's number one something going on that we don't expect with this satellite, but also we can verify if it's the satellite we think it is. And we can tell roughly what we think it's doing and what its capabilities might be if it's something we don't know anything about. So just for the record, a whole slew of observable behaviors, we can tell if a satellite's attitude is changing in any way, if it's maneuvering, if satellites are close by, so Dan and Moriba showed examples of that. For new objects, we can watch them insert, we can watch if they deploy new objects, we can see thrusting events, and we can see debris events. And so getting back on to the issue of transparency and being able to verify, we see many things that the public statements while true about the satellite from, say, the operator don't quite match what we're seeing. And here's an example of the satellite. To your eye, you can maybe make up your mind as to what you think is going on. And the statement from the operator was they were having an antenna-pointing error that was proving difficult to fix. And I would say what they said is absolutely true, but not the whole story. And getting at the core of these kinds of events are the things that we really are focused on here at X-Finalitic. Here's another satellite that put out, I think, up to 13, 14 pieces of debris over three days. And there was a big investigation of this one, and they believe they did find out that there was a fuel leak that started a cascade of different failures. And here's another example of a satellite where we believe that up to 20 objects that reflected sunlight that we tracked came off of the satellite. The operator never confirmed that any of the debris came off the satellite. You can make your own judgment there. And quite frankly, with optical telescopes on the ground, which is primarily what we use, we can never say that any objects came off of that satellite, only that they were within one or two kilometers of the satellite at one point, and then they moved away. So we do have limitations as to what we can do with our optics. And I'll just leave you with this. It's a video of a satellite on its way up to Geo. So we watched them on their way up to Geo as well. We watched all of the plume events, all the thrust to burns, and then we watched them as they park and to make sure that in our and our role, we feel like we're building the underpinnings for what would be a future space traffic management system so that we're operating our system as if that is our job today. And with that, we'll turn it over to you, Victoria. There's about to be a little deployment here. And then I'll stop sharing. Here we go. Alrighty. Great. Thank you. And again, apologies, Doug. Those are fantastic presentations from our speakers. We'll be simply can collect them and put them on our website later on for the event page if they're comfortable with it. I will say we do have a video message from our executive director, Dr. Peter Martinez, that we weren't able to play earlier, but it is on our website. So after this event is over, if you're interested, please go and buy and check it out. As well, before we go into the Q&A, we have a hashtag for this, SWF underscore unidear. So if you are so inclined to tweet about this, please use that if you can. And then finally, for Q&A, we're happy to get questions in the Q&A. We've gotten a ton of them already, keeping an eye on that in the chat as well. But the Q&A is how you get questions in. So looking forward to hearing some thoughts from the speakers. So with that, can we please have all the panelists turn their videos on and this again, and we'll go into the Q&A. The first question I wanted to ask is just talking about, you know, for SSA for verification of arms control, there needs to be a pretty strong level of certainty about actions and behaviors on orbit. And I'd like to know from our SSA operators and from our analysts, how much certainty can we have about actions and behaviors? Can technology determine intent? I guess that's a part two part question. Who would like to take the first response to that? I'm happy to do it. Okay, please. Yeah, so with respect to the first part of the question, most of what we know, you know, if we did not watch a satellite go up on orbit, we track everything independently. And the very last thing we do is we compare against other catalogs. So one of them would be space track.org. And I know more of the uses the Vimple catalog and other ones. And then the operators, they tell, they'll let you know what frequencies they transmit on. And you can do verification through that. All of these methods can be spooked. It could be that space track has the wrong ID, but it's happened many times in the past. You know, if I tell you I'm transmitting on a frequency, I may not be, I don't have to be honest with you. So I would agree with what Maria was about to say, which is everyone has an opinion. There is eventually going to be a consensus after we, and in that small fraction of objects where we don't agree, where we will have to come to consensus. The second part of the question is no, I mean, there's you can come up with data that can be used to infer intent. But with just our observations, it would be very difficult to truly infer intent. And I, you know, I'll just leave it at that. Great. Thank you, Regina. Thanks, I want to pick the point on, that they made on inferring intent. So there's a number of things we cannot see that we'd still classify as hostile acts. For instance, anything that's related to cyber, you need completely different type of means of understanding what's happening and even detecting what's happening. So I think there's, there's a natural limit to what SSA sensor class, well, sensor classes can do. Even when we can observe something, and I mean, we've seen some fantastic examples of, you know, what you can see. And then the question is on how you interpret this. And, and there's a lot of thinking in how you can enrich this type of visual observation with other types of information that you would need to characterize and to understand what's going on before you wanted to infer. And before you wanted to attribute, but there's a number of technologies that are due, that's the same unless you have a certain information about what they're about to do, about their mission, about what they, what they're doing, about, but the, you know, for instance, close, submit your servicing, there's a lot of technologies that are due. So what you're observing could be one thing or the other and the question is on, do you have other information that enriches the information that you get from sensors? Dan. Yeah, to build on the points that were made in terms of the first question, the notion of transparency should extend all the way down into the data as well. So, you know, delivering data along with metadata information about the quality of the orbit determination or the measurements and the timeliness and the like is actually quite critical. Just to be able to understand if the kind of the foundational data and the resulting analytics are accurate and precise and the like. And that's something that I think all the service providers in the industry need to strive for. The second thing is inferring intent is, in my mind, really a kind of new frontier for a lot of these analytics that I don't think we've ever had the sort of comprehensive data sets that we're seeing come together today. And it's those sort of comprehensive data sets that are required in order to understand, is an action new or have we seen it before? Has this sort of action resulted in a negative situation that we want to avoid or is it fairly routine and is not a big concern? So I think we're kind of stepping into new territory here where we finally have the sort of comprehensive data to be able to begin to address those sorts of questions. Yeah, so I won't repeat what has previously been said, which is I think quite awesome. You know, back in my days of being a cop in the missile field, you know, hazards were things that had opportunity and capability to cause harm and threats were things that had intent, opportunity and capability. And I think one of the things that we need to put in place to get to the intent part is trend what normal behavior is for different state actors, okay? And, you know, in that context, understanding that what abnormality is to us is not necessarily what abnormal is to other folks and be able to then understand geopolitical trade winds and these sorts of things to be contextual with the observed behavior of what we see on orbit. And so all these things need to come together. And yes, I think that you can start getting to saying there is a nonzero likelihood that this thing was intentional, but you would have to trend all these things, build dossiers of behavior of individuals and understanding how they implement and how they practice space operations. And the thing is, it's very, it's not common. It's not uniform. So that's where it needs to start. Thank you. Really quick, I wanted to know a little bit more about, you guys all talked about intent and interpretation. I mean, typically SSA data collecting and data sharing does not include interpretation. Generally speaking, right? That is not, it's up to the end user to do that, or do you guys give guidance on what to do with the information? Dan? Yes, so this actually I think is a big change that a lot of the more recent developments in the private sector is really driving forward. In the past, SSA data meant kind of sensor measurements, like radar measurements or telescope measurements. But in that left the end user with a pretty heavy lift, they've got to do a lot of the analytics to say, detect a maneuver, detect multiple objects, you know, find formation, flying satellites and the like. That's something that a lot of the new data pipelines and software systems that are integrated into these sensor networks are solving. So that kind of interface is moving. So it's really no longer the measurements or no longer the state vectors, but the output, the conjunction data messages, the maneuver alerts, the breakup alerts, those sorts of kind of higher level pieces of information are the new data set, the new interface. And it's a very rich data set. And frankly, because it was such a heavy lift for the end user to do all this before, I don't think we ever got as far as we really should have in the verification and validation. So like when you look at a conjunction data set, it's really rich. There's a lot of activities where objects are coming close together and it's not just a piece of debris about to smash a satellite. There's other activities going on. So I think that's where understanding that new interface really opens up a new realm of interpretation activities and policies that can be built on top of it. Thank you. Your thoughts, my other panelists. Yeah. Okay. I raised my hand. It's okay. Very quickly. What we're seeing from our customers is we have been collecting a larger volume of data than they're used to. And it's got a different level of accuracy, which is quite a bit more accurate than many of their sensors. And so right now, they are focused on how do we bring in this data, generate orbits, and so that our tools work with this new data set. Where we are ahead, and we're being asked to do exactly what you asked, we're being asked to provide value on that is in the photometry. What can we learn from the photometry? And none of our customers really have a lot of canned capability and tools that out of the box can either derive alerts from the photometry or assess what's happening. That's still area of our deep for a lot of our customers. So we're providing that as a service where we come in and say, hey, we're the guys who collected the data. We think that we can really tell you, give you a more rich idea of what is going on in certain situations. I showed you some of the examples in my opening remarks. And we see things heading that way as we expand the kinds of phenomenologies we're looking at and the riches of the data we're providing. We do see our customers asking for more of information as a service rather than just the data. Thank you. Anyone else? No, okay, good. Well, moving on to some of the Q and A, we've got a ton of the Q. You probably won't get a chance to get through all of them. But there's one I thought was very interesting from Robert Ray, where it says, are there any policy barriers or national laws in the United States or elsewhere that prohibit several governmental organizations or commercial companies from different nations from collaborating to resolve differences in SSA data? Can you guys speak to any of those issues? Looks like Mariba has thoughts. Yeah, I mean, I think the answer is no, there's nothing preventing that. I think all the treaties and conventions that I've actually read from back in the 60s and 70s all kind of say that collaboration and that sort of stuff is actually encouraged to resolve issues at the lowest levels possible and that sort of stuff and encourages sharing. So yeah, I just think that countries still haven't gotten to the point where they're doing this as a common practice, but I definitely think that we're going in that direction quite quickly. Anyone else? No. Okay, there's a question from Daviji Stefanovic. Sorry. Sorry, I couldn't. Yeah, just one more perspective. So I know the question was about the US, but for instance, in Europe, there is regulation at mandates, collaboration for SSA. So by law, you at least on the European capability side, you don't do it alone. So you do it with other member states. It needs to be a group at least, and that's going to be carried forward also in the next program and that integrates all kinds of, that can integrate all kinds of data. So we use a lot of data from commercial actors from civilian military, academic actors. So it's mandated actually this multilateral collaboration. Thank you. Moving on to the next question from Demetri Stefanovic. And this might be a Regina question, but anyone feel free to jump in. Does any of the panelists have an idea on the mission of the newly established NATO Space Operations Center at Ramstein Air Base with regards to the SSA domain? Regina, do you have any thoughts on this or anyone else? I'd say nothing other than what's already publicly available. So it's going to be new center integrates certain capabilities and provides another forum to talk and operate. Anyone else? No. Okay. There's an idea sent in by Didi Alea that perfect transparency needs an international body to handle and dispatch this data and then an obligation to be transparent. First of all, would the panel agree that international body needs to be able to handle and dispatch this data? And second of all, how can we get an obligation to be transparent going amongst the international communities on this issue? I mean, I look at things like the IGS, that's an international body, but it has redundant data centers and redundant analysis centers. I think that's the way to go. I don't think that having one database to rule them all like Lord of the Rings is going to work. I think that having databases that can be cross referenced and shared is kind of the way to go. But yeah, I do think that there needs to be some sort of international kumbaya that comes together where everybody has agency and how this stuff is shared and what people do with it. So that's just my opinion. What are commercial SSA providers think about that? Yeah, to dive in here, from Leo's perspective, our business is collecting data and producing alerts and information, but ultimately it does not fall on our shoulders. It's not our mission to provide policies. We're not empowered to do that. So our goal is to provide the best picture possible as to what is happening in Leo and then hand that off to the people who need to take it a few more steps further and actually do say verification work or set up policies and procedures and the like. So I think there's a pretty clear delineation there of different roles required to meet the ultimate objective. Yeah, just to add on to that, with every one of our customers, there has been a long and laborious process of developing trust in the data. And I see this worldwide, the United States has their allies with their SSA data sharing agreements, and so they may have an agreement and principle to share data, but the trust in the data is not there unless you go through all the technical processes to make sure everyone agrees the data does have the appropriate fidelity. An international body, I think, would break down the political barriers. I don't know if there's a lot of sharing between the Chinese and the Russians in the U.S. on data. There is some, but I don't think there's much, and that might be the role of an international body. And I would say that there really does need to be a body if that is going to work. It also looks at the technical trust in the data that was brought up earlier. That's very critical if you're going to make life, you know, man-rated life decisions based on the data that you're using. Thank you. One thing that came in the chat was the idea of data latency, and that's obviously going to be a concern if you're doing things like verifying arms control agreements on this. Can you guys speak about how you handle data latency, and if that's an issue that you think about in terms of SSA sharing and making policy decisions on that? Who wants to take that one? I guess I can. Yeah, we, so just to let you know, the latency on our data, the real-time feed that I showed you earlier, that's 15 to 30 seconds latency on that data. So as it comes in, it's, you know, we record it, and it does, it is used to update orbits that are necessary for real-time update. The caveat being across all of the data we collect, that's not the highest quality data. And to generate the much higher quality data, we have lower latencies, you know, for example, to make sure that we get the correlation exactly right, it might take longer than 10 or 15 seconds. But we do shoot for real-time. There is also a need to, if you're going to have absolute trust in the data, we have a daily cadence with which customers that are flying satellites using our data, they also want a daily drop, which is our, has our, you know, our stamp of certification that this, a human has looked at this, and it is correct. And so there's a trade-off between latency and what you might perceive as the quality of the data. Raeba, thank you, Raeba. Yeah. So, you know, when it comes to that, we actually know, you know, how to handle that stuff. And I would say this, right, you know, whenever you have a hypothesis that you're considering, it's always prudent to come up with, I guess, okay, given these data, what is my belief? Okay, if I wait this long, and I bring in these data, does my belief change, or does it actually get, you know, more confirmed? Like this sort of parametric analysis and taking different evidence, comparing and contrasting, and how does your belief change with this, that, or the other, that's something that's not really rigorously practiced today to the best of my knowledge, but that's certainly the direction that things need to go in. And so the latency is real. There's value in incorporating the latent data. I can tell you that from my AFRL days, latency was basically the data just weren't included. And people just, the data just dropped on the floor, because people didn't want to reprocess everything again. There is some research that needs to be done, and how do you incorporate latent data without having to reprocess everything all over again? And that's not a solved problem, actually. How do you map the information forward from latent data without having to reprocess all the information all over again? And there isn't a good technical solution to that, actually. Dan, please. Yeah, you know, some great comments so far, and just to add a little more to it. One of the big changes that's kind of sweeping through the space industry in just the last couple of years is a lot of these modern computing architectures are being pulled in. In particular, a lot of the good work in cloud computing that these kind of online platforms have pioneered, you know, video sharing, mapping, and the like. So actually the ability to scale up and to get the computing power that's necessary is really a solved problem. So latency doesn't have to be a bottleneck anymore, and that really is surprisingly pretty new to kind of the SSA world and maybe to the space industry. The other thing is, Marieva made an interesting point a few moments ago about kind of multiple different databases and cross-checking between those databases. That's actually one of the modern computing architectures is, you know, if you need to pull data from multiple sources, you don't have to put it all into a single database. You can actually put a very lightweight application or additional kind of software layer on top that's able to query all these different data sources in real time, pull out the elements it needs, and perform the calculation. That's really the modern way of doing services. And you even think about like an app on your phone, you know, it's pulling data from databases of reviews, it might be pulling data from mapping databases, the weather databases and the like. It's not like all that data is co-located. It's your phone has an application that can hit all of those very quickly. And I think that's what's being built across the SSA world. And certainly, you know, at Leo Labs, we have an API and application program interface where our fully automated customers are querying the dataset and pulling just what they need in real time. Great. Thank you. We're really, we're, we've gone through a lot of time by one in Virginia to have the opportunity. If you have any last thoughts or a quick wrap up or anything you want to add before we move on to the next panel. Commuted. Excuse me. I was thinking of the focus of the next panel. And I mean, there are other networks. I mean, all of us have talked about that we have not just one single monolithic sensor, but we've got different ones. We've got different sensor classes. We network them together. We, we emphasize that this is a multilateral thing. And there are other arms control regimes and other other areas where we already have networks that we use to verify with different sensors. For instance, if we think about the CTVTO different kinds of sensors. So I think what we emphasize is that that needs to be multilateral, whichever way we can, we can do it. And we need to fuse a lot of different sensor types together. So that'll be from my side leading over also to the next. Thank you. You actually did the transition very well. Thank you for doing my job for me. Please join me in thinking our panelists has been a fantastic presentation. With that, I would like to do the zoom equivalent of asking the next panel to come up on the stage, ie if all the panelists in the next panel can turn on their videos and everyone on this panel could turn off the video. I appreciate it. And I will turn it on. I will hand it over to our moderator, John Borey from Unidire. John, you have the floor. Thanks very much, Victoria. And before I start, I'd just like to thank the panelists from the previous session. It was really fascinating, I thought. Also to thank our colleagues at Secure World Foundation. They've been longstanding partners for Unidire. And we're really pleased to be doing this event with you and carrying on a discussion about SSA and indeed other themes relevant from the space security field, which is what Unidire is a voluntarily funded autonomous institute within the UN family is sort of interested in in the context of its work on disarmament and arms control. I learned a lot in the previous session, even though I've heard some of these folks speak before, I was particularly pleased that Don Seppley mentioned the Kiwi radar. It turns out that that radar installation is pretty close, I think, to where my home base is when I'm back in New Zealand. So I'm going to have to go and have a look at that next time I'm down there. But look, I'm really pleased we've got a fantastic group of speakers now and we're really going to be, as Regina mentioned, sort of looking at some of the lessons and ideas from verification regimes, but also where SSA and STM might actually have some things to benefit arms control more broadly. And I think that at least some of the folks beaming in to follow this meeting today are from the disarmament community in Geneva and elsewhere. So maybe there are things we can learn. I'm really pleased we have Dr. Asha Balakrishnan. She's a research staff member at the Science and Technology Policy Institute, which is a federally funded research and development center for the provision of rigorous and objective analysis of science and tech policy issues. And she has a real engineering pedigree and brings a focus on space policy. And at present she's actually doing some some work with us and with Mareba on SSA. We've also got Gunnar Jeremiah. Gunnar, it's really good to see you again. I quite frequently run into Gunnar as he's the head of the research group for biological arms control at the University of Hamburg. And one of the processes we follow at Unidea is on biological issues. And he's actually done some writing for us recently, looking at some of the impact of new technologies in that field. And last but not least, Larry McFall is the director of verification and monitoring their program at Vertik. Vertik is a fantastic British-based NGO who provide a lot of, I think, you know, very good resources and training on all things related to verification. And he has a background in looking at particularly at issues like nuclear safeguards and nuclear disarmament verification, as well as sort of UN chemical and biological weapons investigations and other UN processes and sort of adjacent fields, whether you think about the UN Convention on Climate Change or the illegal production and trade in natural resources. So I think a really interesting panel. So I'm going to hand it over to Asha and we'll go through each of the panelists consecutively. And then we'll start the discussion. So Asha, over to you. Thank you, John. And thank you to Secure World Foundation and Unidea for sponsoring this discussion and inviting me to share some of my thoughts on this topic. I'll just say at the outset, I am not part of the sort of arms control. I don't study or know so much about the other regimes that my co-panelists will be talking about, but I have some background in SSA and space policy that I'd like to talk a little bit about with you today. So as was discussed in the previous session, SSA may provide a technical basis for verification that states can use to consider legal and policy options for future agreements on space security. But there are a number of challenges to conducting verification in space. Legally binding instruments for space security do not currently exist, which leads to the question of how do we get verification of compliance? Overcoming the physical challenges of space with more SSA data will help, and data sharing among space actors will also help. But how we share that data, what data we share, still remains to be seen. Technology has also improved in SSA sensors to better understand space activities. As we've heard from the previous panelists, this improved SSA data collection, but also the data processing and the capabilities of high performance computing and cloud computing and storage, as well as the data products that are being produced and explored, have the potential to improve space security and provide some data as the basis for compliance. But currently there is no global governance system for SSA in which to operate. I'll also get to this later in the discussion. While there is a broad agreement among the international community on the need to strengthen the governance framework for space activities, there is little consensus on how to go about this. Questions persist, such as what is an agreement or whether a compliance is even verifiable. This leads us to ask a set of very basic questions about who, what, where, when, why, and how we can think about verification in space. And I'm going to explore these six questions a bit further. Starting with the who, whose activities and compliance are being verified. This is probably among the simplest questions to answer. It is most likely the state actors, but also includes the actions of private sector owner operators. Who is doing the verification is another question related to who. This is a question I want to come back to later on with respect to the global governance systems. What, what verification is taking place in the arms control arena? Verification is defined as the process of gathering and analyzing information to make a judgment about parties compliance or non-compliance with an agreement. This assumes there is a set of rules or legal instruments which need to be complied with. This may also be a set of norms or standards that are yet to be developed about on-orbit activities in space. With the help of SSA, verification to understand the extent to which these norms are being adhered to could be pursued. And we've heard a little bit about some of the technology advancements that have happened to be able to do that in the previous panel. Where, physically, this is obviously in space, this is where this would, what we're looking at, but where the verification will be done goes along with who will be doing it. When, verification needs to be conducted prior to a breach or violation of an obligation with enough time to act. And I think we can learn about those sort of triggers of when from some of the colleague, my colleagues on this panel. Why? Maintaining the space environment for peaceful uses and promoting space sustainability is the entire reason we are all so concerned about space security. The liability convention could be leaned on to determine liability in the case of a mishap, but without verification, there isn't any teeth. The only time the liability convention was challenged, there wasn't enough information to really determine who was liable and the case was settled out of court. Verification is an important determination of any liability. And then, finally, how? This is indeed the hardest and most challenging question, and this is where SSA comes in. The more sources of data that exist and the more layered a verification system can be, the more effective it will be in convincing possible offenders that they will be detected. SSA data may also be able to identify physical characteristics and patterns of behavior, particularly with using data fusion techniques. Registration of objects, particularly compliance with the U.N. registration convention will also help identify satellite operators. The verification system should also be able to correctly attribute a space object to its owner to be able to identify an offending party. Currently, the registration, I think the U.N. registration of objects exists, but it's not complied with. As SSA systems improve and provide more frequently updated information, we may also be able to move to a situation where objects are being monitored almost continuously, and we talked about that a little bit more in the previous panel as well. But the one part of the how I want to address is the SSA governance system. This is still an open question. In 2018, my organization, the Science and Technology Policy Institute, conducted a study on the global trends in SSA and STM, space traffic management. As part of that study, we explored four scenarios of governance. I'm going to just share my screen very briefly to share with you the I'm having problems sharing my screen. Okay, never mind. I'm not going to share my screen. I'm just going to tell you about them. So we came up with these four scenarios. So the first scenario is really an extension of what we're doing right now or what it seems to be have been happening over the past several years. The U.S. government through, this is about SSA governance again, the U.S. government through either a civil or military lead agency remains the primary source of SSA data and services for the global space community free of cost for operators. There is no supervisory entity with an oversight coordination role and the actions of for this scenario rely solely on an operator's decision. A few points about this scenario, the U.S. government established the rules about what U.S. private companies can share and with whom U.S. government establishes agreements with foreign governments and operators with about information sharing, and they decide the terms of that agreement. And foreign governments largely rely on U.S. for SSA data. At the time of this study, that was definitely true. I would say over the last two years, two and a half years since the study was published, I think more and more governments are starting to become slightly more independent from the U.S. data. In scenario two, private companies dominate the and are the basic source for primary source of SSA data and services for the global space community. This approach is gaining traction and private companies are working towards this. SSA is a perfect competition market and SSA products and services are provided to operators for free. Operators rely on private services and there is a large market from where to choose from. Again, there's no supervisory entity with an oversight or coordination role and now foreign governments would also rely on private services. Scenario three, this is a global government system and it's run by centralized operation through some sort of international governmental organization as the primary source of the SSA data. This could be, as was just discussed in the previous panel, sort of a hub where other data sets are being brought in, but this is a centralized function. These services can be provided by either individual governments or private companies. All governments and operators share observations with this IGO. And an international agreement is in place to determine what data can be shared to the public in what way, such that countries classified information remains classified. It would be the most complete catalog and operators rely on this database. This IGO builds the database from observations from all of these different entities and then there's some data fusion, additional data analytics based on top of it. Scenario four is one in which each space bearing government or a region might own and run their own SSA system and they share data as they see fit. It sort of bifurcates the world and says we're not going to rely on one. We're going to just have our own and we may share or not share depending on how we want to play with the other countries. So these are four scenarios that we sort of posited in the report and not surprisingly, we did some polling and found that most countries or sorry, most people that we talked to in this regime in this area felt like scenario three, the globally governance system was sort of the most ideal but probably the least likely. And scenario one where the U.S. government sort of builds, you know, is the place to go and extends the sort of reliance on their data was probably the most likely. I'm not sure that's still the case now two and a half years later. So some final remarks. Regardless of the scenario or how, promoting transparency of space activities and information on space objects can build trust among actors, both state and commercial actors. SSA data if curated and analyzed properly contains some of the necessary information to verify transparency as well as metrics to promote sustainability of space such as U.N. registration of space objects, post-mission disposal compliance and even yet to be established norms for rendezvous and proximity operations. Let me end by saying a bit more about norms of behavior. Norms will become more important as establishing legally binding agreements can prove challenging. One analogy I've heard is that norms are like wearing glasses. They provide more ways to discern threatening activities from non-threatening behavior by communicating intent. If nations pledge or commit to a set of standards or norms of behavior actions taken outside of the norms will be easier to recognize. We can also use SSA more effectively to identify these patterns of behavior that may show hostile intent or even reckless or negligent behavior. To that end, space varying nations and international bodies should establish safe and sustainable norms of activities in space considering culturally relevant behaviors in each nation's perspectives of norms. Space security is very much dependent on the measures of safe and sustainability that we establish. Thank you. Thanks very much Asha. That was really, really interesting and I've been compiling a list of questions here for you later in the session but right now I'd like to go to Gunnar. Yes, I just tried to share my screen. Thank you very much for the invitation and I think my task is now to turn the perspective around and look from space to earth and say a little bit on what can be done from space with satellite images to verify the bio weapons ban and I might spoil your expectations if you have any about the user usability of satellite images and that has to do with a couple of things and first is the multilateral norm to ban bio weapons, the bio weapons convention and other than other arms control treaties within the BWC there is no such thing as verification provision really. I mean there is no institutional experience, there is no developed procedure, together information, there is no international organization being mandated usage tasks and also the ban itself concerns the intent to use biology for hostile purposes but that a larger problem then obviously comes with the dual use problem in the bio area which is ubiquitous saying that there are only very few or maybe no choke points that clearly hint towards non-compliance. So if you're in the nuclear area might have nuclear power plants or large enrichment plants or stuff like that you don't have these kind of facilities in the bio area and even military activities that you have in that area are allowed if they come for defensive purposes. So the idea would be to tell or discriminate offensive from defensive purposes of a military facility and that's pretty hard to do. So and then in the civil sphere you have global spread of biotechnology which is good thing basically and most times for example in developing countries you now have a lot of also larger bio pharmaceutical facilities popping up that are used for the production for example animal vaccines so that this leads to more independence of these countries but basically we have no oversight since there's no prohibition, there's no control, there's as I said no oversight of specific facilities and also different to for example the nuclear area there's also no declaration mechanism so no one has to declare facilities and obviously there are thousands of bio facilities around the globe. So what is it that we want to know? So as I said it's the intent that we want to find out about and so the quest it is for signatures of illegitimate biotech facilities and as first step that requires the ability to identify biotech facilities in general and to to have a well somehow complete or comprehensive picture that would include that we identify or see small biotech labs and recognize clandestine activities that we see big biopharmaceutical facilities where the production would maybe find place and again the recognition of clandestine activities and to discriminate offensive and defensive activities and military bio facilities and I said already in the beginning I have to spoil expectations this is possibly simply not possible with satellite images alone but still of course there's value of satellite pictures that can contribute to at least two different tasks and first is the monitoring of facilities of which we know that they do play or have played a role in offensive or defensive military bio weapons programs as far as we know there are no offensive bio weapons programs right now and also of course would allow the monitoring of civil facilities and the second is to search and identify facilities that are mentioned in the media in official documents or elsewhere where there are rumors that these facilities might have a role in a bio weapons program but this would only work together with some geo information in these rumors because it is not possible to automatically scan a whole country or so satellite images of that on bio facilities and that is because signatures are a bit vague to be careful so what information do we have in satellite images are there are first of all there are some that are not biospecific we can check upon activity is that traffic parking lots being used or not is there a continued use or conversion to military use also the other way around do we have bunkers security parameters double fences separate parts within a facility or stuff like that or maybe you're even the the other way around that these kind of parameters or structures being deconstructed we can set these facilities into a geographical context are they in an urban area are they abroad however it's not a rule that offensive bio weapons sites are abroad there's a famous or infamous example of a former soviet program spirtloss or part of the program being biased in spirtloss in a in a in a city and yeah well then it comes to biospecific signatures and again spoiler there are basically no signatures of small biotech even the best reconnaissance officer or the best reconnaissance nerd couldn't tell that this here is one of the only four highest security labs that we have in germany in the bio area uh based here just a few kilometers south of me in the red light district of emberg um yeah simply you couldn't you couldn't tell from from that picture and also for large biotech there are very few but not exclusive signatures for example we very often see construction changes because the production lines would be changed once after a while you would very often see cooling devices for waste heat treatment from fermentation or other bio processes or purification plants but even in the largest bio weapons program that history knows that they already mentioned a bio preparat program in soviet union as far as we know satellite emery did not play a role in the recognition of that program and that was back in the 1980s but still satellites have played a role in record reconnaissance so here is as an example from the civil side a one of the most unsuspicious bio facilities of that scale that we know it's a vaccine production plant in germany in desau and we have all signatures of a civil facility i will not zoom in here because it's little time only but it's only single fences if you look into the entrance gate yes there is security but no further measures behind it and so on there are in fact development over time you see a lot of people working here by all these cars being parked here and as i said it's very typical to have cooling devices but however this is not exclusive for bio plants and also you don't see them in all designs because sometimes you have them just hanging in the wall and here is a purification plant but without knowing that this is a vaccine production plant there are little chances to prove that from these pictures just quickly turned to the military side one quite impressive example might be open air test sites in the desert since these are structures that you might only see from from satellite images like this but like the Nazca scratches in Peru and this example here is the Namus B2 site the former french test site in Algeria it was active until the early 1970s and still you can see some circles here around where the the idea was to measure the the distance of disperse of bio agent here from the center and since you can still see that and also the skid marks and the sand you might think well maybe it's it's not inactive for some 50 years but if you would zoom into these buildings here or even to the site here which is belonging to to that test ground you would see that the buildings are mostly destroyed by fire fire fences are open you just have ruins you have an airstrip which is not in good in good shape and you don't see any vehicles so it's it's a good I think the conclusion would be that this is really not in inaction it's different to the darkway proving ground part of the US defensive bioweapons program in the desert of Utah and here you see a similar design the circles surrounded by by another wall and you see vehicles you see that the buildings nearby seem to be in use at least there are also cars parked in front of it you can also here you have a it's really a very similar design to the one in Algeria right so you have an airstrip here and also here you have the facilities for indoor experiments for preparing the experiments and so on of course you know that that you can also have different time layers so you can also follow the development of a plant over time are here basically is the the purification found again and also in civil society actors might use different websites for example here this is mickey mappia to display additional information about sites like this however everybody could just use this and say that this here for example is the chemical test facility in darkway proving ground so it's it's not checked it's not and yeah it's not really verification in the strict meaning of the term the images do not allow discrimination of intent and also not of use so since time is already over i will not go into detail about one project that we or one one you know one example case or test case that we had here a couple of years ago here's the link to the article on that on arms control won't that was on the um um identification of the alma liha rice and production facility in syria where the starting point were open documents to the united nation security council at opc w and in the end we had no proof but rather could identify qualified um questions which i think is the usual outcome of such investigations so conclusions um the absence of verification and clear definitions of compliance in the bio weapons convention prevent a set framework for the analysis of satellite images in that field um anyway even if we had that there are no good of clear signatures for bio facilities uh satellite images and other information including all kinds of open source information used by both civil society or or academia and single states obviously uh lead to different effects on transparency so difference of a state or a baleen cat or so would do such investigation um the totality of open source information not supposed to identify smoking guns that really needs on site inspections and we cannot also expect an automatic scan of larger areas for bio facilities but still our satellite images can contribute highly relevant information um to monitoring uh in biological arms control uh for the result however since there's no official political the agreed verification mechanism the result would in the best case possibly the phrasing of qualified questions so i think that was a bit too long but thank you for being here thanks very much gunnar and it's sort of listening to you talking about sort of the bio field it sort of made me think of what asha had been talking about before too you know in the context of ssa i mean in the in the biological weapons convention you have this this kind of normative uh strong norm against biological weapons but uh it it doesn't really have measures to ensure confidence and compliance you know in order to face these challenges and we won't go into the history of those attempts in the bwc but this seems highly relevant when you're talking about sort of norms of responsible behavior i guess in the in the space security field that you want to be able to back those up with some systems that can enable you to share information and i know that in that respect the bwc has some confidence building measures but they're mainly voluntary they're not very detailed and they're they're not necessarily very very well adhered to so maybe when we come back to the discussion later we can we can pick up some of that but i think it fits in nicely in terms of being injected into the the the four different options that that asha laid out for us at the beginning but i'm going to go to larry mcfall now because i think larry is going to bring a nuclear dimension to this and i think that is highly relevant um and i've also been following some of the chat and some of the references to arms control there um so over to you larry thanks very much uh i'm just waiting for my video to start thanks very much there this light glitch with the video um so thanks very much um to the host for inviting me to this panel um very much enjoyed listening to the previous speakers both in the panel before and the current panel as well actually i was very well it it's been fascinating to hear about the development of space situational awareness um and how much capability has increased and will continue to increase um but i'm also very glad that asha brought up some of the fundamental questions that certainly have been taken any organization or government looking at verification of treaties will need to ask itself and although they sound basic they very rarely are and um they continue to be asked um to this day across all the treaties and agreements that that we focus on and those are of course who what how why and when um um but uh space has been of particular interest to us and myself because it presents um issues or challenges even um that are prevalent both in sustainable development world um which we mentioned before um your carrying capacity management of the common product life cycle circular economy and even polluter pays and of course uh regulating transport as well and in particular transport of transport by carriers that are themselves potentially risky um but also the security field weaponization destabilization escalation misperception dual use and intent these are words that we've heard come up quite a lot both in technical discussions and the political discussions of space security um there may be lessons that can be learned from uh the nuclear field um and quite possibly or probably from chemical and biological and the conventional fields as a conventional weapons field as well i've been asked to focus mainly uh and briefly on the nuclear field uh and uh and its verification which is oriented really more towards the security aspects than say the safety stability or um sustainability of the uh space sector um but the evolution of verification mechanisms in nuclear field dates back to about the middle of the last century um and the future pro both that and the future prospects uh for these mechanisms provide a relatively rich example of what's achievable technically and politically when countries have identified and agreed on a serious risk and decided to take collective action to mitigate it um and that's not to say that there haven't been problems and challenges both from a verification and compliance perspective as well as uh at a more basic uh adherence to uh and joining any of these treaties or initiatives but lessons can of course be learned from those issues as well why they happened um it's also not to say that approaches in this sector or any of the other sectors can be directly applied to space some elements may be able to be but there certainly are general principles and drivers that will undoubtedly come up and do come up uh and examples of what's possible um if there is the right kind of technology and sufficient political will or a window of political will that's prevailing at um at a given time um so different nuclear agreements and their associated verification mechanisms um as well as future looking initiatives which I'll touch on have focused on a fairly wide range of activities um perhaps less so than in the chemical biological and in and in due course in the space sector but it's focused on nuclear material itself associated locations and facilities even academic research and development manufacturing export and of course warheads themselves delivery vehicles and nuclear explosions so if you think about the field in that sense in the overall effort to preserve or support peace and stability the mechanisms that the community has come up with apply to very different stages of the risk profile from the nuclear sector they're all aiming to some degree or other to be preventative in nature um but those agreements that focus on nuclear material address the source of the risk um the dual use nature of new material whereas by focusing on explosions um you hoping to deter or at least respond to the final stage the realization of a nuclear weapons program um so the timely intervention the principle of timely intervention has been uh tackled in different ways let's say in the nuclear sector and in all the other sectors that we um I mentioned at the beginning um but throughout the evolution of verification mechanisms in that field um the now familiar issues at least in the field have been apparent throughout the process what can be verified how it should be done and who should do it um crucially what level of intrusiveness will each state tolerate in their efforts to support communal transparency on-site inspections what should their frequency be what should their duration be how much notice should be given um how should commercially and militarily sensitive information be protected during inspections or any other kind of monitoring surveillance uh how can states of reassurance that and link to that how can states of reassurance that a verification system isn't seeing what it's um not meant to see um what kinds of verification technology are permissible and how does that change over time most many treaties that that um that with um you know that with us today um were negotiated at a time with uh significantly different types of technology and pervasiveness of that technology among you know uh governments countries and even general public who carries out inspections states or IGOs based on what legal measures um so verification in nuclear field has seen most of those questions addressed amounts in one way or another uh and the primary examples to consider here are um the international atomic energy agency nuclear safeguard system which evolved from the desire to enable peaceful uses of nuclear energy and applications while guarding against the proliferation of nuclear weapons um although there is a central treaty behind this um system which is an proliferation treaty the actual verification system itself is based on individual bilateral agreements between countries and an international organization in this case international atomic energy agency um that body also has separate departments focusing on safety and security science technology and energy the initial focus of safeguards was to focus largely on nuclear material in the field cycle but it has come having learned lessons itself um to focus on a wider range of activities and I think that's a good example of what was considered necessary to begin with and acceptable in terms of intrusiveness and then when certain things became apparent that it wasn't sufficient countries being willing to take on uh greater levels of inspections and so on um under those right agreements countries also agree to adopt implementing legislation regulations and practices to account for and control their material and to enable access to agency inspectors and they also send reports containing declarations and accountancy on its holdings to the agency the agency collects and evaluates safeguards relevant information and verifies it um through onsite and remote monitoring in contrast the ct bt's monitoring system is designed to detect nuclear explosions anywhere on earth uh underground underwater or in the atmosphere it's got over 300 monitoring stations 16 laboratories worldwide and it uses a complementary set of methods seismic hydroacoustic infrasound and radionuclide and these are all all this information is transmitted back to Vienna um where it is processed um meanwhile in contrast another nuclear agreement which has been used a lot lately new start under that it's a bilateral agreement two countries and inspectors from each party account delivery vehicles and warhead members uh unique identifier tags are also put on missiles and then as I mentioned there initiatives looking to the future um looking at nuclear disarmament verification more broadly uh this takes aspects of all of the uh agreements um negotiated so far built on them it looks at warhead dismantlement and also disposition of fissile material back into civilian applications um these activities also have to tackle thorny issues related to non-proliferation and delving back into nuclear histories but there is a concerted effort amongst governments and various other organizations to work on this looking to this long-term issue of how to verify multi-actual nuclear disarmament and then it's just worth noting that there are other or other um treaties more on the conventional side such as the Vienna document um and the cfe in the open skies treaty which already have in place um uh instruments such as exchange of information on military activities defense plan risk reduction activities if you see an unusual military activity prior notification the open skies treaty has a stringent approach to sense for equipment validation and provenance of overhead imagery um but a common feature of all these agreements is the need for a high level of precision in the definitional language of what is meant to be verified and how and developing the capabilities and agreeing the language has often taken a considerable amount of time effort and negotiation um I think what we've seen from our colleagues and what we know about space is that the issue of dealing with the um challenges in space is now fairly urgent given um the growth of activities there that said the same could really be said about nuclear and biological fields given the nature of the threat um and the level of the impact and um with that um I will stop apart from to say that I agree with Asha that I'm very glad that she's or they have been constructing a scenario based approach to looking at what might work this is something that we really enjoy doing as well and it is very useful to draw up parallels of what might be ideal and what might be likely to be acceptable in terms of whether you can have a central body um gathering all the data and what's likely but I think although it's it can be difficult to see at the moment agreement on um a collective approach that the examples that we have referred to such as the IEA hope is EW do give an indication that centralized bodies can be put together when there is sufficient political will okay thank you very much Larry for sort of giving us that very kind of useful overview and I sort of want to bring it back down back to the the panel now for some discussion and to bring in some of the points that we've had coming in although I also noticed in the chat there's been there's been a side discussion among the physicists on quantum computing which um uh I guess you know Q physics joke here um or physicists joke but um we'll try to bring it back to to focusing on um on where we are with SSA so I want to I want to throw out two two questions to the panel to start with I guess the first one is a little more sort of toward you Asher but anyone else would like to have a crack at this and you know recognizing that you know you're offering these um points in your own capacity you were sort of talking about option three and option four among your options option three sort of being the global governance model and which would probably require some sort of um you know multilateral agreement I guess to getting that going and then the fourth being a more regional model um and then contrasting that with I think your first option was you know a sort of Pax Americana kind of approach where the the US was sort of really providing the the the data and you were saying you know option three was likely to be very difficult um or at least it seemed very difficult when you were doing your study two and a half years ago I wonder now that you're seeing changes in Washington in terms of administration is is that likely to have any impact on how uh the thinking is there um so it'd be a penny for your thoughts on that and then the the other question really for the panel um in general is uh it was prompted by something that you know Larry you were talking about sort of the nuclear arms control approach and these were very much angled for much of the Cold War on of course capabilities and we're not likely to have an international agreement I would imagine anytime soon to limit SSA capabilities nor would we want nor would we want that um but maybe maybe there could be agreements in space to restrict certain forms of behavior and these could be legally binding or they could be voluntary or they could be politically binding so then the question is is SSA up to the task and for what and this goes back to Ash's question and I mean let's let's bring it in from the abstract and talk about specifics is SSA capable in the near future or now of of um say being applied to a prohibition on destructive ASAT tests or say monitoring the minimum distances for co-orbital maneuvers among satellites and maybe this could be connected to I think an idea that you mentioned Larry you're talking about a notification regime you know notification of close orbital maneuvers that then you know would SSA be of some use there because I sort of feel that on the arms control disarmament side there's currently some uncertainty and there are different approaches out there toward SSA and verification so be useful to hear from you guys as experts as to your thoughts on these questions back to you. Asha do you want to start? Sure I think your first question John was about um was about the scenario three and also which was really the globally governed system and as well as the sort of individually SSA systems you know from each country or region I think that um with respect to sort of the political viability of a globally governed system I mean I think that that would be the most ideal approach if people, countries, state actors, owner operators, companies trusted the entity that was collecting the information I think this really goes back to trust in both the entity but also trust in the data and so one thing you know I've learned from listening to Mariba and some of the some of the more technical field folks is that you know by crowdsourcing and by fusing data you may be able to pull out those entities that are you know putting in bad data because if you have enough data then you might be able to identify where the where the bad data is coming from but um but going back to the political viability I think that I don't necessarily see like a change of administration you know pushing it one way or the other I think first of all we're still in like a few days of of this election and so I don't want to speculate anything that will come as a result of it but I don't think that I think the globally governed system everybody sees as best if there's trust among actors I don't know if that answered that question Guna would you like to go next? I can try please so um yeah I would also concentrate on your first question um on these different models and well I mean we we see that in in certain regimes we have global governance and that there is at least basic level of trust which then also enables verification maybe but um and however I would also maybe mention a model five which would then be a civil society kind of model where we have no where we don't see any um interstate agreement on the horizon and as we've seen here today and as we also see um looking into the transparency measures and transparency um creating efforts that that organizations like Bellingcat also um do that um I think um the I mean as as a basic building block for trust and confidence we need transparency and transparency can of course also be produced by actors others and states um and um my my guess or my my my hope would be that um whenever a relevant information would be made public by whomsoever uh that states have to react on that and so um maybe that would be more to think about thanks Guna do you have anything to add Larry? Uh yeah I I think from what um you know from what we've heard about space situational awareness capabilities um I think it's I think the the situation now is basically to have to look at what they could do in terms of a prevention or a deterrence effect um so it may there may come a time as we were talking about um before as the other panelists are talking about in terms of being able to determine intent but this strikes me as being very difficult um at least currently so it may be that either you're carrying out inspections at source um as in on earth before things are launched which we have associated levels of um sensitivity and intrusiveness or you're looking at um trying to identify characterize and attribute actions after they've happened and from what we've heard that doesn't sound that sounds a lot less problematic because there's so much there's so many eyes on the sky now both through the private sector and in government of course by that point the problems happened um so that may not be sufficient for some countries but on the other hand that is something that has already been certainly the arms control community has considered it if not um sufficient then necessary in other fields because that's that's precisely what the CTBT does it tells you that nuclear explosion has happened um so it's also what the UN Secretary General Mechanism on the alleged use of biological and chemical weapons does it comes in after something has happened after an incident has happened and tries to establish what has happened um then it's up to states and the international community to to decide what to deal with that information but assuming it's not a hasn't been existential um species level existential then then there is always something it can be done um that issue so there are print there are precedents and there are examples and there may even be lessons to learn if not from the technical side and at least from the legal the way the negotiating side and the legal architecture of how um systems like the CTBT and the USGM mechanism have been developed that could be useful um and presumably in in any kind of post-incident investigation international post-incident investigation mechanism um that uh does dovetail with what Asha was saying before this all it all really the any of these approaches do hinge on the level of trust in any organization and the level of trust in data um and that's both in terms of a retrospective kind of finding but but also I guess um if if we were going to have some kind of verification regime that or warning system that was something in advance that data would need to be trusted and acted on very quickly and if that's an international body then you'd need a very high level of confidence in those systems um when it was set up well thanks very much Larry I'm I'm quite conscious of the time now we're almost at an end and I know that our Secure World Foundation colleagues would like to have a couple of words at the end um do any of you the panelists have any very quick parting words before we know okay well look thank you very much all of you um for your contributions today I think you've given us a lot to think about um I can also um I would think in a future discussion it would be great to perhaps bring in some perspectives on what's been going on in the world of cyber as well because it seems that there are many parallels between some of the issues in terms of norms of behavior or verifying activities in space and and and and developments in the cyber domain and in fact there was some attention to this last week at a at a major conference organized by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs which you can find online too uh lastly I'd just like to give a plug uh to uh our former Unidea Space Security fellow Daniel Porrus who's now with Secure World Foundation he helped to organize this event but he's also written a very useful primer on some of these issues called Eyes on the Sky Rethinking Verification in Space if you go to the Unidea website at unidea.org and you search for for Eyes on the Sky or Daniel's name you'll find that there and that might be of interest to some of our participants today and of course there are many very very good Secure World Foundation publications as well so with that I want to thank you all again and hand over to Brian Whedon for some final remarks thank you thank you very much for that and and thank you to all of our speakers um for uh today's just one second things are still come up here um all right so thank you for that and thank you to all our speakers uh for joining us today and giving such a good presentation set of presentations and excellent discussions about this topic uh you know the purpose of today's event was to restart a more focused discussion on the possibility of some sort of a verification regime for future agreements in space and and we wanted to start with discussions of space situation awareness as sort of laying the foundation for that discussion um as we sort of saw of course across today's discussion there is a lot of things to work from uh leolab and and exo and the others in the first panel showed off some incredible capabilities that already exist to you know see what's happening in space and monitor some of these activities uh but as we also saw there's still some challenges we have the challenge of in case there's multiple opinions about what's happening in space how to validate data how to come to a better agreement on on shared agreement and understanding of what's going on there are certain activities such as cyber or electromagnetic use and jamming that we can't see with traditional as I say and those could prevent additional verification challenges and then finally how do we determine intent which is sort of a challenge across many different types of activities we then had the second panel where we looked at some examples of how verification regimes uh have been put in place or and and work or in some cases have challenges from other domains and what lessons there are for that that we might be able to apply for space I think going forward uh I would suggest you look at this as the beginning of a discussion for those of us that are concerned about the proliferation of counter space capabilities and the potential for conflict in space uh we need to seriously think about how we can build a verification regime that will enable future legally binding agreements and restrictions on certain types of behavior or activities or even technologies that are detrimental to all but that's going to take quite a lot of work uh work that has been done other domains but it's not necessarily been done yet in the space domain so I think going forward we sort of put a call out to the community for your ideas and your writings and your analysis and your suggestions about how we can start to lay that foundations and work towards that verification regime in the future so with that I'll just make a brief reminder everyone that we will be posting a recording of this event along with a transcript and all of the PowerPoint presentations to our website in the near future um and we'll ask that you stay engaged in subject and with that thank you very much for coming