 Hello, good afternoon, and welcome to New America. My name is Andres Martinez. I am the editorial director of Future Tense. Future Tense is a collaboration between New America, where you're seated today, an independent think tank here in D.C., as well as Arizona State University and Slate Magazine. We are tagline on Slate's website where we publish content, including a number of pieces by today's authors as a citizen's guide to the future. Future Tense looks at emerging technologies and its implications for society and for our policy-making world here in Washington. In addition to publishing daily blog posts and longer articles, we also have every month we take one topic and do a deep dive and we call those units Futurography and this month is on the new Space Race and that is the unit that has inspired this event today. So I urge all of you to check us out on Slate's website. And if you're following today's conversation on Twitter, please use the hashtag FTSpaceRace and you can follow Future Tense generally at Future Tense now. So as I was flying yesterday to come to this event, I was in Mexico earlier in the week and I was flying here on a very packed flight and I was thinking this friction that we have between the idea of collaboration and competition is a very fruitful, rich one on so many different fronts and I think it's one that's very much in evidence on our exploration efforts and what does feel like a new race to space and we wanted to take this subject and look at it in the context of companies competing with each other, collaborating with each other, competing with governments, collaborating with governments and also in a geostrategic sense the traditional contest between nation states and also collaboration between nation states which is so important and what that motivates us to do together and also in competition with each other and why we do it? Are we exploring space because of what's out there or is it also or perhaps even more so about what it means for us here and what it does for our imagination? And I was thinking of it particularly in the context of my packed flight yesterday because I hope that when we do take commercial space liners we will have done away with middle seats. That's one of the innovations that needs to occur and talk about collaboration and competition for that arm rest that's a whole juxtaposition of the two. So I'm thrilled that all of you could come. Housekeeping matter please. It's my role to remind you to turn off your phones and also in the Q&A periods please wait for a microphone which will be in the room and identify yourself as this is being webcast. Also what just another matter in terms of our show flow here today is that on the right sides a Virgin Galactic had a meeting that was rescheduled that didn't permit him to be here at noon so we have shifted that conversation to one o'clock with Ann Marie Slaughter and that's reflected in the agenda that was handed out today but it was an adjustment that we made late yesterday. So now let me kick things off by asking one of my colleagues at ASU to please join us to get us started with her presentation. Lindy Elkins Tanton is the director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU and she will start us off and then we'll segue into a conversation that will be moderated by New America's own Constantine Caccheus who is a senior fellow here at New America and the author of The Pioneer Detectives. But Lindy we're going to start off with you. Hello everyone let's see. I'm expecting a presentation to appear magically. Is there something I'm supposed to do? Ha ha! Oh my gosh brilliant okay I'm with you. So why would indeed why I show this beautiful fish from Las Specula in Florence. I want to start out and it's nice actually to be shifted because it's a sort of an introductory conversation I want to start out by talking about why we explore. Very often it's assumed that exploration is a search for science and so I like to start to talk about Darwin this is part of what I refer to as the Darwin Pickled Animal Collection at the Museum of Natural History in London downstairs. Of course Darwin for those of you who are students of exploration know that the Beagle was not a scientific voyage. Darwin was in fact a mediocre student and he was hired on to be a gentleman companion for the captain unless the captain be bored talking to all the people whose main job it was to survey South America for trade and commerce. And so science in general is an add-on. Exploration is mainly about nation building, trade and commerce traditionally in the past. And so what I really want to challenge us with today is can we make a bit of a new model for exploration in the future something that's more fitting for the future of humankind and for this collaborative competitive melange that was introduced. So this of course is Ernest Shackleton the famous endurance trip that when I thought about being an explorer as a kid and maybe some of you did too I suppose if this were a class I'd challenge you to raise your hand if you once wanted to be Ernest Shackleton. But I think that the really amazing lesson for exploration with the endurance is that they didn't do any of the things they set out to do not a single thing they didn't even get step one done toward their actual goal and yet he's heralded as one of the greatest leaders ever in the history of exploration it's so visionary and so inspiring in the person we should all hope to be and so right away don't we have a suspicion that exploration is really not about getting there it's about how you are and who you become while you're doing it and what happens to the people who are with you and I think that's a kind of a nice metaphor for space exploration so having wanting to be Ernest Shackleton this is me in a very wild part of Siberia I led a five field expeditions in wild parts of Siberia and they were wonderful but I was also not the first one ever to go there and isn't there that special thing about being the first you really want to be the first and we were there for science but it also happened that it ended up being a diplomatic trip also in a way we made a lot of nice international collaborations and this is something that now I'm going to forget his name there was a 19th century Englishman who stated that science was a wonderful way to keep countries connected even when their governments were at war and I think that that is something that we need to also keep close to our hearts while we're thinking about space exploration this is going to be the hot spot for international relations we can't get along together very well here on the earth imagine when we're adjoining a non-standardized Mars basis how well we're going to get along there so I think that that could be a kind of Joseph Banks that's his name that could be a kind of a model for us and so that wish to be first this is one of the famous medieval T maps a map of the world shaped like a T this is the first one that ever used the word Europe 900 AD and so we're going to be making a new kind of map as we go to other bodies and we'll be the first to make that map and we'll be dividing it up by nationalities potentially or by commercial industries or by special collaborative missions and this is where at ASU we're getting very involved and this is my new project that I want to introduce to you because what we want to do is try to address some of these larger exploration space problems I'm always asking people, especially students because they tend to like to think about these things what do you want to have achieved in your life in 20 years you know I asked them what are the imperatives of our time don't do a bit of science that's an increment don't do a paper that's an increment decide what's really worthy of you and especially in this room I think a lot of us have set our goals very high and in addition to our imperatives what are the biggest questions facing humankind and we have a lot of questions right now about our future and I think that a lot of them are going to be answered in the context of space exploration in and around it not just international relations resources technology social behaviors the fracturing of the human race so we're asking questions we started an initiative called the interplanetary initiative and so we're doing not just science and engineering but we're asking these other questions what's going to happen to the humans back on earth how are we going to feel when the first baby is born on Mars what's going to happen to us as a species when life is really confirmed to be off of the earth is it going to be a fracturing event or a combining event I think these are critical questions for the future of humankind and they rest in the area of space exploration so this interplanetary initiative advancing society through exploration we're going to produce a new paradigm for university public cooperative projects around the future of humans in space I hope to be working with many of you on this but asking those bigger questions not just how do we make a better capsule but how do we keep humankind together while we do this ran a bunch of brainstorming sessions with students this is unbelievably fabulous for inspiring students the number one feeling they had when they talked about the things that we're talking about today is the feeling that they're making history to give them a goal and a vision and something that's bigger than themselves then they move past beyond the content-driven education of the 19th century industrial workforce and they start imagining and creating a better future for us we're starting with the big win we just got in January that is the discovery mission to the metal world psyche I'm the principal investigator for that mission and we are teaming with Space Systems L'Oreal it's their first deep space mission and so I ask myself again while I'm running this mission what is the purpose of exploration this is very science driven but I think the real purpose of it is inspiration the real purpose is to make everybody take a bigger step than they might have already taken now when we're talking to companies like Blue Origins and Virgin Galactic and SpaceX and the other pioneers everyone there is taking a bigger step and if you imagine if we could get everybody a bigger step then we wouldn't be quite in the quandary that we're in right now and space is unbelievably inspiring for that purpose and so back to the subject at hand 47 years ago we went to the moon and then no one went anywhere for a really long time and yet our national identity rests upon that that America was the country that put somebody there and very soon we're no longer going to be the only country that's done that and there are going to be private entities that have done this as well and so nationally first we had a priority to go back to the moon then we had a priority to go to Mars then we had a priority to go back to the moon in between there were some space stations and so to go back to the beginning of the first things that I said once again we're learning that it's not the destination that's necessarily the purpose of the journey the journey itself is a lot of the purpose but when we combine commerce then the end product becomes part of it too so there are two parts there's the inspiring to take a bigger step there's the pushing all of society to a bigger goal and then there's the what do you find when you actually get there and so even though I'm all in favor of the moon and I urge you all by the way to have a favorite lunar crater I suggest Orientale it's a really good one and I've worked on Apollo samples I really think that Mars is where we've got to go because when you talk about vision and you talk about even resources you've got to think big and Mars is really the big destination that's within our grasp as a species and we've got to do it so this is the first picture that Viking took of the surface of Mars and so finally just one of our more recent Mars inhabitants I think we do need to choose a place I think that place has got to be Mars and I think we need to do this under a new paradigm where we figure out how to cooperate better and we use this to make frankly a better life here on Earth as we're going forward we've got to be bold enough to have an optimistic vision of the future it's so easy to have a post-apocalyptic view of the future but it's up to us especially the people in this room to have a really optimistic view of the future with a big goal and I think that goal should be Mars thank you this is time for us to... Yeah this is where I say Lindy needs no introduction although Andres gave her one so thank you very much for that presentation which was I don't know inspiring to me I think if the other panelists will join us on stage as I sort of introduce the panel so Lindy I should mention it's not surprising given the content of her talk among many other honors has received the Lowell Thomas Prize from the Explorers Club which has gone to Buzz Aldrin, Edmund Hillary and Isaac Asimov among many others that's a club you would love to be a part of and we're thrilled to have her here Ellen Stofan to my left thank you for joining us had until recently I think one of the most cinematic job titles in the country being chief scientist for NASA and had spent a lot of time at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena one of NASA's laboratories which is run by Caltech and I think by my reading if people weren't... fake news out there but you spent a lot of your career on Venus is my understanding which... Studying Studying Venus, indeed, yes which I would sort of... Yeah exactly, good cause to be optimistic about the climate on Mars by way of contrast Eric Stalmer is the president of the Commercial Space Flight Federation a trade group and my understanding is that you've learned to deal with setbacks in transportation from a young age when you overturned a boat on the Hudson River quite a large one I did I ruined that boat I ruined that boat but it was a setback again I got over it Just got that later I really dug that up though Scott Pace is the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University one of the sort of preeminent places for the study of space policy and we're thrilled to have you here someone whose work I've read for a long time I remember reading a report that you had done about GPS many years ago for Rand which GPS I think it's an interesting sort of place to start and quickly move on for of maybe one of the ways in which space has so profoundly transformed life on Earth and I think our impulse towards exploration is always in concert with the immediate applications which many of the members of Eric's organization I think are also sort of looking at how dramatically Earth-chasing applications will be changing with small satellites and things like this so I think one place to start might be with the space race and I'll pose the question openly and if any of you would like to weigh in but I remember reading John Logsdon one of Scott's colleagues who's written sort of very extensively on the ins and outs of what was going on in the Kennedy Administration in the early 1960s and one of the shocking things to me was that the space race as it's remembered today was not inevitable there was a lot of very early on discussions of collaboration with the Soviet Union even well before Apollo so used and things like that and yet it's clear that the decision to spend as much money on the Apollo program as was done was not driven by science going back to the point that Lindy was making and I guess one way to start might be by thinking about a counterfactual history where we worked with the Russians would we still have gotten to the moon or would we have fizzled out? Basically it would have been a completely different world and you can make the argument that the Apollo in some ways was kind of a bubble, a technological bubble that is it was an injection and an accelerant that caused more technical work to happen faster and sooner than otherwise would have been the case but you can make that argument about the entire Cold War which in turn led to Silicon Valley in part and so there's a whole series of things that happened that led to technical capabilities and a particular diplomatic outcome would have been differently I don't think really would matter one way or the other the larger context was a large amount of government investment and technology for geopolitical reasons and if those geopolitical reasons weren't there you can argue that World War II may not have even occurred depending on what happened so you can go down a lot of other different paths before you get there the question is would other countries have developed their own space capabilities lacking that initial impetus would Japan would Europe, Canada other countries have developed their own separate space capabilities rather than having been a bipolar dominance in the early days right and we're obviously in a completely different place right now where we have at least 14 space agencies from around the world working on the global exploration roadmap people have held up the International Space Station that's something that should get the Nobel Peace Prize you're going to hear later from Talal the United Arab Emirates is sending a mission to Mars you have new players you have a whole era of international cooperation we're just in a very different place at the start of this journey to Mars as you mentioned the International Space Station that might be a sort of interesting sort of as we try and transition from Apollo into the present day I want to return to Lindy's distinction between science and exploration if you look at the scientific return of the ISS the received wisdom as I understand it is that the bang for your buck is not very high I'd be open to having you correct me on that and sort of talk about if there are scientific benefits that are not broadly appreciated what those have been and also how as somebody who is inside of NASA you see this distinction between exploration and science that Lindy would sort of enunciate in her talk you know when you look at the International Space Station you have to keep in mind it's been up there for 16 years which is an amazing thing that kids who are 16 years old right now have never had a day of their lives when there weren't people living and working in space and right there that's a fundamentally mind blowing thing the other thing I think you have to take into account that while they were constructing the ISS there was not a huge investment going into research because they were putting all that money into constructing the ISS so we're really only in the last four to five years really ramping up the science that we're able to do and in fact it's only been in the last two years that the crew is actually now oversubscribed where we have more science more research for them to do than they have hours in the day and that's terrific but you know I don't know you tell me if it's profound or not do you know the genes turn on and off in response to the lack of gravity in plants in humans in model organisms we have fundamental new ways of looking at combustion there's a whole phase of combustion that's been discovered on the ISS we're about to send a cold atom lab up to the ISS where we're gonna form a Bose-Einstein condensate in space where they last much longer I think it's an amazing research platform I think we're just beginning to exploit it and exploit microgravity we're just not there yet I've got it add something to that which is critical to all of us is this information about genes switching on and off I'm not sure how widely appreciated that is that in microgravity your entire gut microbiome changes and as this is new information since the ISS has existed how important that is to our health in so many ways so they're going to be really interesting space challenges as we spend more time on microgravity I like that just one thing under the benefits that we're reaping from the ISS research all the experiments are going on are fantastic they really delve into them what they're doing it's amazing and yeah they're not producing these high dollar rates of return but I think one thing you'll see and we can look back to when it first happened I think about two years ago is 3D printing on the International Space Station and I say this for a few reasons because it was done by a company of young entrepreneurs and I say young folks that were in their 20s from I think UCF one of the Florida schools and through microgravity research they were able to test the printer and when the astronauts on the space station needed a part they were able to use this 3D printer and I say this because I believe that manufacturing in space is a huge stepping stone to all the endeavors that we're going to do in space down the line and that one I think the first thing they did was a wrench and to be able to do that in space there's your building there's what you can start doing and I think the possibilities down the line are to be endless and I think that's going to be a real turning point when we look back. I would say one of the things about space station and Ellen's absolutely correct and characterization of how much effort went into development before we could get to research is the educational aspect of it I mean space is one of the most multidisciplinary kinds of activities particularly human space flight you can engage in you have to master basically every discipline to do this successfully and so what you're doing by going into space is you're literally going into an alien environment and you're learning how to live and operate and work there and you're learning things that by definition you would not have learned if you stayed at home and so how much value do you place on that learning aspect of it it's not simply gee I discovered something that then had a ROI and I got a benefit out of it and so forth that's great we want to do that and we're looking for those things but it's also the fact that you're learning how to operate at a scale that's far beyond what you would do on earth not only technologically with a 3D printing but also with other countries I would say one of the most valuable things that's come out of the space station over the decades has been the thousands of relationships very very deep and trusted relationships between ourselves the Russians the Europeans the Canadians Japanese or we have done something that's really hard and brought people together in a non wartime kind of environment and so it's not just that physical object that's up there it's it's particle accelerators as well right this is true at CERN particle physicists don't get out that much you know I used to be a physics major and you know I'm sympathetic there's a nice ski chalet at CERN but yes no the thing is in all seriousness what happens is yes other forms of large science environmental research do that particle research does that but what happens with space is you cut across commercial communities you cut across political communities you cut across dual use communities so space is more integrative and more multidisciplinary I would put it up against almost any other field not to say those other fields aren't valuable for science but that's what space exploration brings that's unique and I think that that is actually a foundational idea for education that we need to now educate people more in a more interdisciplinary team building kind of way to prepare for this kind of work but I want to come back to this point because I think this is a sort of justification for the amount of money that gets spent on space that comes up frequently and I don't disagree with it right I think this is true however I want to you know the kid who dreamt of being Ernest Shackleton presumably like didn't dream about sort of like improving multilateral institutions and you know the quality of international cooperation and I wonder if there is there something lacking in the sort of motivation qua the thing itself when we come so quickly in this conversation to this sort of secondary sort of soft effects I don't think so I don't think there's lack of motivation I think one of the things you're seeing as we go back to the earlier talk about the space race is there's a clear divide a timeline of individuals out there those that remember the Apollo era and then the post-apollo era and the post-apollo era and you know do the line at 71 or so never remembered that didn't know that stuff only knew it from the history books and you're seeing a lot of these entrepreneurs that felt maybe cheated out of what the capabilities of space and what could be and those are the dreamers those are the Shackletons and I think that they are putting you know their money towards their dreams Jefezo said just the other day you know you don't get to pick your passions but he won the lottery ticket with Amazon and he's going to funnel that money into what his passions are and that's expanding the democratization of space and to see millions working in space and I think when you you know I cringe a little from hearing it described as a soft effect because if you look at the data in the post-apollo era the number of PhDs rapidly increased after Apollo so there was a motivation to go into engineering and medicine it's a pretty clear I think it is a causal link and in fact if you anecdotally ask anybody why they went into that and you look at Apollo and you look at this big piece that came after it if you look at countries around the world you know we talk a lot in the US about needing a strong STEM workforce if you look across the world with the challenges we have because of climate change every country on this planet needs a strong STEM workforce and the space as motivating kids to go into engineering into math who become computer programs who become civil civil engineers go into things that have nothing to do with space I think it's huge for countries it's the motivation that causes a kid to go into a profession that benefits a country I think you need to make a distinction between reasons of state and reasons of individual motivations that's it merely because someone is personally inspired feels emotionally strongly about something does not create a claim on the taxpayer dollar so that individual motivation may be why someone goes into it to make a difference to have an impact on the world sense of personal adventure those are very important real and personal motivations as to why people go there but when governments ask why should we spend something on this now if there's a military reason or there's commercial reasons that's a different issue but exploration that's not tied to specific rates of return has to be driven by larger geopolitical concerns and so what are the reasons of state why someone why we would do this and if you look at human exploration particularly with two exceptions they've always been driven by geopolitical of course the Apollo moon race Apollo Soyuz, Detente after the 72 summit meeting the space station to bring together members of the western alliance and the emerging programs of Europe and Japan the decision of the Clinton administration to bring the Russians into the space station to symbolize a post-soviet relationship with them the only two cases of major human spaceflight that occurred where international and geopolitical concerns were not a major consideration was Nixon's decision in 1972 where international played a very minor role in flying forward astronauts was about it struck contrast to Kennedy and the other I would argue was in the Obama administration in 2010 with the Mars and the asteroid decision which was done without a lot of international attention and as a result I've argued elsewhere was problematic because it didn't provide opportunities for people to partner as closely as they would have liked and would have been in our interest to do so so in general geopolitical issues tend to be one of those dominant drivers and then individuals participate as they're motivated I'm completely agree with that and I think that there are these very strong geopolitical drivers and I think there are these individual drivers and we need to use the inspirational aspect of space for that STEM workforce but I would argue on a more brainstem kind of level as a species we are apex predators and exploration is an imperative to us I don't think we can help it I think in a way we're explaining backwards on this geopolitical question and you've seen some of this from the inside and maybe you could speak to it the relationship of the United States with Russia is to say the least strange in the present moment and we have this cooperation around the ISS and around space more generally and the sort of claim that I've been hearing from the group is that this cooperation leads to a broadly better relationship it seems that maybe the relationship is very strange and there's this weird thing going on in Baikonur where some Americans go and hang out there and what is the broader effect so I'm curious can you sort of enunciate particular examples of things that have come out of our cooperation over the ISS that have benefited the relationship more broadly well you know let's go back in time and I have a very particular point of view on this I did my PhD thesis on Soviet data of Venus at a time when the US and the Soviet Union were actually not really getting along at all to date myself it was about 1984 and I think the fact that we could keep lines of communication open through science, through NASA communicating with IKI and through this ongoing relationship that we were able to keep lines of communication open where others had failed I would argue space really literally is the higher ground where you can always keep in mind can I have a concrete example of oh because we're talking in space it made this other situation better no but I think there's this general idea of we can find common ground we can find ways to work together there's going to be a solution coming through this and I would contrast that right now with the situation with China where NASA is actually prohibited by US law from bilateral cooperation with NASA which I personally don't think is a good thing because again if you can find some degree it's been that way for a bit but yeah no but when you have and you know to me and you have a situation now where the rest of the space agencies of the world are cooperating with China NASA's not I don't think it's a great situation I think space I think science is a way to keep those lines of communication open the problem for a lot of space enthusiasts I often think they're more important than they are that they think that the shame is their white side is not here you know well the idea that if we have this great space thing happen that suddenly our consciousness is going to be transformed you know differently what happens in space cooperation is it tends to follow political and political decisions and environmental decisions rather than leading it so because we decide to have detente we do Apollo Soyuz because we decide to have a post-soviet relationship we do it I would argue that Putin today is probably one of the worst threats to the Russian space program that the country has our Russian colleagues are great we love working with them we trust them we understand what they're capable of doing we have immense respect for their scientific and technical capability and we see their program suffering we see it being harmed as a result of the decisions that Putin has made but because space is special in some ways we're able to maintain those communication lines when everything else is maybe not working it's still possible to have that connectivity it's not invulnerable it is possible for that relationship in space to end and it probably will on the current trajectory but it's probably the last thing to go and I think we should probably try to hold on to it as long as we can I want to anchor us a bit in the present moment with and then open up the questions the NASA authorization bill passed the house yesterday and I think the expectation previously passed the senate is that it will be signed into law and this is the first such bill in seven years so I wonder sort of look you're all people who follow this quite closely are you happy with the sort of immediate future of the US space program well me personally with the US space program what NASA is doing I think there's elements in that authorization bill that are good some people rally around certain objects of it I think the real test will be when the OMB numbers come out and Congress has to hash that out could you elaborate on that I think they're talking about budget of 19.5 I think it will probably be less and then how do you divide up that pie and where is that money going I worry about programs space technology mission director I think they do fantastic things could you elaborate a bit on what the things they do lunar catalyst different areas where they engage more the commercial sector in these public private partnerships and one of the things that we're very enthusiastic about is the continued use of these space act agreements we think space act agreements funded space act and non-funded agreements are a very good way for the private sector to do business with NASA how does that work for people who might not it's much more streamlined effect usually a lot of times it's fixed price contracting but it's not this never say we're not wonky it's not this huge it's about procurement system it's a little more streamlined it's an easier fit for more commercially responsive companies so we think that's a good thing there's a lot in the bill for everyone whether you're an aeronautics person or an exploration person we just want to see how that pie is going to be divided up you always wait for the actual numbers to come out and my concern at this point frankly is the earth observation budget and climate change research so if there's any part of the budget that I'm going to be watching what the numbers come out I agree we're doing a lot to really partner with the commercial sector I think in new ways in really positive ways that I hope are going to continue and so I think watch those numbers and see where they go because that will give a hint of what the administration is actually thinking to be kind of wonky about it the issue to watch if somebody wants to take a note the 302B allocation what comes out of the budget reconciliation, what budget agreement we're on twitter as Andres mentioned the 302B allocation which is the one that covers both NASA and NOAA and so the pressure on all non defense discretionary spending which then flows into that allocation which then flows into NASA and NOAA is such that we can and should watch very closely on priorities within that allocation but the larger problem of automatic spending growth and entitlement spending in general puts immense pressure on non defense discretionary spending and that is the thing which is grinding pretty much everything else in front of it if we had the same budget for NASA today as we did at the end of the Cold War roughly 1992 the NASA budget today would not be $19 billion it would be $24 billion in flat constant dollar terms and you can just imagine the breathing room that would give for a lot of things but that's not the environment we're in both due to political choices and structural choices that have been made in the budget I think it's also a really interesting point when you look at the increasing pressure because of entitlement spending really nerdy stuff but if you look at that going forward for people who think oh NASA is going to get this huge budget increase if only XXX it just can't happen the non-discretionary federal budget there's no pressure on it and then on this sort of question of sort of following the money as it were the new entrance large and small into the space industry from you know SpaceX Virgin Galactic I think George's I don't see him in the back but he's there Blue Origin many others that are I'm not going to mention all by name there's an influx of new money that wasn't there before and there's also a entering into the contracting process with NASA the same as the Lockheed Mardins of the world have been doing for many years how much I mean there's an element of sort of a cultural injection of this sort of like Silicon Valley spirit or I've made my fortune and now this is my application and there's also just more money coming in and I'm wondering how you weigh are those two factors of comparable importance is one more important than the other? I think it certainly helps and it benefits NASA to have this new infusion of money a great example is Bigelove I see some representatives from Bigelove here the module that they attach to the International Space Station just great you know commercial technology that they said hey why don't we give this a try why don't we see if this works for what we can do later whether it's CIS Lunar or actually Lunar Surface whatever it may be there's reducing the cost of access to launch through the commercial crew program and right now with the commercial cargo program where they're bringing up resupplying the International Space Station I think with shrinking budgets NASA has to look at these new entrants and look at their track record in a very short amount of time look what some of these companies have done SpaceX and Blue Origin come to mind but look at Planet what they're doing for Earth observation they weren't around five years ago it's amazing like 300 people working in San Francisco building satellites and I think they're on their fifth generation of satellite it's absolutely amazing some of these things and that's coming from a lot of that Silicon Valley money well I would say between different kinds of money I mean there's been an infusion of intellectual capital which has been tremendous and beneficial as Eric's describing the problem is where is the new source of non-government demand because if we're simply spending government dollars any more efficient in a better way that's good by itself but fundamentally what you're doing is you're privatizing a government function you're not really commercializing it the things where there's been really new demand that's come to the market companies like Planet, Inspire, Black Sky and so forth because location-based services, the Googles, the Facebooks driving geospatial and GPS industries in the non-government side and so I think it's really important that if you're specializing in this area not to paint with a broad brush about what is commercial because that term is very misleading there's government contracting efficiencies and there's things that are coming from a truly private sector market and not all commercial things are the same because is private capital really at risk or is there private non-government demand for this does the market ultimately determine what the outcome is the answer to those is yes then that's a commercial activity if it's fundamentally dependent upon a government partnership in the longer term then no and I think we've seen that the answer is yes for non-human space flight the things you mentioned and the size of that and nature of that market for things like space tourism is still a little that's the low hanging fruit let's go into low earth orbit with robotic and get data that we need but more things are going to be commercialized going forward I'm personally very interested oddly enough in metal asteroids but I think that the point about the point about the efficiencies and the innovation that's going to drive forward the entire field when we're doing more than just privatizing the government activity every NASA mission every space mission before this has been a bespoke spacecraft crafted at great expense and so as we learn how to reuse not just the rockets but the plans when we learn how to rebuild something and they become off the shelf items like these virtually off the shelf items like the solar electric propulsion that's going to drive forward into commercialization of deep space as well I think the space you really have to watch is low earth orbit because we talked about the ISS a lot NASA is putting a huge amount of their money into the ISS and low earth orbit at some point we want to the NASA wants to take those assets and put them towards exploration getting a habitat and orbit around the moon getting humans to Mars if the commercial sector doesn't the private sector doesn't start seeing a motive for becoming the anchor tenant in low earth orbit and governments want to leave low earth orbit how is that going to work and so I think over the next six years that's really going to be the space to watch is what happens in low earth orbit as governments start trying to pull out and the private sector does it come in behind them does it not how does that work into the budget it's going to be interesting let's take just a couple of questions from the audience raise your hands as Andres mentioned please do identify yourselves the mic I will add on please do make your question in the form of an elaborate monologue and if you don't I will interrupt you to ask you to continue um yes I'm Yasmin I'm a screenwriter consultant at space ISU graduate I had a question about you know commercializing anything in space it requires that I think the people who go who are non-governmental or non-scientific who are paying for their way is it important to have a purpose how do I say it it's kind of like an arc concept is it okay just to be a tourist yeah a tourist with tourism and that pays for something substantial and then for other things skillsets that are important one of the things I see about the space tourist I don't want to say flippantly but as I compare some of these folks about 300 or so individuals that have signed up they're going to spend a lot of money doing this they're paving the way for the rest of us to do this these are the individuals that dropped down $15,000 for plasma TV when it first came out and so that we can reap the benefits of having a $100 plasma TV and better technology just 10 years later I think it's a lot of the same effect that it's going to reduce the cost for the general populace and I think for what they're doing whatever reason and motivation it is for them to go up I think it's going to lead to a lot of motivation for others from a commerce perspective let's take another question if there is one yes in the back John what more if the United States decides it's tired of the space station and leaves it the other international partners can they pick up the slack or is the space station just salvage that gets re-energized to the atmosphere then we think right now the initial studies that were done is that the space station all the partners have agreed to go to 2024 at the moment the analysis that NASA conducted is we think that the space station is good at least through 2028 but eventually the solar panels are going to lose function it literally will not last forever and probably towards the end of the 2020s and of course because it's so big it will have to be de-orbited some of the partners Russia has said for instance they might take some of their modules out and reuse them that's a possibility could you reuse some of the modules at some point the space station as the entity as in its current configuration really can't go past the end of the late 2020s I think something to stress given the long lead times the space projects take if we're not planning right now for what comes after the space station we are in fact default planning that it will be de-orbited without any follow on so what happens right now in the FY18-19 budget really is going to set the stage because in aerospace if you're not moving forward you're basically planning to go out of business I think we have time for one final question please do you identify yourself I didn't prod Hi Paul International Space University student I just wanted to ask as you said going forward do you have an idea of the destination Leo, Astroys, the Moon, Mars and why I'll agree I think we use a simple term that space is big and there's a lot of commerce for everyone and whether you want to do resource mining or if you want to do moon bases or if you want to do remote sensing I think there's a lot of applications there and there's plenty of destinations I think it's all I'll rephrase the question briefly and then let you all answer if we take Mars since you all have a sense of that's the destination certainly of the theme of the afternoon there's two challenges one is getting to lower orbit more cheaply than we have and the other is sending human beings into deep space into the radiation environment into all the other challenges and those are both hard problems and maybe just a quick closing remark on how you see and they're not they're interrelated of course but how you see that relationship changing in the environment of both the international environment as you mentioned China, India has a nascent space program and the changing sort of structure of American industry and government involvement in space so I'm an optimist I think in the 2020s we are going to see the private sector take on lower orbit I think we're going to see the private sector moving out towards asteroids I think you're going to see the private sector in cooperation with governments going down to the surface of the moon I think you're hopefully going to see more space agencies keeping their focus on Mars and again to me as Lindy said this is a scientific imperative we think life evolved on Mars there's huge excitement so I think that'll stay the focus but I do think you're going to see it's not just one destination it's multiple destinations I hogged it early so I'll just a quick from an economic perspective the cost of launch will reduce with more with reusability which will increase the access to the opportunities that are affordable in space I would say that destination is not a physical destination destinations are policy destinations economic, security, diplomatic we also get metaphysical people who think solely in terms of physical destinations miss the motivations that actually drive governments to spend in this area I agree with Ellen that Mars will be the penultimate goal and will be in the hearts of the scientific community I also believe that Jeff Manber of NanoRacks that Mars is in our hearts the moon is in our business plans and that Mars provides more opportunities in the near term for commercial and international partnerships that will in fact drive governments even while the science community still has its heart set on Mars I think low earth orbit and then increasingly the moon our local block in the universal city are really going to feel like an extension of the earth's economy that's going to be our that's going to be our state but then going to Mars is a much bigger push up that's going to be a different group of people with a different motivation and it captures the public's imagination and we've seen that over the last few years and we have to keep the public engaged and Mars engages the public well thank you all very much I think that's a good note to close on and if our goal is to keep the public engaged I don't think we could do better than George Whiteside thank you to the first panel and thank you Constantine I was admiring your shoes throughout the discussion very cool so now I'd like to invite on stage George Whiteside the CEO of Virgin Galactic and Ann Marie Slaughter the president of New America Ann Marie Ann Marie is on her way so as all of you know Ann Marie is the reason we're all here she's our fearless leader for future tense being a collaboration between New America, Slate and ASU so Ann Marie please Ann Marie everybody's worried me now I see why sorry yes the conversation is how much for a round trip ticket to Mars I asked George to raffle off to Mars today so that's the good news the bad news is he said it was going to be a one way ticket so you might just want to settle for the talk I'll leave it up to you Ann Marie so welcome everybody and this is one I often explain to people that I spend my life trying to get street cred with an 18 year old and a 20 year old boys my sons right who really don't understand what New America is what the world does and she writes and so whenever I can tell them I'm doing something cool my stock goes up this was not a hard sell when Andres said you know would you want to have this conversation I'm like absolutely so I want I want to start with just the really practical for those of us who are not necessarily space aficionados although you know anything like Lactica there's nothing cooler than that it sounds like a cross between a superhero movie and Star Wars what are we talking about when you talk about going to Mars and I was saying earlier so when I think of it I think I'm not sure how many light years that is but I know a light year is really long and it's going to be in a small contained space and I practically kill my husband on a regular basis in a large house and I pledge to spend my life with him what are we talking about how many people in what kind of a space for how-all well it's nice to see you as well first of all many years ago I was in college and I went to the Woodrow Wilson school back at Princeton and Emory obviously did an incredible job there and New America is lucky to have you where you are so you know I think I think that I'm going I'm in town because there's a satellite conference going on and it seems like every hour there's a new announcement coming out about something and we were in a tremendously exciting time when huge amounts of private capital are being deployed and huge discoveries are being made I was just in a meeting with a senator that I won't name but we literally had a lot of trouble trying to not talk about this extra solar planet discovery that was just made a few weeks ago but that's fantastic right because there's really big things happening and then of course we have one of the great challenges of our time in climate change and essentially learning how to become better managers of our home ecosphere, our planetary ecosphere and so space matters not just for the business or commercial opportunities but because it's something that inspires us and also that we as humans have a lot of interest in because we're on a spaceship ourselves and we need to do a good job a better job at managing that spaceship so that's a context I think what Richard Branson founded Virgin Galactic and his aspiration is to open space up to the rest of us we have two business areas where one of them is to send people into space and we're going to start with suborbital flights that are more regularly scheduled than have ever been the case with spaceflight before and we can talk about that and then we're also going to be performing launches of small satellites into space which is the area of the market that's growing the most and we can talk about that so that's what we're going to do and we're going to start there and then over time we're going to get bigger and do other things but we're really focused on in a way, this is a sort of a fraught phrase but democratizing space and all I mean in the actual sense of de-most like opening space up to the people so because space has been or at least was for many decades sort of more the province of big governments and big corporations and now it really is something where a college classroom can build a satellite and launch that satellite and get good data back and that's tremendously exciting that means that the benefits of space can be shared more broadly on the planet and it means that I think hopefully in 10 years if we have a conversation like this everybody in the room will know somebody and maybe a good chunk of the room has actually been to space but not to Mars, so I'm working my way around to Mars I know that that's the subject of this, I mean so I got into space because I was interested in Mars in part and I was a fresh faced 22 year old and I wrote I wrote this thing said Gen X, do you remember Gen X? I said why Gen X should take on Mars as its goal and I think that's sort of what every new space generation does is they think that now is the time to go to Mars I think that Mars and in general solar system exploration will be enabled by one major thing and that is lowering the cost of access to space right now it costs about 10 to 20 thousand dollars per kilogram so this is maybe a pound, so that would cost 10 thousand dollars to send that into space it's going to be hard to do anything ambitious if it costs that much so we need to reduce that cost by a factor of 10 or maybe more to really enable large scale exploration of the cosmos and what's exciting now Annemarie is that the competition that we've always hoped for is starting to come down the line so that you have my boss Richard Branson but also Elon and Jeff Bezos and other international players who are all going to be competing to develop systems that lower the cost of space access and that is going to be the thing that really enables our big space dreams to come true so I want to ask you lots of things about what you said about little satellites and suborbital orbit but what I'm hearing you say then is that kind of competition will lower prices but won't we have to invent some like Harry Potter like time space transformation to actually imagine getting to a place like Mars and given just the distance we could do Mars we have an expert in Mars you've got some real Mars experts in the audience here and I think you agree we have most of the technologies to go to Mars it's just really expensive right now it would take about 6 months depending on the transit time and that's what current things what will be hard and what we can get to towards the end of the conversation is going to the nearest star and that's going to be really exciting Mars is exciting but we are the first generation that could probably send a probe to Alpha Centauri and right now that would take a really long time to get there so that's the sort of you were talking about using chemical propulsion to go to Alpha Centauri that would take 30 to 70,000 years but Mars 6 months Mars 6 months there's well known transfer orbits we've already we just Scott Kelly just got back from a year in space we can do that I mean he could still beat me up when he got back as long as you exercise along the way you're going to be we can solve it it's a question of finance now but the thing that I always used to say what do we want out of going to Mars what is the reason what is your answer to that question well I'll tell you what I think would be an opportunity missed and take this in the right way because I got into space because of the Apollo program and all that but I don't think we want another Apollo for Mars and what I mean by that is that we go and we do 6 trips and then we stop for 4 decades or 5 decades why did that happen because it cost a ton of money to do each of the Apollo missions and so I think that's why reducing the cost to something that is is more doable is so important because if we go and I'm in favor of going to the moon and going to Mars and actually the asteroids too there are all kinds of interesting things out there but we have to bring that cost down so that we can sustainably explore explore the the solar system so let's talk then about suborbital flight and I was thinking so I was talking to my mother this morning and it's my parent 60th wedding anniversary coming up and so they're going to go to Alaska they've always wanted to go to Alaska many of us would like to go see Glacier Bay or whatever and so I was thinking about that and I'm thinking maybe by the time my husband and I get maybe not to our 60th but whatever 30th or 40th we'll do a suborbital flight what will that be so when you say suborbital flight what I understand about that is we get to a place where you can see Earth from a distance and I want to talk about what you call the overview effect but describe for me is that just like flying to Australia but from a different route or talk about it so on our vehicle we have an air launched vehicle so technically that means that we carry our spaceship up to like sort of aircraft altitude the video is very cool if any of you go on the site and see the video and then we release the spaceship and then the rocket ignites and it basically turns towards space and it goes up and the whole journey you know lasts a couple hours order of magnitude and you'll have a few days of training beforehand just to make sure that you feel comfortable in the vehicle because it will be a high energy vehicle you know you're going to be going Mach 3 Mach 4 on the way up and it will make that our 30th wedding anniversary on 25th but you know what's you know you mentioned the overview effect and I think everybody will go to space for a different reason we have about 650 customers and they're terrific people and they know that they're early adopters and something that will matter to the future of humanity and what's inspiring to them is I would say that the number one thing that people want to see is they want to see planet earth now some people want to go because they want extended microgravity or some people want to go because it's like the next translate extended microgravity so like floating around for a while I'd love to do that and well I mean just a quick a quick a discursion on microgravity that's a technical term that I don't like weightlessness the thing I love about weightlessness so I don't know if there's a parabolic flight you can basically get in an aircraft and do parabolic flight and it sort of simulates weightlessness for about 20 seconds or something like that and I did that for the first time a while ago and what was wonderful about that was that it sort of felt like a part of the brain had been turned on that had been turned off since maybe age one or two or three I sort of feel like we as mammals have a little part of our brain that sort of teaches us how to move around in an environment right and you know when you're a baby or a toddler or something you're sort of learning to move around in a 1G what we call a 1G environment and then you sort of learn how to do it and then that part of your brain sort of turns off and you know you don't have to really know how to find a new environment but then when you go into a weightless environment for the first time it turns back on and you sort of say wow this is a new anyway that's sorry that's a side note but it's really cool it's really it's definitely something to do but anyway going back to the experience of looking down at our planet you know they say that the Apollo image of the whole earth was the most powerful image for the environmental movement and I do believe that was true because there's nothing that makes you realize the sort of the fragility of of our ecosystem of our ecosphere than that and so I'm really inspired about sharing that with people from around the world because I think that when you've talked to astronauts and they say that when you come back down it changes you it doesn't change everybody but it changes many people in a fundamental way and I think what our planet needs right now is people who can attack you know attack the challenges that we face with a planetary perspective and there's nothing better than that than going to space to have that experience so we look forward to working you up in a bit of time but that is fascinating and actually if you think about moments in history what discovering the new world obviously to European settlers that was to the new world it wasn't to the people who lived here but that fundamentally changed Europeans ideas of what was possible how to think about the world in ways that you're right if you actually shifted to a planetary perspective and we're all debating the debate political debate is so much between nationalism and globalism but I prefer transcending that and thinking about what it is on a planet as an international lawyer my career and so much of our career thinking about national politics is defined by borders and erasing those borders visually erasing those borders that is fascinating well let me shift gears a little bit to cultures and you've been in NASA and now you're in the private sector and this is we're going to be talking about collaboration competition part of the point of today and I wanted to ask you to reflect on the difference between those two cultures because many of us might say oh well NASA that's a public agency that's all collaboration having been a dean in academia for a long time I'm well aware that you know academic scientists and your fathers and academic scientists compete like crazy so that's crazy the idea that you don't have competition in the public sector but the flip side is I would imagine with Virgin Galactic or any well run company you need a lot of collaboration so how do you see the differences in those cultures and maybe particularly on the collaboration competition axis I'm a yeah I mean you know obviously it's not either or let me pose a few interesting things that I'm interested in I do think that humans perform well in competition it drives creativity and it drives it drives us to be better than we think we might be able to be and already you see the dynamic in the space world of competition playing out in launch vehicles and you know we have this interesting sort of going back and forth between Elon and Jeff Bezos and that's fascinating I think that's going to be a terrific dynamic and because it will make everybody better and it will generate better vehicles and so I think that that's really exciting for really big goals to turn back to our subject for this conversation Mars for really big goals you have to have some measure of collaboration and the idea that we can tackle a big goal together internationally is going to be crucial one of the big success stories of NASA but also international cooperation is the International Space Station which is an incredible feat it's a government program that has lasted for 30 years or whatever it is and it's multinational it's successful and it's based on trust and it's based on common performance we're going to need something like that when we go to Mars I think one of the big questions when we do that is do we go with the Chinese or not and I don't know if this current administration is going to tackle that question but I do think that over time those fundamental questions of you know we're collaborating with the Russians we're collaborating with the Europeans in space we're basically not collaborating with the Chinese and from a policy perspective that's going to be at some point we're going to tackle that question I don't know when that will be but that will be a big question is that fear of sharing technology mostly probably yeah I think that is certainly where it started anyway it's going to be an interesting one you know it's interesting to think about that international collaboration traditionally has been the result of a great crisis right I mean the United Nations comes about because of World War War II the League of Nations because of World War I and you do wonder if what we may need you know a climate crisis we're in one now but a more acute one to suddenly shift perspectives on the benefits of collaboration outweigh the cost it's interesting to think about yeah I mean we don't have a choice when it comes to the globe we have a planetary situation and national approaches are important but they won't solve the issue obviously so I'm guessing I have time for one more question so I so this is you were talking about competition and the value of competition and I certainly agree that competition is essential but you know there are gender differences this is International Women's Day and nobody thought that I was going to get up here without reminding you that it was International Women's Day I hope and there was a recent piece in the Times of the FT I can't remember on women are deeply competitive I think it may have been the Sunday review but often we compete more against ourselves and as a deeply competitive woman I will just say that growing up you it was fine to compete against yourself it was not fine to compete against somebody else and beat that person either another girl even then not so good and God forbid you should be a guy right I mean I received the message loud and clear growing up that that was you would never get a husband that way and I got to but so I have to just ask you and I don't want to put you on the spot but when I looked at the videos and I looked at all the astronauts you had this great video people are all coming out and they're little astronaut things and they're all men in that picture I'm not going to but in the picture they're all men and there's a picture of a crowd also waiting and it's not all men but it's overwhelmingly men and so I just wonder when I listen to you talk about Elon and Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and I think this is a particular kind of intense competition and it is one I used to teach civil procedure and I would stand up and say civil procedure is the etiquette of legalized battle which means we took all those guys who used to you know fight each other and turned it into the legal equivalent of jousting and so it's fine you channel all that competition into a socially productive use not everybody would think law litigation socially productive use but by and large and you could say this too but do you think about how to diversify and maybe get other kinds of competition and other kinds of collaboration and just more generally the values of diversity what I think a lot about is and this is going to sound really far future is part of the reason why I'm interested in space is because I view it as a a start of a really long journey and so we happen to be alive at the moment when rough moment you know within a few decades where humankind gets the ability to travel into space and to start exploring other planets and eventually other solar systems we happen to have been born at that one moment where we start going outwards and why does that matter it matters because the values that we send will persist and not just persist for decades or centuries but for millennia and that's what I mean is super far future but I mean we're sort of the home planet but we're going to be sending out expeditions and then we'll send out settlements and then you know and on and on and on and the values that we send along with those expeditions are really important and one of the reasons that I got into space was because I think it represents in many ways the best of humanity whether it's competition or whether it's cooperation or different things it can be both and so I think the values that we send out in space and I really do believe that in a general sense the values that we are sending into space are some of the best values of humanity are crucial because once you've sent them out to Mars and then someday and it's not going to be next year but you know someday we're going to send things to the nearest star system and then they're going to start sending it and this is going to be hundreds or thousands of years but keep in mind humans have been Homo sapiens have been exploring the planet for about 200,000 years so you know through some stroke of luck or something we happen to be alive at the moment before we sort of start expanding outward and so the values that we bring with us are going to be hugely important and I think it's certainly important that those that we bring along all the diversity of that we don't just bring sort of male values or female values or whatever but that we bring sort of the best of human values out with us and you know we just yeah so that's what I would say this has been the most hopeful conversation I've had in months I think I have a a renewed sense of how we may be able to pull together let's start with as a nation and then as a world and as a planet and thinking about yes the overview effect and the impact of what it is to see ourselves from space but also then to think about who are we and what do we want to send into space is a wonderful framework so thank you so much I can't imagine a better way to start this conference thank you Anne Marie and thank you George and to continue on the hopeful note I'd now like to invite up to the stage our good friend Talal Al Casey who is the director of the US UAE space affairs office he's a senior advisor also commercial affairs and special projects here at the UAE embassy and he's going to give a presentation on why the UAE is bound for space and also I should I should mention proudly that Lindy school at ASU is a partner in the UAE project that we're going to hear about and from there I will pass off the baton after back to our moderator with the great shoes Constantine to take us into the next conversation Talal great well thank you Andres and thank you to the new America for inviting me and everyone else who's organizing this event it's a pleasure to be here it's really an honor to be able to speak to you a little bit about our country and what we're doing in space and why space is important to the UAE and I think you're going to find that a lot of what I say in terms of the reasons for why it's important to us are what was mentioned in both George's discussion as well as a panel that preceded that so I've got a few slides that I'll show to draw up some context as well but the UAE for those of you who don't know is pretty small country but it's possible in a certain extent to the size of the state of Maine with about nine million or so in population and about one million who are UAE nationals or locals so and we try to distinguish ourselves as much as possible from other countries in the region by punching above our weight in many of the things we do and you've seen a lot of this in some of the iconic projects like the tallest building in the world the Burj Khalifa the Palm Islands and the world or the ski slope in the mall and things that might seem like luxury projects or PR stunts but really have an underlying reason behind doing them whether it be the tourism effect, the economic effect or what these types of things do to bring attention to a positive attention to a part of the world that needs a lot more of that these days especially so you know with such a small population we've had to lessen our dependence on hydrocarbons since the discovery of hydrocarbons back in the mid-century and during the formation in 1971 of the UAE the wise leadership decided we need to employ a diversification strategy to ensure that we are able to depend less on hydrocarbons and diversify our economy further and further away from that and as part of that diversification strategy we looked at what are the comparative and competitive advantages that the UAE has using oil as an enabler to ensure that we're able to get into other industries that could provide that solution and I'm happy to say that today with that diversification program we now are involved in several different industries where we're able to become an exporter of knowledge as well as service as well as goods on many levels and that our GDP is only 30% contributed to buy oil and gas in the UAE today and in Dubai in particular it's only 1% it's about 99% non-oil trade so you know some of the different things that we've done we are one of the largest purchasers or customers for Boeing and Airbus through both Emirates, Etihad and some of our low-cost carriers so we thought maybe being part of that supply chain makes a lot of sense so we have a structural composite manufacturing facility in the UAE that's manufacturing there and our tier one supplier the likes of Boeing and Airbus right now on the semiconductor front we also have some major investments all around the world including in upstate New York and Saratoga County a $6.7 billion investment manufacturing semiconductors and then on the renewable energy space so it's one thing to diversify your economy but you're also going to want to diversify your energy basket or the source of revenue that you had initially and the reasons for that source so basically we needed to figure out a way to lessen our dependence on hydrocarbons hydrocarbons because of the environmental impact that that has so we have a huge investment in the renewable energy space as well as the nuclear energy space so space was an inevitable eventuality in terms of a sector that we wanted to diversify into for a multitude of different reasons but more so than the diversification aspect it was about trying to inspire the youth and encourage STEM education and I'll talk a little bit more about that once I draw some context as to what we had in the space industry in the UAE prior to the establishment of the space agency and then what we're looking to do going forward so we've had about $5 billion or so worth of assets in the space since the late 80s we had the company like the RIA that's very prevalent in this week's satellite conference here in DC they have satellite telecommunications equipment that they sell globally to both governments, military and commercial customers there's also Yasat who have two satellites in orbit right now that are providing broadband support services for military and commercial customers and are working on their third satellite right now here with UAE engineers at the Orbital ATK facility in Sterling, Virginia so that's another very exciting project that we're very, very proud of and then there's a few other types of entities over there including the Muhammad bin Rashid Space Center that are focused on building satellites themselves so we started with DubaiSat1 where the team from the Muhammad bin Rashid Space Center or MBRSC went to Korea worked with a partner over there and manufactured this satellite, launched it mainly an Earth observation satellite then went on to building DubaiSat2 with the same partner but in the UAE and are now working on CalifaSat with a UAE team in the UAE so that general and gradual transfer of knowledge and technology and the development and advancement in the human capital that we decided to employ in both DubaiSat1 and DubaiSat2 came to fruition when we had a UAE team working on CalifaSat right now in the UAE and building that there so that's something we're very, very proud of and then in 2014 the UAE government decided we wanted to bring the space sector collectively under one federal government umbrella to represent the interests on a multilateral level and so the UAE space agency was established and the idea was to help put together international agreements and shoot for bigger and better things in space and I'll get back to that aspect of inspiring the youth and the reasons we think that this is one of the best and most important and effective mechanisms to do it but the types of relationships we were able to build since the inception of the space agency have been multiple with many different countries but here are some of the ones that we did with the US established a space security dialogue we have a framework agreement with NASA we're working with many of the commercial space industries over here we mentioned University of Arizona, some of the institutions University of Colorado and Boulder is another partner of ours in one of our missions so it's a very collaborative approach that the UAE wanted to employ in ensuring that we were working with international partners to attain the goals that we've set so then simultaneous to the announcement of the space agency the leadership of the UAE and His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid the Vice President Prime Minister and ruler of Dubai announced a mission to Mars and this is back in 2014 and the objective was to have the mission reach the Martian orbit by 2021 which is our 50th year anniversary so a very ambitious timeline, a very ambitious project and obviously something we can't do on our own and that's where the project management team that have worked on building satellites in the past came into play to where they were able to assume managerial roles and partner with international institutions to ensure that we were not only defining the science and figuring out collectively and collaboratively the questions we wanted to answer in terms of what we wanted that Mars mission to accomplish but also building the spacecraft integrating it and launching it and getting to Mars by the deadline that the government set there are many other investments in space that we have George was here a few minutes earlier and Virgin Galactic are a proud partner of ours, we've invested a certain amount of money with them in their program since I think it was 2011 or 2012 and we're very very happy with the collaboration we have with them so far so back to the long-term objectives and the reasons why we're going to space when you look at the region you have about a third of the world's population in Middle East and North Africa you have 50% under the age of 25 with unemployment rates that are staggering and you see a lot of disenfranchised youth that are gravitating to some of the things that you witness in the media which are not very productive and not very promising for our future space is one way that we think as the UAE we can inspire the youth not only in our country but across the region to look at other opportunities and other things where you could have options if you you know get an education within the STEM education and you're able to employ that in your work life and we think that's a very very important aspect to trying to help shift and win the hearts and minds of the youth in the region and we're hopeful that not only do students and kids and others in the region get inspired but even governments in the region are inspired to be able to emulate what the UAE is doing in diversifying the economy and going through ambitious projects like space exploration to inspire their youth and ensure that they make the future for the world a much better place and that I think what I'd like to do is leave with a coat and then take a few questions since I think we have about five minutes left but this is a coat by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed that says this probe, the probe that we're sending to Mars represents hope for millions of young Arabs looking for a better future. There is no future no achievement, no life without hope and thus the name of the spacecraft after crowdsourcing ideas on social media with the Arab world was dubbed hope in honor of this. So happy to take a few questions either, yeah. It's coming right back. Can you prepare how do you find the most talented people among your population, the young people and train them and identify who they are, even if they're poor or they're richer, it doesn't matter but how do you find that? I spend a lot of time in this region and I know that there's a lot of talent and how do you train them to be the best, the best, the young people? Yeah, so that's a very good question. How do we train and how do we find the right talent to integrate into these types of programs? So we be hopeful that they find us, that the people that are inspired come with their ambitions to be part of these types of programs but then how do we equip them with the tools necessary to excel in these roles that's where the international partnerships come in in a big way. We have several partnerships on the commercial side with the big manufacturers both here in the US and elsewhere as well as with the likes of NASA where we have internship type programs and training workshops and things where we can have our students and trainees embedded within organizations to help them attain that skill set. We've done things with Orbital ATK with Lockheed Martin and we're working on doing similar things with NASA as well and others in the international sphere to ensure that we're equipping our students. Sir, in the back? 2021 is going to come upon us really quick. You have your mission hopefully it's a success. You put together this brilliant group of people. What do you do with them next? Do you have a plan? Yeah. There are many things that we're planning to do next. There was a recent announcement right after the government summit in Dubai about Mars 2117 and the plans for that are under development right now but the idea is to try to work collectively again on the different things that would take to have a self-sustaining colony on Mars by 2117. Commercialization of low-earth orbit, post-ISS is an important element. You look at the transportation vehicles and lowering the cost of access to space. You look at asteroid mining and the types of things in space resource utilization. These types of things are all part of the suite of options that the UAE are looking at in terms of where to go next and how to carve out a niche for something that we would be able to participate in. So it's still undefined but we're exploring. Great presentation. I was wondering when you were conceiving the organizational structure. Were you looking at a particular space agency to see how it's going to be organized to execute the work? Yeah, so it's a good question. So when we do end the UAE as a very young country we have the luxury of starting from the times that we embark on. That's a great benefit. You're able to benchmark best practices all across the world and then learn from the mistakes of the best sometimes. So structurally I think that was the easy part. I think defining and coming up with the national space policy and then ensuring that it would be to an extent timeless but also vague to the point where it could be inclusive of the incentivization of the commercial industry more so than a lot of other places would give us that differentiating factor. I think that's where having subject matter experts from all over the world including the U.S. we were able to come up with that type of a policy that's conducive to the industry on all its facets whether it's government or commercial. So yeah, I think that was the biggest accomplishment I think in coming up with that policy. So I think see time is up. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you taking the time. I'd like to invite up to the stage our next panelist Rob Chambers, Tom Cremins, and Veronique Daukendorf. Rob is an engineer at a Lockheed Martin who's done a great deal of work on Mars in general and the Orion in particular. Tom Cremins is the associate administrator for strategy and plans at NASA and Veronique Daukendorf from the embassy of Luxembourg is here I think particularly to talk about asteroids and space mining and the role that Luxembourg is envisioning for itself in that respect. There are a few different ways we might start out. I thought one way to launch us into this discussion is part of the way in which collaboration and competition is structured is through the nature of international agreements. We've agreed in the outer space treaty not to make property claims national claims in space there is ongoing discussions about the peaceful uses of outer space and the nature of that competition and Tom I know that you spend quite a lot of time in the negotiations around the ISS and have sort of a deep experience of multilateral discussions of this kind. It seems to me that part of the sort of gist of this discussion is that there will have to be a major revision to how we think about the commons in outer space and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on what that will look like. I think to start it requires presence because if you're not there it's an opinion so it's actually being in the commons it's kind of the George's point you made earlier about the values you take with you so I think the first part it's important to maintain US leadership and presence in space to be able to help shape what the commons will look like. For us what we've been able to develop around the space station with 15 partners national partners and now a host of commercial entities that are joining and we're hoping it explodes over the next decade and shifts from space station to a low earth orbit in general we view our job not so much as setting the policies that's really for us but for setting the example of how we work and operate so how we deal with other nations in terms of our code of conduct in terms of how we operate our spacecraft actually how we operate shows what we believe in so we try to mitigate we try to use all the fuel on our spacecraft and practice smart orbital practices and share our information with other nations for space situational awareness purposes so that's kind of what NASA's role is is to kind of be out there doing it and doing it in a way that represents the kinds of values and the kinds of norms we'd like to see continue to develop and to diversify over time. That's a sort of natural segue speaking of space situational awareness to the nature of the sort of military civilian relationship in space in this country and in other countries. If low earth orbit is to get more and more crowded whether we're on our way to Mars or just launching small satellites for Earth observation this becomes a more and more pressing problem and it's something that the people at Shriver Air Force Base are pretty deeply interested in and the relationship between NASA and the Air Force and the American military as a whole is a deeply intertwined one and I guess to put this in the form of a question how do you see that relationship evolving as the commercial space sector evolves? And then I want to turn to Rob. I think that relationship's been there since the beginning of the space age but what's become more complex now is the number of actors, the number of both commercial and national actors in spaces that's grown just in the last 10, 15 years the slopes like this. We've got, just as NASA we've got over 800 active agreements with over 120 nations so as well as commercial agreements, nontraditional agreements with folks like George and other companies over 1100 of those type of active agreements which if I and I did look at it about a decade ago it was roughly two thirds less at that time so with that complexity comes the importance again of being able to work together and allowing competition, productive competition as well as collaboration at a government level that in a way helps the people which on the DOD side to not have to deal with as acute a threat environment as might be there if we weren't engaged so you mentioned my work with the Russians that was a key part of trying to shift from the late 80s where we had and unfortunately we're kind of going back there in some areas with certain countries but where space threats were a big part of what we worried about cooperating with the Russians in part helped to get rid of their co-orbital ASAD and to change their behavior in space and do satellite weapons in that time frame it was a direct something that got shot from the belly of a Soviet fighter could take out a satellite now the threat environment with the F-16 test that back in the 80s we've done as well a long time ago with the cooperative activity in space and actually having people living and working upon not getting blown up while they're working because it's hard enough to live and work in space that has allowed to a certain extent a little bit of a firewall at least get people to think about that it's not just another frontier for warfare although again we're seeing that threat environment extend out now a little bit so it's going to be a key part of both in the orbit and how countries go out to around the moon as humanity moves out how we can use soft power and use the other tools of international engagement diplomacy, economic interaction as other tools in the national tool chests to help with the other side of space which we brought up against but we're very conscious of trying to maintain a very white world and engage commercially engaged image and reality so Rob I want to sort of turn to you with a cartoonish vision of history which I don't think is true sounds appropriate I mean there's a story that Apollo was we were all very excited then you know eventually Jimmy Carter becomes president there's a national malaise that extends into space and Elon Musk like make a ton of money and like makes space exciting again and meanwhile you know all the guys at Boeing and Lockheed were like I don't do nothing for decades and I don't think that's true and I kind of doubt that you do and what I want is as sort of opening for you to maybe look back on a long and accomplished career at a place like Lockheed where you have a tremendous amount of technical expertise at Lockheed and your peer competitors who've been doing good and difficult work for many decades in a way that that narrative certainly is not part of your sort of person on the streets vision of what's happened and I'm curious as to why and I'm curious as to what that looks from your side and these aren't sides and that people clearly have gone to work for the new generation of companies from different lenses, right? So I was born after we landed on the moon and I've been pretty bitter about it ever since because I missed that and I agree with one thing in particular George said which is it's Gen X's turn I'm Gen X to hit Mars, right? That's ours, it's not our kids they can go to Europa or whatever the hell but this one's our generation and we've been on Mars for 41 years now, right? Lockheed has been fortunate enough to be working closely with NASA on every Mars mission that ever went worked on Viking explored I think just about every planet in the system plus whatever one calls Pluto these days So is the Wii there Lockheed or Humanity? Lockheed, which is part of Humanity Right and a publicly traded commercial company So we've been doing that for a long time and the focus, and you're right attention, what people get really excited about and why I went to Purdue and went straight into working for NASA and done civil service my whole life those programs is to explore, right? It's the get the humans off the planet We were talking, I think it was Lindy that referred to the walking around the city block Well, my company and the folks I work with on the NASA side, we're the guys that grab a backpack and get the heck out of the city So it's a different very different for the last say 40 or more years our focus has been working with NASA to go to Mars, explore Venus, you know latest missions out into Jupiter and beyond Juno, just we got into Juno insertion last July insights coming up and that has insight insight next spacecraft going to Mars launching in 20 next year, March adventure that a decent chunk of the room knows that yeah and then there'll be Nemo in the next lander and so forth so there's this cadence of every two years going to Mars focus on Mars for just a second with a steady aggregation of data and there was a little bit of a lull there when we thought Mars was dead like the moon and the fact that it's very static and if you're looking at a rock in a lab it doesn't you don't have to be really interact with the rock it is a rock when it comes back the rock is still there unless it's a diamond and it's been stolen but if it's just a cheap rock that no one's going to take from your lab it's still there the next day Mars is not a rock it is alive, there's running water there's methane sources we don't know and so when I like I don't quote block you just said there's life on Mars I said it's alive in that it's changing we're on Twitter everybody my phone is going to ring communications guys so the it's evolved it changes and so you have to change dynamically with it but we didn't realize that so there was a lull there where we didn't do a lot of Mars exploration and then we started learning how much is going on and so that has started to percolate out into the the social world right into the the public perception and that's part of the reason frankly why everybody wants to go to Mars and when I say everybody the scientists and NASA and the space agencies and that has gotten out into the public conscience so I think it's great that now we're getting a lot of folks interested in Leo and the applications and true commercialization I like what Scott said to differentiate commercialization from privatization we get very confused about that that's all very good to get an infrastructure but then you need the crazy guys with a backpack that are going to Mars and so that's you know Orion and SLS and maybe we'll talk a little bit about that in a conversation here is how close we are to achieving that so Bernika I want to turn to you and cuing off of something that Tom mentioned of you know once you're there once you're in the commons then you start having a different sort of discussion than if we're talking about something in the abstract if we can all agree to sort of share you know Alpha Centauri equitably because like none of us is going to be there anytime soon things start changing if you go out and start taking stuff and not necessarily in a bad way right it's the sort of like economic incentives are powerful imperatives and you know Luxembourg has been in the past year or so I think making a concerted effort to be out in the front of that and I'm curious just to hear you talk a little bit about what it is that as a sort of nation Luxembourg hopes to accomplish both for itself and you know as part of a sort of like broader effort in space yes absolutely about a year ago or so February last year I think our ministry of the economy announced that Luxembourg would go into asteroid mining and that created a big fuss in little Luxembourg and this thing gone crazy now and what's going on and in fact it's a little bit like Talal was describing it's not something that just fell from the sky upon Luxembourg like that it's something that has been worked on for a while but the basic premise would be easier we are looking into economic diversification in the first place of course we are a country that came from steel went to banking then satellites we have a bit of experience we think in space because we have the biggest satellite company of the world had quarters in Luxembourg and at a time when we found that that company people also thought we were crazy so the minister felt and the government felt that this was something that Luxembourg could possibly play a useful role in in terms of the commons and international collaboration and at the same time diversify our economy and hopefully create a hub in Europe for space exploration and to make that possible we have drafted a law based on the outer space treaty and it's basically to implement those bits of the treaty that say that if you want to go into space and explore and use the resources that you find there without appropriating the bodies themselves the asterisks themselves and so on you need authorization from a state party to the outer space treaty and so that's what we're doing we've got the law it's in parliament right now we hope to have it adopted in the course of this year and from then on the US I think has a very similar law enacted about two years ago and then from that moment on we're hoping that companies will use this Luxembourg law to get licenses to explore and use what they find and we are at the same time investing into research and development activities and partnering with a number of all those commercial companies that are in space to help them achieve what they want to do and hoping that we can attract business to Luxembourg while at the same time working in a very exciting field and we are also working in the international fora that deal with space on these matters the difference with the Emirates for example might be that we don't have a national space agency and deliberately so we are a much smaller country than the Emirates we're the size of Rhode Island we have over 600,000 people not 9 million and so on and we're in the middle of Europe between other big states so we deliberately decided to do this through ASA the European space agency we became a member in 2005 we chaired it with Switzerland over the past few years to also show that this is not only about the Luxembourg economy and about doing business and earning money this is also about pushing a field and we think Luxembourg has is well placed for this we're small we've been in the European Union from the beginning we know what it takes to sit between the big ones, mediate try and find agreement, negotiate and so on and so we thought well maybe this is after the satellites maybe this is a new field that we could go into so mentioning the European space agency I want to get Tom's sort of opinion on this and then come back to you cooperation, competition these are abstract concepts and thinking about them in a concrete way it's a very interesting case study I think of looking back in the earlier as the space race was underway between the US and the Soviet Union there were national space programs in France and West Germany and the UK in many cases in some cases those programs continued in parallel with the European efforts if you look at satellite launch I think Ariane can be described as a qualified success at the very least if not better and yet the human space flight side of things there is an ESA astronaut corps but they've been launched either on space shuttles or on Sputniks there's not a independent manned capacity and there's something that is more difficult the obvious risk questions about human space flight and I think Tom in your years of interactions I've turned many different ways with the ESA what do the successes and shortcomings of ESA say about deeper cooperation in space between more globally going forward ESA is kind of a as an example for other countries how they might evolve I think for ESA currently the astronaut corps is a force multiplier and that those flight opportunities they'd like more but it's our relationship with ESA and actually other partners is around barter it's not around exchange of funds except we do buy seats from the Russians for our crew return so what does that barter look like in practice it's based on how much resources kind of how much resources you put in is what you can to the space station program you get a commensurate percentage of the utilization rights including astronaut in this case ESA astronaut or Japanese or Canadian flight opportunities out so it's really based upon how much you're putting into the program that gives you the return and those flight opportunities are important for ESA because the nations that get those for example I was in Belgium when they had their first Belgian astronaut go up and it was all they talked about in Belgium for the time they were up there at a time when Belgium can't even agree on the city dog catcher let alone you know so that was something that was of an immense unifying national pride level that was much greater than any amount of money that went into that flight opportunity so I think the human space flight side ties to that a bit ESA is very involved on Orion is building the service module and for the way ESA is structured it's also a return based on how much money individual countries put into ESA they get a what they call just return of industry money coming out the back that they use then for their national industry so critical for European industry and how they've maintained and built up a high tech, high paying jobs, high return in their space industry which is the next phase for them now is really in Cislunar space and beyond so Orion if you look at it is a hate Apollo on steroids but if you go ahead and look at that behind the capsule is the service module of Apollo 13 fame and ours is also called the service module that's being built by the Europeans today ESA Airbus is a prime contractor so for Lockheed we interact of course with NASA and ESA but then also directly with Airbus and I tell you these folks know their stuff when we first look to break a vehicle and for anybody that's a systems engineer in the room they're breaking a vehicle right down the middle very complex interfaces we were like oh my gosh what's NASA thinking but then we started talking about it and we looked at what they had for their ATV which was their automated transfer vehicle which was their cargo carrier to station and we looked at the capabilities of that vehicle and we said you know what it could be a cheaper path from here to there as humanity now and so that really turned out to be a very wise approach they've been great to work with and they just signed in December at the ministerial at the ministerial the next EM-2 which will be the first crewed flight and what we found is which might also be EM-1 I can never remember if I'm talking the baseline or the what if so Tom's making reference to our first test flight uncrewed in the current baseline is at the end of next year full system test of Orion and SLS and then after that we were going to start flying crew within a couple of years annually we've been asked by the administration could we do that on this first flight so that's where it was this morning was working on those studies what we found is that all of the European countries we've worked with are extremely passionate about that next step right get beyond Leo and get into exploration what can we do from a lunar perspective what can we do from prospecting to asteroids other applications you can use these pathfinder flagships of NASA and the conversation has been what can they add to the existing system don't reinvent the wheel we don't need another capsule we don't need another deep space vehicle we have the one now we can go ahead on these other elements so they're very interested in habitats, nodes arms of course etc and just real quick your question of extensibility of the ESA cooperation and what it might mean for other countries we've been very sensitive of not everybody's at a level of resources of an ESA so that's why we have you know 780 agreements with 120 countries very small percent of those is around human spaceflight a lot of those are around earth applications around technology discreet technology elements those kinds of things where the human spaceflight part enters in though because even India now has an aggressive human spaceflight program you heard UAEs thinking about where they go with their program I think the human spaceflight part adds a complexity and a challenge and a visibility that can be catalytic and again be a multiplier to those other areas that are important so in India's case when we first started dealing with them it was all around satellite applications they stuck their toe out we started working with them out to the moon with a robotic mission to the moon and they came back said boy we've turned on our people now they really want to do more and it's a great way to give our STEM workforce the young people who don't want to be just call centers or other places like that don't find satellite applications enough to bring enough people into that pipeline that they want so the human program helps kind of catalyze some of that so I'll ask you a question that might be difficult to answer but I think I'd be remiss if I didn't ask it you're a sitting official in the US government at present a government that has undergone some change in recent months all of this international cooperation 780 agreements with 120 countries how has that changed since January 20th with a president who has a very markedly different attitude towards collaboration than his predecessor short answer is it hasn't changed I think the longer term we'll see how it gets shaped because I think it's a reality of what we are as an agency that international engagement as well as national leadership in doing things that others don't do so you haven't developed any pressure from White House to change what you've been doing no we've been highlighting both the opportunities for national leadership for doing things that other countries can't do or where they can come along or we can help them like outer planets and using things like SLS and Orion or where in Sicily and our space we want to have a greater presence and a greater regular presence to be able to set the norms as others move out there and on the other side of that is how international engagement is a tool too that can be used maybe to offset how you might want to be engaging in a harder line in some areas or as a carrot in some areas and have your actions international partners have they been similar to what they were several months ago have they changed they haven't changed yet what's going to happen with China or not we have some very low level things with China looking at Himalayan water flows and things on the earth data side so it's kind of going in it's the same set of agreements and things we haven't had any major new initiatives though so we'll see how they want to handle that I'll ask one more question and then open it up to the room a lot of the earlier conversation we had here as well as this conversation comes down to a relationship between activities in space and their political effect on the ground it's good it's a channel for international cooperation and having grown up in the 1980s I remember distinctly like my first sense of international collaboration in space was that the Canadians built the robot arm for the space shuttle and I remember thinking as like an eight year old can't we build robot arms in this country what do they have about arm creation that we don't and I think it was a very good robot arm and don't think any less of the Canadian colleagues who built it but we probably could have built that in the US and it was a discrete thing of like hey Canada make us a robot arm the systems engineers can figure out the interface and what I want to ask of all of you it seems to me that I've never run a spaceflight program manned or otherwise but in other things when collaboration comes about because of an actual need intrinsic to the thing itself it tends to enhance productivity in a way that it doesn't when you know I got to pick the kid to play on my baseball team because you know he's the little brother of the guy who's good and which is not no offense to the robot arm people who I'm sure were fantastic keep digging but what I want to ask you because there's also I mean bloat can come out of cooperation endless committees endless let's revisit let's come back I'll write you a memo you write me a memo and if we're going to share costs if we're going to share expertise what can be done to do that in a way that we don't tie ourselves in knots and I want the most concrete answer you can give concrete oh they said complicated that might be the same thing that might be the same thing because that's probably now the so to use your analogy but I'm not jumping into the hole with you and keep digging the robot arm to dig with if I want to build the best team possible I want to go get the next town over to bring their folks as well I could pick the best team I have from who grew up in my little hometown but if I bring in the next town over and then you select the top athletes from across you get two things first they're diverse right they perhaps played on a different playing field dirt versus grass or with cricket bats I don't know that can be all the difference when you've got a problem to solve and that's what you know I think about diversity and for George with his and I'm going to pose the same question to the rest to the other panelists what's the best example of cooperation in a space technology project you can think of and the worst and I'll take just one or the other but both would be good best one would be I'll use an example of the ESM I mean if I'm allowed to do a European service module they had something that was ready to go if we want to get to Mars and we can be a Mars orbit for about a decade if we chose to with humans tell robotically exploring the surface that's within our grasp right if you want to do it you got to stop reinventing stuff that's already existing that works good enough and so I think it was what could the ESM do that say it's American counterpart we could have done it I mean one person can build a spacecraft if you give them like a million years right they can figure it all out and they can build a hardware it's a hell of a lot better if you have it's really good then it's even better right and I'm being a little bit flip but the point being of course we can do all this stuff in America we got to the moon on slide rolls what was sort of like it was done I mean why go design a service module with tanks and main engines and ox thrusters and RCS and solar arrays and batteries what did it do you don't know what the ESM does I'm sorry so I'd have solar panels to charge the batteries three fault tolerant two fault tolerant engine systems fail down from the main engine to little ox thrusters and RCS jets all the command and data handling water because they have to drink air because they insist upon breathing the astronauts all of that was essentially there in one shape or another and so we were able to leverage that we the human race now were able to leverage that and just not reinvent any of that that to me is a fantastic example and a horror story and then we'll go to Tom what's the most you just kept circling around I would say to be honest I've never seen a case where it's been disastrous because you always come out better quite honestly if you have diverse thoughts there's some challenges there's cultural and language and then if everybody would just stay on the English units of measurement it would all be better even England hasn't stayed on the English unit now I would love to go to metric but we want to get to Mars but you know gently yeah exactly so those are the things you have to work through so to be honest any of the negative ones are just working through those interfaces and those personnel pieces very diplomatic answer Tom a couple quick ones I saw one we had signed an agreement to fly to Mir prior to the formal Mir program we had three flights to Mir and to do the docking we needed a docking module in order for it to happen and within an envelope over a dinner the Russians took that we paid them since we didn't have the capability to turn that around quickly they turned that around for 20 million dollars that was in the envelope or an envelope but they turned that around under eight months to a flight hardware that we flew and docked to on STS-74 but anyway so I think it focused a real focus behind cooperation important on the requirements I think we stumbled around on space station for a long time because all that and what really got it focus was bringing the Russians in and having a it was actually going to fly so it got it off the kind of every country needing their own lab and needing their own and all the negotiations around how we were all going to work together got very focus I think that's the real challenge is how for us now is sure we can build anything in this country and you're seeing more and more and you're going to see more and more and you're going to see more with this administration I think of focus on US industry and on our public-private partnerships to answer a little bit more on your last question I think that will be the emphasis international still be there but there will be this piece too stronger but that's all great we've got 19 billion dollars 18,000 civil servants and nine centers that can do anything so a big part of what we're trying to do is really streamline that around what are the things that NASA can do should be doing and is probably the only one who can do it or where we have a national interest a long-term national interest in having that resident within a government government wheelhouse are you worried about the Earth observation mission that was discussed earlier sort of on NASA whether NASA going forward will continue to have a strong focus on understanding the Earth and its climate we're in the middle of the budget process so I'm not going to comment on that but I think clearly what we do is more than climate change we do we've got Earth applications programs that span the globe that deeply impact how we deal with things on the ground in this country everything from coastal management of communities to disease vector attracting to you know how we interact with mom and pops on their farm you know until we get more and more data from private systems that's NASA's data feeds a lot more than just we're in about climate change so Varinik from your perspective this is the same question of sort of international collaboration gone well and gone badly are there any sort of stories that stand out to you not in space because I'm not from the field so I cannot unfortunately or fortunately of course at the Luxembourg we come from a totally different perspective, small country we breed collaboration as we go we sit between Germany and France we've gone through multiple phases of occupation wars etc so we or our fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers decided that we needed to be in every multilateral organization that was going to be there that's fine we'll have time for just a quick question or two if they're pressing anyone else also raise your hand and we can just take them in a row and please go ahead and introduce yourself I'm Nate and I work at the FAA office of commercial space transportation my question is for Varinik I'm kind of curious you were talking about the resource utilization law and the partnerships that you're looking at forming businesses and use based industries and companies like that so when the US passed our resource law about a year and a half ago we got a lot of reaction both good and bad from the international community at the UN for example and others well industry was quite supportive of that I'm wondering has Luxembourg gotten any kind of similar reactions or different reactions were there any lessons that you guys learned seeing what happened here in the US that you're applying now to your law we will peg this are there any other questions alright please go ahead thank you for the question we're only in the process of adopting the law so I'm I'm not aware of many major reactions to the good or the bad I think we got a number of encouragement from the commercial side and within ASA from our partners there I think our law is pretty similar to the US law with the difference that you don't have to be a Luxembourg citizen because there's not so many around but we've been very careful about phrasing the law and making sure that nobody will think that Luxembourg is unhinging the outer space treaty or anything we've partnered with the University of Luxembourg international space experts to make sure that we're on safe ground here and that we we're creating a legal framework that will be sound and give legal certainty to operators but that we're not overreaching or over-stretching we are we're not the US we're Luxembourg and so we're very mindful of our size and the international context that we're all being in we're hoping that this is going to be a good starting point to partner also with other countries who will venture in the same direction and then see where we can take the international legal framework in decades down the road maybe because somebody said that these things are very slow but this is not something that we just want to do for ourselves and then have our law and that's it and the others can see where they are the idea is to have legal frameworks for everybody and hopefully to kick starts in a way competition as well in the creation of legal frameworks well me you were stuck with a little longer but the panelists want to thank them very much for taking the time eventually they'll take all the chairs away and I'll have to sit down but thanks for that thank you both for joining us it's a real pleasure to have both Desi and Carl here with us they're both extraordinarily accomplished and beautiful writers Carl has written I believe 11 novels yeah starting in 2001 was the first one that you wrote on your own and you had an earlier one as a collaboration called Ventus which I have only read part of and I've really been enjoying so far Desi your first book came out recently it's the title that is very easy to remember it's Nigerians in Space which is a very catchy title and your next book After the Flare is coming out in September so everybody should keep an eye out for it and I think we're going to sort of frame this conversation as a little bit of what can science fiction do for us instrumentally not that anybody sets out to sort of write or read fiction in a sort of overly instrumental fashion in order as a rule and we talk about this a little bit over email and I'm just curious maybe whichever one of you cares to start okay well it's easy to as a science fiction writer to go down the route of rah rah we're great and you know Star Wars man but to get a little serious and pedantic for a minute why use fiction to try and inspire what are essentially massive economic investments here it would seem to be an odd fit but for instance Professor Brian Boyd of Auckland University wrote a book called On the Origin of Stories and what he's found is that the way he puts it narrative is the default mode of understanding of the human mind in other words if we can understand something in narrative terms we automatically will and this means that storytelling is so deeply set in us that it is what we go to automatically when we hear about or learn about anything so when it comes to space development for instance which is a highly complex in some ways extremely abstract to frame it to understand it we will do so in terms of stories the only question is what those stories are and who if anyone controls the narrative the power of narrative I would agree with that just in the previous panel it was interesting hearing about SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and how they've captured the public imagination versus Lockheed which has been doing great work for space and one of the reasons I think is the narrative I was thinking messaging in my day job I work for a non-profit messaging is huge for campaigning and getting people to care and just thinking from that perspective that the story of these sort of titans of industry wanting to explore space is very interesting they're good at flashy making things flashy in gadgets so part of it in terms of that particular aspect of traveling to space I think it's about using narratives to inspire people for my own writing basically I grew up, my father's a scientist I grew up with scientists Nigerian scientists coming over to the house it was a very normal thing I never felt like science was something that was beyond me that something technical was something that I couldn't achieve just by sitting around and hearing those conversations I was very fortunate to have that and writing about a space program I wrote about it before there was a lot of information coming out from Nigeria that there actually was a space program but I mostly thought of it as I grew up in the US I remember the Challenger exploding I remember all these important moments in space history I remember wanting to be an astronaut and feeling that that was something that was possible but a frustration that here there are people like my father and other scientists of color and women scientists you didn't see them on the big screen you didn't see them in writing so the story came out of that but making it interesting one of the things about fiction which is creating tension creating conflict so just trying to put that in a story and give people a place to go it's a challenge because you want to be optimistic and you want to show people a grand vision but it can get boring if nothing happens nothing explodes so it's something that science fiction writers struggle with I mean Mars in particular I think is sort of like loomed large in the human imagination particularly in the sort of genesis of science fiction and war of the worlds and the canals which was not a factual discovery but one that sort of metastasized into fiction I'm curious how both of you sort of have thought about the large body of science fiction about Mars which I don't doubt that you both know far better than I do so I'm curious if there's anything particularly Martian related that you particularly like or think is sort of was before its time in a way that was sort of like had some meaning to you well yeah sure I think for me there is a huge body of work on it and actually that's why in my new book I skipped Mars and had to go somewhere else because I thought that it had been explored so well but actually Ray Bradbury's stories he had a Martian chronicles I remember feeling that he just explored the human condition and what would be lacking being transplanted to Mars in these really poignant very sad and somewhat frustrating stories that wasn't as much about the technical aspects of flying to Mars but I really feel that that was a book my brother handed me just being inspired by that that this is the kind of storytelling I could get into where not everything is great and wonderful and written for kids there's adult things happening too yeah the irony for me is that I've spent the last year or a year and a half day dreaming about how to colonize Venus but I'm old enough to remember in school looking at school textbooks about the planets that had images of the Martian canals in them because that's what we knew and I remember the excitement at looking at that first grainy image of Mars taken from orbit that showed craters and going wait a minute craters that looks like the moon that doesn't look like Mars so for me it hasn't really been fiction but nonfiction the process of the unveiling of Mars over the decades that has been most extraordinary that it has gone in my lifetime and in my memory from being an Edwardian fantasy image to being a lunar wasteland to being something enigmatic and now potentially alive that's taking on its own sort of or asserting I guess its own style and substance to us it's going from being something we imagine to something that is speaking to us and that's an amazing journey to undertake so this idea of the power of narrative both to inspire and as a sort of lens of understanding is certainly true of fiction broadly and not particular to science fiction and we were talking earlier that trying to sort of police the boundaries of what is and isn't science fiction is not a terribly productive exercise there has been and maybe you can I think the audience is probably broadly familiar you can walk us through a little bit a sort of like distinct movement within the sort of hard science fiction to sort of identify scientific rigor as a sort of like intrinsic element to the construction of a novel in a way that wasn't always present right this was a sort of ideological commitment on the part of a set of authors some of the time and I'm curious whether you see that as something that you know the form of constraints are put upon literature as a form whether this is a sonnet or a villanelle or a short story or a novel this is a sort of formal constraint that it just makes it interesting in the way that formal constraints do or does it actually result in something distinct in terms of the way in which hard science fiction can be read for something beyond pleasure and sort of like in imagining what we might do out in the world well I have a lot to say about that for me yes it's a formal constraint like doing a sonnet when I write hard science fiction it's simply to give myself a set of parameters to work in that can allow free play but there are a lot of people out there who assert for ideological reasons an approach to communicating or approach to thinking about the world that says you must write about what is scientifically possible it's not actually a large group of people within the science fiction community but what I've discovered over the years is that however hard you may try at being faithful to reality in any way you're only really going to expose the massive blind spots that you have about other things when you do it so to take for instance I mean science fiction has been very very good at talking about nanotechnology anticipating biotech and space development we can imagine all these things and yet for its entire history science fiction has consistently failed to imagine that humanity might we govern ourselves well the foundation isn't that part of the canon you bring that up because it's essentially the only one big one but I think the point Star Trek also but the point stands I think that there are these blind spots and a focus on hard or rigorous science that's the core of science fiction is one of the things that contribute to those blind spots I mean I agree with the basic premise that we are often imagining apocalypses and wars but you know having in the process of completing this book and feel like there's been with the popularization of Star Talk and I feel like movies like Gravity and Kim Stanley Robinson series that the bar has been raised for technical science fiction I think a lot of the genres are actually for marketing they help customers they help companies sell the books and they help customers find the books find what they want I don't think hard science fiction is for everyone I know a lot of people who don't like it what I've found is that one of the challenges of writing about space exploration is that the real narratives that are happening are actually so extraordinary and the amazing advances that are happening on a daily basis the discoveries that are happening are, they're stranger than fiction so trying to boil that down into something and still tell a story can be a challenge I've come from a more of a literary just my writing is more a literary MFA I've maybe trained a little bit more to focus on character and stories but I don't actually think one is better than the other I think as long as people are entertained and find it interesting it can inspire people then that's good enough I've been short changing the audience systematically which I feel bad about but these conversations are hard to interrupt but I do want to open it up if there are questions in the audience please raise your hand thank you for sharing your thoughts about heart science fiction also it's a don't you think that sometimes this formal representation of science as you said this universe and the fact that astronauts live in microgravity and sometimes I've read some of it and sometimes I have the feeling that the authors have to spend more time educating the reader than telling a story I wanted to know what you think about maybe authors like Stefan Baxter or The Martian that came out recently those were examples where you were educated and entertained at the same time yeah the danger is always that you write a textbook with characters and the thing is that that used to be a normal approach for science fiction to the point where there are classic tropes that you learn when you're starting out such as the Rod and Don conversation where two sock puppets tell each other things that they already know so Rod we're on Mars and as you know the red planet as it used to be called it just goes on and on you could have hundreds of pages of that kind of narrative back in the 1950s but it is true that the standards have risen to such a degree that that sort of didactic writing is much rarer these days and it's a good thing I would say in response to that about the sort of backstory it's an art form that the best writers do it so easily your eye just goes right over the page you follow the story, you're inspired you don't even realize they've just fed you free facts about an obscure plant or something but I think it's not just science fiction Tom Clancy was kind of he's a best seller big time really good at weaving technical information in with a very pacey narrative very aggressive writing that's why those books sell writers have to learn that's our model MK83 microphone Tom Clancy style Hi Kevin Cole as a follow up to the question and answer here have you thought of or do you know science fixer writers who are writing textbooks with characters as part of STEM education flipping it around and saying textbooks are kind of dull and boring can you make the textbooks more exciting by you know adding in well not specifically for the educational system but personally since 2005 I've been working on a hybrid form of fiction that I call scenario fictions for mostly foresight clients in the military and government I've done two short novels for the Canadian government on future of various military matters and just completed one for the U.S. Air Force these take a stack of findings which might be this thick and and these are publicly available publicly available generally though not always I've written that they say government support for the arts is I've written a few things that will never be read in public but you take a thick stack of documents that no one will typically read how do you communicate these particularly if they are public well you render them into narrative if narrative is the default mode of human understanding then they're already in the worst possible form in that stack so this has been a highly successful strategy for me both professionally and to learn sort of the next stage of the craft so to answer your question yes it can be done and it can be done quite successfully but I don't think it could have been done using the attitude towards these ideas that people had back in say the 1950s when we thought there's science there's fiction let's just mash them together right I think a great deal more sophistication is required but that sophistication is out there in the current generation of writers all the way in the back and we can work our way forward even further back than you but you're next yes it's a wonderful talk thanks very much I'm old enough to have been inculcated in the three kings of science fiction the draconic azimov bradbury and Heinlein and and they still remain deep in my heart deep in my psyche so I wonder for you as authors do you have favorites that you think are up and coming in other words a new generation of writers I mean I can speak to one right here no there's so many there's a I think the collections are really good there was one called long hidden just basically marginalized voices women minorities LGBT writers writing speculative fiction and some of the best stories I've read were in that volume it was a kickstarter volume there's another one coming out so I think there are just a lot of voices if you look at the Hugo award winners there have been a lot of both translators and exciting writers coming up so I think things look really good and promising one thing that I've been waiting for and I think we're going to start seeing these voices is the harry potter fan fiction community so people who loved harry potter and would write fan fiction and these are millions of people young people well all different demographics wrote intensively got feedback they got workshopped within these online forums and those people are going to start we're going to start seeing those stories come onto the market where did they're imagining if they're writing novels at age 12 where are those stories going to be in 10 years I think we're going to have some really like an explosion of creativity yeah I don't think we have or will have again a small set of universally known names but the current generation includes people like Kim Stanley Robinson and new authors particularly many new really excellent female authors like Ada Palmer for instance who are writing fantastic cutting edge fiction so I think in some ways the golden age for science fiction is right now but it's there's so much noise and clutter in our mental lives these days that it's just hard to know or hear about these people a little investigation particularly yes in the anthologies will turn up some people that could become lifelong favorites yeah and I'll just speak to it one other thing, a trend that we're seeing is the Netflix HBO Amazon these are opening up possibilities for science fiction authors but they're going into the writer's room so I think a lot of talent you can see like Charles Yu on Westworld he wrote a book called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe it's a really great book I recommend it as a lead writer for Westworld on HBO so I think not everything's going to come out in book form yeah hi, Tad Daley's my name I was intrigued by what Carl Schroeder had to say about governance and imagining better forms of the human race running its affairs so I would like to ask us to imagine the moment this topic is imagination when the first human sets foot on Mars and what flag they're going to plant let me just give two quick factoids on this I've been interested in this issue for a while I went to the NASA library there were some scientific librarians over there and they did some digging into the archives and we discovered that they talked about this in the mid 1960s there were some voices inside NASA who said they had to plant the United Nations flag or maybe some kind of artistic rendering of the Earth from space but those voices were overruled second factoid is Neil Armstrong was interviewed on July 20th, 1979 the question was how did you feel as you stood there on the American flag Dr. Armstrong and he said I suppose you're thinking about pride and patriotism but we didn't feel very nationalistic at that moment we felt it was a venture on behalf of all of humankind and so I just want to propose that it's one thing to imagine somebody setting foot on Mars and planting the flag of the United States it's entirely another and for me to imagine the first human planting some kind of flag on behalf of all of humanity and I suspect Tad Daly Neil Armstrong aren't the only ones yeah I've taken to the Armada theory of Martian colonization first of all we sent robots they built the cities and then we show up en masse so that the very first ship that lands lowers this giant ramp and a thousand people simultaneously put their foot prints on the planet it would be a very different way of going I just love that I'm putting on my campaigner hat that is a good campaign the same way that Antarctica Antarctica is kind of in this international for the scientific community I think that's a really nice campaign one of the Oscar nominated shorts for this year was an animated film and it showed about to set foot I think it couldn't tell what planet it was but some U.S. astronauts about to set foot and then they see some aliens have already put their flag down there's this whole silly conflict and then it turns out that the aliens were just playing golf and it was just a golf hold at that time one of my favorite space age artifacts is if you're a government employee and you travel there's a form you have to fill out when you got back from the moon of Apollo and the aircraft carrier and this and that so there's always a quotidian anchoring to that sort of sentiment yes my name is Shalina, hi I thought that what you had to say about branding with private space companies was really interesting and when you see a lot of the videos publicity videos from companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic it almost seems like they are science fiction as you're watching them and so I was wondering now as these private companies seem to be using a lot more narratives in order to get people excited about spaceflight does it seem like the public increasingly doesn't really know the difference between what is science fiction and what is actually something that can really happen in space a willful blurring of the boundaries in an attempt to not really know what the difference is so I mean it's a great point and a great question I like it a lot I think for me actually one of the most inspiring videos was none of those videos maybe a year or 18 months ago there was an aircraft unmanned aircraft from Boeing that had been in space for a year and landed and it looked sort of like a shuttle in the room probably know what that was actually that video I watched that video so many times it absolutely blew my mind I couldn't believe that I was saying hey have you seen this video have you seen because that to me was first of all the ship was so interesting to look at it had worked had been in space and I didn't understand why people weren't making a bigger deal out of it I mean it got on nightly news but the video was available and it landed so but you couldn't know what the thing did you didn't know what it was but that's an interesting mystery final question it seems like one of the problems with space is that it's very unforgiving so if you're having a nice ocean story and the boat develops a leak and there's a shark so it takes a long time whereas in space the single most likely thing to happen is bang there's a hole and you're dead so as as authors what do you do about that how do you I mean you don't kill your characters that way the other thought I had was with regard to going to Mars what if a week out into your ten month trip or eight month trip you discover you're sure that there seems to be some sort of very slow leak and you realize that you're not going to make it but you'll probably make it seven months but you won't make it all the way what do you do then that is a fundamental premise of Kim Stanley Robinson's recent novel Aurora in which an interstellar generation ship has this exact problem so yes there's a great deal to be said about it but you have to be willing to go to some pretty daunting psychological and emotional places as a writer to talk about it the basic debris problem was I have a scene in the forthcoming book and it's all kind of internal the fears of knowing that all these objects could be hurtling at you at any moment I want to give my best impression of a speck of dust 50,000 miles an hour and bring this conversation to an abrupt halt thank the panelists and thank you all very much for coming as well as Andres, Emily, Kirsten, Tori and the Future Tense Team for organizing this event