 Welcome to the ITU Studio here at the Radio Communication Assembly just prior to the World Radio Communication Conference 2023 in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates where I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio by Mike Lindsey who is the Chief Technology Officer for Astro Scale Limited. Mike welcome to the studio. Thank you very much, it's a pleasure to be here. Now I know that you're here for a reasonably short visit but it's obviously important enough for you to be here and taking the time to come here because I believe you're based in Tokyo although I know that Astro Scale is obviously in different countries. I wanted to perhaps start off by asking you a little bit about what Astro Scale does. I know that you are promoting safe and sustainable space for the development and the benefits of future generations and so perhaps you can tell us a little bit about your tasks, your roles, your Chief Technology Officer and I know that you've also been involved in Astro. That's right. So yes, as you mentioned Astro Scale is dedicated to the sustainable development of space and we focus on the provision of a number of in-orbit services. These are services such as inspection, life extension, end of life removal, active debris removal and then we can expand to other services such as refueling, repair and hopefully one day recycling. And the aim of these services is to reduce the amount of essentially waste that is launched into space or is left remaining in space because that becomes a hazard to other operators in space and the reason that we're here at the ITU is because the more debris that is created and generated in space actually negatively impacts the efficient access, the equitable access to space spectrum and orbital resources. So we're actually very encouraged to see the ITU start to think about the long term sustainability of orbit resources as well as spectrum resources because they're very much interconnected. Indeed because I mean ITU's key objective of the ITU regulations is the avoidance of harmful radio interference. I mean obviously we don't regulate other aspects such as physical objects etc but I know that there's a lot flying out there there's something like 10,000 tons of space debris apparently and there's there's even 34,000 pieces of larger debris that over over 10 centimeters large so there's a big possibilities obviously for improving the environment up there but I know that you're also getting involved in or possibly looking at a lightweight version of the ISS robotic arm on that. Is that something which you could talk about? Yeah absolutely so part of our technologies require us to dock with a client object in space and this object may be as large as a four ton school bus or it could be as small about the size of this this table here about 100 kilograms and in order to dock with and control these objects we have to develop a variety of interface technologies so we have been developing magnetic capture devices to use a magnetic extension device that can interface with ferromagnetic docking plates on satellites and there are hundreds of those in space already but for objects that are not necessarily prepared with an interface we are developing robotic arms as you mentioned that will help us manipulate the end effector to the right part of the spacecraft where we can maintain a safe and reliable hold on that client object. Now you're also interested of course in international policies are there any particular outcomes that you're hoping for from from the World Radio Communication Conference? Yeah absolutely so we're in a very nascent industry here the in orbit servicing industry and this requires three aspects we need the technology to be there we need to support the the growth of the the ecosystem and the economics that will enable a long term sustainable in orbit servicing industry and then there needs to be supporting policy so part of the reason we're here is to make sure that spectrum allocations for example consider in orbit servicing missions because it's it's actually quite a unique mission profile that our services will be utilizing we're frequently moving between altitudes to different client orbits and we have periods of time where we we don't need high data volumes and then there's other periods of time when we're taking lots imagery LIDAR infrared data that we need to transmit so we need high bandwidth for critical docking operations so these types of activities to our knowledge have not been well studied at the ITU so we're here advocating for the proper consideration because these services again are going to be absolutely critical for long-term sustainability of space. How optimistic are you that we can have a safe and sustainable space environment? Well things at the ITU do take several years to implement so actually this is the first time Astroscale has been represented at a ITU event personally this is my first RA so it's the first step we're taking towards advocating for this and we're seeing some steps again there was resolution 219 coming out of the Plenipotentiary Conference Bucharest in 2022 that called attention to sustainability so I think the interest is there people are becoming more concerned about this again the progress is going to be slow but it'll be steady I think the issue is becoming more and more apparent to everyone and we hope to see more support for solutions. One small step for man or woman. One giant leap for mankind. Excellent well thank you very much for being with us in the studio and I'm sure we will get a chance to catch up again very soon. Absolutely thank you very much it's been a pleasure. Thank you. 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