 Hello, my name is Darren McKnight, Senior Technical Fellow for Leo Labs and I have the pleasure of starting off the session on activating active debris removal. The vast majority of the debris generating potential in low Earth orbit for Leo resides in a few hundred massive derelict objects often abandoned in tight altitude clusters that amplify the probability of significant debris generating event. As early as 2000, all of the major spacefaring agencies identified this pool of several hundred objects. This list provided a clear story, but did not provide actual priorities. Recent analysis by a team of 19 global experts from 13 countries reduced this longer list into the top 50 prioritized list. The top 20 objects were 20 SL16 rocket bodies, 18 of which are centered at 840 kilometers altitude. As a side note, the top 50 objects were roughly 80% abandoned before 2000, roughly 80% rocket bodies, and roughly 80% of Russian Soviet origin. Further, this year, a new analytic tool was created, the Leo Collision Risk Continuum, which examined over 400,000 conjunction data messages or CDMs issued by Leo Labs during the last half of 2020. These CDMs included all objects against all objects. The search is not limited to the riskiest conjunctions for the largest objects only. We let the data select the worst offenders. The probability of each conjunction is multiplied by the total mass of the objects included. This served as a surrogate for consequences if a collision happened to occur. This total mass involved in each close approach was used to obtain a risk value. For this analysis of all objects in the space catalog, the top four items were again SL16 rocket bodies. Further, the analysis clearly showed what had been hypothesized in the past from previous analyses. The greatest risk of future debris growth is from potential collisions between massive derelicts abandoned decades ago, not the small, agile, newly deployed small sets populating constellations. Further, there are two altitude regimes that continue to rise up in all analyses as potential hotspots for future debris growth and therefore targets for ADR. These two regions are centered on 840 kilometers and 975 kilometers. While active debris removal, or ADR, as a remediation option is rapid and permanent, there is some benefit to consider the general category of remediate in orbit to work cooperatively with ADR. This may be even more relevant for the most massive objects such as the SL16s, as their removal would definitely require control reentry to assure limiting the probability of ground casualty to below the threshold of one in 10,000. Just-in-time collision avoidance, or JCA, and nanotugs are examples of remediate in orbit options. JCA calls for the use of either laser impulse or interaction with a ballistically launched cloud to nudge one of the two derelict objects from an imminent collision. If a JCA solution could be developed that was much less expensive and responsive than ADR, in conjunction dynamics accuracy improved, this solution might become a valuable complement to ADR for the most massive derelict objects. Similarly, a nanotug is simply a small, probably a 6u-cube zap system that could be attached to an abandoned derelict object. The nanotug comprises accelerometers, electric thrusters, GPS receiver, to in essence bring the derelict object back to life by providing the capability to perform collision avoidance maneuvers as necessary. We are decades beyond the point of urgency of cleaning up mass deposit in LEO decades ago whose collisional churning may adversely affect commercial and national security space system for decades to come. This is especially true for constellations of satellite whose collective exposed area will make them uniquely susceptible to lethal, non-trackable debris. So as a popular press and regulators seem to be fixated on constellations as a catalyst for reduced space safety, I propose that the constellations will end up being the victims of decades of complacency and debris remediation and debris mitigation policy and regulation. Thank you for your time. We recognize the growing hazard of space debris and increasing congestion in Earth's orbit. We welcome all efforts, public and commercial and debris removal and on-arbit servicing activities, and undertake to encourage further institutional or industrial research and development of these services. My name is Ian Christensen, Director of Private Sector Programs for Secure World Foundation. Those were not my words, but rather are quotes from a joint statement issued by the leaders of the G7 countries after their summit in England earlier this month. The spotlight talk we just heard from Darren McKnight gives us an idea of part of the reasons why the G7 countries might have made this statement. The urgency of the need to address the orbital debris challenge is indeed increasing. Following through on policy statements will require sustained attention to implementation. Technical research and development will surely be needed, but it will also require understanding whether there is economic and business rationale or reason to tackle space debris. In the next 55 minutes, this panel on activating active debris removal plans to dive into these topics. What can we do to spur government and industry alike to get serious about removing orbital debris? We have a panel of experts well placed to look at this from multiple angles, economics, business, and policy. You can find their full bios on the summit website, but I do want to briefly introduce each of them. Asha Balakrishnan is a research staff member at the Science and Technology Policy Institute, a federally funded research and development center that provides analysis of science and technology policy issues for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Recently, she has collaborated with colleagues on a number of reports on space situational awareness, orbital debris issues, space traffic management, and small satellite technologies. Asha holds a PhD degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kolelia Yakomino is a research fellow at the CLAB, the Space Economy Evolution Lab, of SDA Baconi School of Management in Milan. She is currently a PhD candidate in management and innovation at the Catholic University of Milan. Research interests include technological trends regarding on-orbit servicing, economics reapplied to space debris, and the role of industry and public spending. Yay, who is the CEO and co-founder of Kolelia Space. This is Kolelia's first space startup or space degree in on-orbit servicing. Luke studied at the EPFL Space Center with a master's degree in mechanical engineering. Cherie Wheaton is the vice president for Kolelia Space Center. She master scales global policy efforts for space flight safety and insurance and thermal pieces. Cherie also serves as the chair of the U.S. Commercial Space Transplantation Advisory Committee on Contact. She holds a master's degree in state confidence. I'm excited to get to this discussion and I'll talk more to our panelists on the virtual stage. The first three, four are not going to be panelists. Cherie will leave 40 of them on this panel for audience questions. Please submit your questions. Our first question today is going to go to Kolelia. So, Kolelia, we start this conference this morning with the discussion of space's role in addressing climate change. C-Lab has included the parallels between the challenges of space debris, challenges of climate change, and here in introductory talk. How would you describe the environmental challenges that space debris represents? So, thank you. Thank you, Hian. Thank you to invite me to this interesting event. So, as C-Lab, we started to study the space debris problems. And when we started to analyze this problem, we compared the space debris problem ecosystem with the climate change. And we started to analyze in particular what was happening in the climate change. So, the comparison with the biosphere degradation of tropical forest loss. So, the cumulative problems and the cumulative effects regarding the natural ecosystem with the parallel with the orbit ecosystem. So, let me read a quote that was very important for us when we started to compare the orbital debris problems with the climate change. So, the quote is of the professor Alfred Kane that was an American professor and an expert in regulation. So, he developed a theory, the theory of the small decision. He said that the theory of the small decision is a situation in which a series of small individual rational decisions cumulative result in a larger and a significant outcome, which is nature-optimal nor the side, and can negatively change the context of choices, even to the point where the side alternatives are irreversibly destroyed. So, this was what is happening with the space debris and the challenges and the comparison that we did with the natural ecosystem and orbit ecosystem. Thank you, Clilly. I understand there's some problems with my connection. So, hopefully folks can hear me. If not, okay, it sounds like it's better. So, we'll try this and if my internet goes bad again, we'll have to see if I can have a colleague step in. My apologies here. So, Charity, Luke, the next question is going to be basically the same question for both of you. So, maybe if I can have Charity go first and then Luke wants Charity finishes. And the question is, what is your company doing to respond to the challenges that Darren and Clilly have just talked about? What near-term mission milestones can we look for from your company? So, Charity first and then to Luke. Thank you. Great. Can you hear me, Ian? Can you hear me? I can hear you, yes. Okay, great. Just wanted to check. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I appreciate the invitation. So, space sustainability is a growing market and an essential element of a robust space economy. Astroscale is on the leading edge of an emerging on-award services market. We're developing technologies, the business models, and driving the policy discussions globally. We support the management of the space environment via life extension, in situ, space situation awareness, end-of-life, which is disposal of prepared objects, and active debris removal, which is disposal of unprepared objects. Key to these missions, what many on-award services have in common are rendezvous and proximity operations, docking and capture, automation, and ground support command and control. And this is why our first in-orbit demo for end-of-life services will naturally advance efforts across all these business lines. Our very own LCD end-of-life services by Astroscale demo is the first commercial mission to demonstrate end-to-end debris docking and removal. And it launched in March of this year, and will be testing a series of progressively difficult maneuvers to capture a prepared salade, one equipped with a lightweight docking plate that was stacked with our servicer. LCD has since passed its major operational checkups, and we will begin the demonstrations later on this summer. You can track LCD on our website, and we are sharing ephemera, covariance, and maneuver plans with both ESA and the 18th. Notably, this demonstration is entirely self-funded. LCD is exciting because it's that first demonstration of an end-to-end debris docking and removal. We see all debris as a threat to space commerce, exploration, national security, critical services, and our way of life. And while small debris is clearly problematic, it's also important to prevent large debris from becoming smaller pieces of debris by remediating those objects that pose the greatest threat. Last year, Astroscale was selected as commercial partner for JAXA's commercial removal debris demonstration, phase one, which is the inspection of an upper-stage rocket body expected to launch by 2023. Finally, let's not forget space sustainability also involves economic sustainability and orbit. Last year, Astroscale announced its entry into the satellite life extension market, which adds value and ensures effective use of the limited natural resource that is GEO. So I'll just pause there and hand it over to Luke. Thank you. Thank you for having me on this panel. So ClearSpace is a spin-off from the EPFL in Lausanne. Initially, it's a team of engineers, EPFL, that's been working since 2010 to find a solution to actually remove space debris from orbit. And the project has initiated after launching a CubeSat straight into the field of debris of the Cosmos Seridium Collision, which generated obviously a lot of conjunction notifications and really brought our team to start thinking to, okay, what can be done and what should be done to address the growing problem of space debris. ClearSpace has been spun off in 2018 and we signed a contract with the European Space Agency to lead the first debris removal mission where we have as objective to go pick up a piece of debris that belongs to the European Space Agency in orbit and remove it by end of 2025. This mission called ClearSpace One is the first mission to execute the complete value chain of removing a piece of debris from orbit, addressing all the different dimensions, whether legal challenges, liability challenges, but also technical challenges on how to actually pick up a non-corporative object in orbit. Today, ClearSpace is about 40 employees. We work with an extensive industrial team across Europe and we're in the first phase of the development of our mission. All right. Thank you, Charity. Thank you, Luke. And I think we'll have time to come back to some of these activities and the subsequent discussions that I'm already seeing, some questions in the chat that have to do with the specifics of astroscale and ClearSpace missions, so we'll get to those towards the end of the panel as well today here. But I want to turn now to Asha. So I referenced the G7 statement at the beginning of this panel and we've also seen in the U.S. National Space Policy a goal to evaluate and pursue active debris removal. And in January of this year, we saw the NASA Inspector General issue a report, Office of the Inspector General issue a report that argues that mitigation alone is not sufficient and that we need more strategic remediation, strategic remediation activities to address space debris. Can you tell us about the current state of U.S. government activities regarding active debris removal? Sure. Thank you for inviting me on to talk about this topic. So in addition, in January, not just the OIG from NASA issued a report, but the OSTP, the Office of Science, Technology Policy, the White House also issued a National Orbital Debris Research and Development Plan, which laid out some of the research priorities for all areas with respect to debris. So there were kind of three major thrusts in that. One was debris mitigation. One was tracking and characterization of debris, which is very related to SSA and STM. And the third one, really for the first time in sort of a national level document like this, they addressed remediation of debris as a core element or a core area. And they then further sort of described three particular research and development efforts that agencies should move forward with. And these were develop remediation, repurposing technologies and techniques for large debris objects, as well as the same type of thing, but not repurposing technologies, but remediation technologies and techniques for small debris objects. So similar to kind of what Darren was talking about, there are many ways to go about this. In that paper of 50 derelict objects, there are very large ones that one could try and remove for the purposes of removing risk long-term. But then there's also a lot of discussion with respect to lethal, non-trackable debris that's, you know, could be mission-ending. And so they identified two areas. And then the third one, which I think is a really important area, and it's one that I think a lot of the people on this panel have talked about is developing models for risk and cost-benefit analysis. And I think that everybody sort of feels like there are models out there. They may touch on some aspects of risk or some aspects of a certain type of debris, but we really haven't seen sort of a holistic model looking at all of the trade-offs between the impacts of the probabilities, as well as the different orbits and the regimes and the sort of the numbers of satellites that are going up in that area, and not just technical risk, but also economic risk as well. I would say that the last thing is, you know, we do need better data. So that tracking and characterization piece that is part of the R&D plan is a really important piece because the models are only as good as the data that we have. And I fear that for the large debris, we have, you know, better data and there's more work going on with some of the NC2-SSA and some improvements in spacefence and coming online and those kinds of things. So, you know, in the small debris scale, we don't have as much good data that has really good accuracy to it to really understand the environment enough. So, I would say lastly on the ADR technology and where the U.S. government is, I think there's still, and this is a long-term thing, and that there is no one agency that has the mission nor the funding to do this. And so that's where we're stuck. And that when it comes to space traffic management, we're stuck with that when it comes to ADR as well. So I feel like there needs to be a little bit of a unsticking in the government realm. Yeah, indeed. The who and then what one agency in that question is one that is coming up in several different areas of U.S. space policy right now and seems to be good. Well, it's not a means to it either. So I think maybe that might again be another one that we come back to here as we go because I think that relates, it certainly relates to the previous panel with the space traffic management question and it relates to this as well. So speaking of the previous panel, that previous panel, we just had a good discussion of some of the challenges that the policy and regulatory structure for these large constellations pose. And the topic of debris certainly came up in that discussion as well. Darren in his talk suggested that these large constellation operators might actually potentially be a victim of some of this regulatory attention in that the existing risk from the large objects is where some of the real challenges and these constellations are operating in that environment, right? So I want to pose a question to you, charity. Your company has worked with one of these large constellation operators and some technology development programs along with the European Space Agency. What is the role of the large constellation community in addressing the debris challenge on orbit? Well, yeah, just great to point out that Astroscale did announce a partnership with OneWeb in May to develop an ELSA that can conduct multiple end-of-life disposals. And, you know, per your comment on Darren, he always does make good points. Derelict debris, approximately 8,000 tons of it, is a real threat to operators in orbit. However, as we increase the use of orbit, we need to prevent additions to the derelict population, right? So any additions pose a threat to creating those lethal non-trackable that Astroscale was talking about, but also interrupt critical services and commerce by requiring more collision-avoyance maneuvers. So even if they de-orbit within the international norm of 25 years, they're still creating a perturbation, if you will, on the normal operations in orbit. Large constellations are exciting, and they bring a wealth of benefits just here on Earth. And I personally know people in communities who are benefiting from the proliferation of access to space, but we can't add to the population of debris in space now. And we need to be responsive to new hazards and congestions. So this means one of two things for constellation providers, and really all operators in space. Either ensure high reliability of satellites, which might be rather expensive, or have a plan for a controlled disposal at end of mission. Regulators under Article 6 of the Outer Space Treaty need to make sure one of these two options happen. There's no middle ground here in terms of space safety. So what does this mean, and how do we get from here? That's the major question at hand. I feel the first step is to measure accurately what that risk of a system is. Meaning the entire system's risk needs to be measured for probability of collision. Next, we need to cap that risk. No one wants excessive or unlimited risk in this business with simply driving investors away. And third, proper monitoring is needed of this risk profile that constellations are imposing on the space environment. Right now, there are educated guesses of, at best, of how a constellation may impact the environment. How about a near real-time update as the system is deployed? And finally, there is no use making limits if regulators aren't going to enforce said limits. So sure, customer access to the benefit of a constellation should be economic, natural economic driver to limit debris. But what if it's not? Well, then governments are ultimately liable for private operator activity. So there should be financial carrots and sticks, as Asha mentioned, the economic drivers here, that drive responsible behaviors in space and limit debris. So just foot stomping, we're all in this together. Operational satellites that can maneuver around debris are good things. Transparency and information sharing among operators to understand who's doing what is a good thing. Space situational awareness is a good thing. Space traffic coordination and management is a good thing. But inactive satellites without collision avoidance, raining down through operational orbits and human spaceflight is not a good thing. And I don't care if that takes two, five or 25 years to deorbit. I count current large debris objects among the items that are not conducive to a successful space environment or space economy. Thank you, Jerry. And we're seeing, I'm seeing a lot of questions coming in in the audience here. So this is good. I've got a couple more I want to ask that we discussed in advance, but we're going to get to those audience questions. So keep them coming. So clearly this next one, I'm going to turn to you. So both Asha and Charity now have mentioned the need to create economic incentives and possibly, you know, the consequences and enforcement penalties that might come along with that. From your standpoint, does the rise of large constellations, does that pose or offer any sort of solution or relationship to the economic challenge of addressing space debris? Does it kind of change the way that we think about the economics of the space debris challenge? So this was the point that helped us as a resort center when we started our resort. And in particular, the question that the guide has was, is the market that can solve the problem of the space debris or we need the government intervention in order to solve this kind of problem. So I did before the parallel with the climate change that was a useful example to understand the role of the public and also the private sector. For sure this question, so is the market that can solve this problem? So we try to answer to this question through a simulation of different scenarios. So we try to understand, first of all, the risk. So if the risk of collision is in the medium term or sorry, in the short term, in the medium term on the long term. So this for sure changed the position of the private sector in order to invest in such technologies. And we started, first of all, to understand which kind of technologies the private sector can use and have the economic incentive to use in order to avoid and to solve the problem of the space debris. And we analyzed the mitigation of, for example, post-mission disposal or collision avoidance technologies active debris removal technology. So we saw that this technology in a stack mitigated the risk of collision. And in particular, the post-mission disposal solution was in our point of view, first of all, a good solution to solve or to mitigate the collision because we saw the curve of the risk lower than the curve of the risk of collision. So this was, in our conclusion, a cheap solution for the private sector in order to have economic incentive to invest and to use the post-mission disposal. For sure, if the risk isn't the short term, if the risk in other scenarios that was in the long term, I don't think that the private sector would use this kind of solution. So to use their fuel in order to the orbit the satellite. So I think that in the long term scenario we saw and I think that the private sector decided to leave their satellites to fail to the orbit. And I think that in this case, the active debris removal is needed for the death satellite in this case. But also for the active debris removal is a question that I ask to myself, but also when I talk with my colleagues, is there the market for the active debris removal? So you're hitting on, I think, a number of themes there, right? We talked a lot already in this panel about the need to have a good understanding characterization of the technical and economic risk and being able to communicate that across actors. You're also talking about active debris removal as part of an overall scope of responses that operators use to talk and need to take here, including simply post-mission disposal, compliance is important, and the business plan. So Luke, turning to you now, clearly I talked about whether if there is or is not a private market for active debris removal, your company is trying to find that market, right? That is what both you and part of Aster Scales business as well, right? So outside of technology, what factors do we need to have further development in to enable the commercial debris removal market? Well, I think to reflect on what has been said until now, I agree with Darren. I write that large object are a major issue and have to be addressed. And I agree with Charity that we have to build up a solution that is sustainable for the future. I think the first thing is that we have to overall, generally, whether if it's agencies or commercial operation, recognize the complete cost of space operation and the complete cost of space operation means the complete cost of a sustainable space operation. And in this cost, removal of debris has to be included. You cannot consider that. You look at the complete mission and say, okay, now it flies, we paid for it, we operated this platform or the satellite for a while. Everything's okay, whether it fails or not in orbit. And often what has been done in the past is that when you look at the overall cost of a space mission, you would go all the way up to the point where the satellite fails in orbit or is it orbited if it has been orbited. And I think this is not the complete cost. The complete cost should include also the orbiting and specifically, I mean, if you follow the logic of Darren, specifically for the most dangerous and problematic objects in orbit to start with. And this means that the first thing that has to happen is that agencies have to start looking at the object they have in orbit and say, okay, what kind of project can we put in place to make sure that we don't produce a situation which will affect everyone in the future. But then beyond that, I think this has to be also integrated in the business case for commercial operators. And the question then is, what is the dynamics, the financial dynamics that makes that the payment of that kind of service is just a natural step of a complete business case. So I think this dimension is really important. Regulation, we have a lot of regulation today that are in place already. There's a lot of things that are just not applied. I think in the other part that is happening right now that we can see happening much faster than we actually expected when we created clear space is the conscience of the problem. I remember for years before we created clear space, people would tell us nobody will ever pay for that. Nobody will ever pay for the orbit mission. Why would anybody pay for that? It doesn't make any sense, right? You're just removing a piece of debris to make space for the others. I mean, it's the tragedy of the commons. There's no reason why somebody should ever pay for that. And when we created clear space, when we founded the company at the beginning, we thought it's going to be hard to find investors. So we should find sponsors to actually make a demonstration. And we were surprised to see how quickly everything evolved. And we see that the timing is right to affect change today. So what has to be done is first, I think, that agencies start thinking about the object they have in orbit. I think what's interesting, actually, in the list of the 15 most dangerous objects in orbit is that there's not a single American one. In the list, what is just one? I think there should be more transparency about what's up there. There should be conscience in the agency starting to think, okay, how do we put in place a budget that makes sure that we increase the space of operational orbits? There's some orbits where consolation already cannot operate today. There's some orbits where you can already see Kessler's syndrome appearing. So you see that happening already today. It's a very slow evolving problem, but it's already there. So the first step for me is, I think, is those lists I agree with Darren and those lists of 50 objects have to be addressed and agree with charity. We have to build up the consolations in a way that takes into account all the different outcomes of an end of mission and actually just addresses them in a consistent, logical way. Thank you, Luke. And you've teed up the question that I want to start with from the audience. We almost like we planned this, but it just worked out this way. You were talking at the end of that remark about how to communicate the value and the need to start working on these top 50 objects and to start working on integrating this into the business case of the large consolations and designing those to operate safely and sustainably. So the question I'm going to put up on the screen here shortly, I'm going to ask Asha to start and then the other panelists to come in. So Asha, as we try to communicate the need to address debris, to remove the large objects, to figure out how to field active debris removal services, how should we as a community be communicating that to lawmakers and to policy makers? Is there anything you've seen in your experience where messaging has worked well or perhaps has not? And then I'll let the other panelists come in as they think there. So I haven't seen much in my experience in terms of moving this forward to get sort of the SSA and STM, we're still waiting on that. I think that with respect to ADR though, one thing that I think might work, I'm not an advocate here, but if one was to pull a story together about the cost now versus the cost later, I think you have to think about, it might seem expensive now with lots of dollar signs or euros, but if you waited and it created a more kind of much more untenable situation down the line than the cost or move millions of pieces of debris if things ended up colliding. So that comes back to the data and that comes back to the models. So we need to be able to have really robust models with good data, right? Not data that we took in shuttle windows in 2011 or 2009 for predicting what the debris environment is. We need really good data on the small debris side as well as the large one to feed into these models so we can convince ourselves of understanding what does it look like down the line? And if we did this now, yes, it's going to cost money, but it's going to cost a lot less than if we did it later. Thank you for that, Charity. Asha reminds me of a great quote from Darren. Pay me now or pay me more later is essentially what he says. There's a good paper at ISE on that. I recommend everyone read that. And just to quickly add on, this really comes down to domestic priorities, right? Those policy priorities, clearly Europe and Japan have made it a priority to invest in research and development for debris removal, and therefore there are programs. And I feel that ADR and just generically on our services writ large check a lot of domestic priority boxes for the United States in particular, international collaboration, technology development, growing the industry, national security, application to exploration, and just simple leadership, being involved and making sure that the United States is involved in ensuring the norms and leaving the rules and the norms and behavior on this sort of activity as well. So the stars are aligned. It just needs action like other domestic priorities do. I think we could certainly interpret the G7 statement as a recognition of wanting to take that leadership that you're talking about there, Charity, but it's a good statement. I think we can work on the follow-through when providing that story and implementation that needs to be provided. All right. So we are fully into the audience Q&A portion here. So we're going to jump around to some different subjects here as we go, but I'm sure the same commonality and threads will come up. So the next one kind of goes towards spurring action and some of the tools that we might or might not use. So Chloe, I'm going to put you on the spot to answer this first and then other panelists might come in because there's a little bit of economic theory behind this. So with a prize model or a bounty model, provide an effective incentive to remove some of these hazardous objects that we're talking about. Yes. It was mentioned before. So I think that if we demonstrate that the risk is now, so it's not in the long term, but it's in the short term, I think that is an important point to change the government attitude to fund the technologies or to find the private sector in order to take the action to mitigate the space debris. So this is the point that I want to stress about to understand, to demonstrate the risk because this is the one point that can convince the governments to take an action and it was happening with the environment on Earth. So before you mentioned that if we pay now and invest now in the future, we will have less cost about invest to technologies and this is true. So if we invest now to the technologies to help the private sector in order to avoid and to mitigate the risk, also there are several options that the government can do is to fund the technologies or through the public-private partnership is a good solution in order to invest in technologies such as active debris removal because we know that the active debris removal is a costly solution if we compare these technologies with other technologies. So this is the logic that we did when we started our research. So to understand and to compare the cost of the different solution and we know that the active debris removal is a costly technology and there is the need of the government to co-fund this kind of solution and the public-private partnership would be an option in order to help the private sector. So that's an interesting suggestion that the use of the PPP model which we've seen for other areas of government and commercial cooperation on space system development with success might be something that we look at here and I think there are elements of public-private partnership in both the Clear Space mission and some of the Astroscale partners as well. So I think that is something that the governments are looking at. All right, so the next round of questions is going to be a lightning round for our Astroscale and Clear Space colleagues. We have a lot of questions in the chat about where you guys are going, what your missions look like and how you interact with each other. So Asha and Claudia, I mean, you can chime in if you have anything on there but it might be a brief break for you. So putting the question up but the first question is going to get started here. Clear Space and Astroscale, are you guys competitors and are there others in your market space if you are? So Luke and Charity, I don't know who wants to take that one on but go for it. I think to be competitor, there should be the market already probably. It is, we have regular interactions and we obviously see each other because we are trying to produce the same change in the industry, maybe with a different approach in different regions. But at the end, what we see is that the market, when it activates to actually address all that requires more than all of our companies to actually address the complete problem. So there's plenty of room to do a lot of work. Right now, what we can see is that we are active, well in Europe, we're active together. Astroscale is active in the UK but otherwise, I mean, we are on a European mission, Astroscale is on a Japanese mission. The question is how far can international collaboration work and that's one of the questions that will at some point come up. Mostly also because for many different ADR technologies are considered as dual use. Right, and there can be limitations and strategic interests from different countries around that. But yeah, I think at the end, we might likely end up competing on some market and collaborating some others. I'll just echo some of what Luke said, maybe less competitors and more pioneers, aren't we Luke, in this space. And really, this industry needs to be collaborative at this moment, very moment. We need to get together to build those policy and best practices to conduct these operations safely. A small difference between our companies, I feel Astroscale is looking at a whole suite of on-orbit services in a number of orbits. ADR is just one of those missions. If you can rendezvous with another object in orbit, you can provide in-situ SSA, life extension, maintenance, et cetera, et cetera. And just a shout out to those industry associations and industry groups that are driving best practices and making sure this is a sustainable and safe market, is the consortium for the execution of rendezvous and servicing. Of course, there's other ad hoc groups like the Space Safety Coalition. And I know that probably Luke's company and Astroscale, we're part of many, many discussions with our industry colleagues. So it needs to be collaborative. Thank you, and so we had a question there that both have already spoken to about whether you're doing the same thing or are definitive differences. It's a little bit of both, right? I like the phrasing, you know, pioneers, not competitors, right? Because as Luke said, you know, make the market and then compete for the market. So, Luke, you've already teed up the next question very nicely. You keep doing that for me, so thank you. There's a question from the audience. So Luke, you mentioned there's some potential dual use implications of some of this technology, right, for ADR or for servicing. So the question is, are your companies doing anything to make sure that ADR operations don't create security concerns? And so what is the relationship between, you know, civil ADR technology that we're talking about in this panel and some of the national security implications that that might have? I think to do a mission that has national security implication, you have to be placed on the right orbit. You have to get an authorization to launch. This means that you would have either to have an authorization by launching state that actually knows what you're planning to do because you have to provide a lot of content, a lot of detail about what you're going to do in orbit, especially if you're in orbit servicing. This is already quite a deterrent. The other aspect is that we look at it for us. It's quite obvious that the solution we're building is a sustainability solution. That's what we're after. That's what we try to build. And I'm certain the astroscale as well. We want to address a fundamental problem. And in our perspective, there's a lot of dimension that can make if you want to de-abilitate or break a satellite or a military satellite, you don't necessarily need to actually capture it. You need to collide with it. You need to do other stuff. And there's probably ways that are much more cost-effective to actually do that. Then actually do the complete exercise as we do it. In addition to that, I think that it's a little like an ambulance. You don't use an ambulance for warfare, mostly because you know that if you start to do that, the cost benefits in terms of your complete exercise makes it illogical, right? You have more to lose than to win if you start using it this way. So that's the way we look at it. Maybe it's a little naive when it comes to military application. But for us, it's clearly the approach is very clearly and has to remain a sustainability solution that we are building here. Nevertheless, it's a solution that is dual use and will be classified as dual use. What we export and how we address it because the question obviously came in from the Swiss government when we started working on the first mission for ESA, the question came up and it comes up on a regular basis. What we export is a service and not the spacecraft or the technology itself. I'll just add that Astroscale categorically is against the deliberate creation of debris and orbit. That is incredibly important and that is our ethos and the reason why we stood up as a company. Beyond that, the government's point fingers here can be the worst offender of debris generating, debris generation and orbit, especially the last six decades. So we feel that government should be customers of our services to prevent debris incidents from occurring. Just echoing Luke, private operators are regulated. By domestic nations and therefore we have to adhere to space safety standards. We also are pushing norms of behavior, best practices in this market as well. As I said, we're regulated and want to develop solutions, not create problems. That's all I say about that. Thank you and I think an important point that both of you are talking about is we discussed earlier transparency and sharing of information and there's going to be a civil commercial mission that's going to be an emphasis on transparency and information sharing at least we hope that helps to distinguish those sorts of activities from something that might be more national security in nature. So thank you, Charity and Luke, for the clear space and Astroscale portion of this questioning. I'm going to try and open up to a broader question now. The number of questions in the chat about removing spent rocket bodies, right? And we know the majority of those bodies are Russian and Chinese ones as well right from the top 50 list. There's a legal and policy question here around permissions to use to remove those objects, responsibility to remove those objects and liability associated with that, right? So a broad question about what legal and policy tools can we think about to address nations that do not consent to the removal of their derelict objects or to encourage those nations to start participating in removal of those objects. So open to anyone on the panel who wants to try to take that thorny issue on. Did that not come through? No, it's a little better now. I'm not going to be able to answer that question. I think that's a really, really hard question. I think we're all sort of silent because we don't know. This is really an international cooperation diplomacy issue. I mean, this has to, this cannot be solved by technology development. When one of the things that we, when we helped support sort of the orbital debris R&D plan, we looked at, okay, what are the big challenges in orbital debris, you know, irrespective of R&D? What are the major challenges? And then what can R&D solve? And R&D can solve some of the challenges, but they cannot solve the liability challenge. They cannot solve, you know, post-mission disposal, people complying with the 25-year rule. They cannot solve the registration challenge. And so these are things that have to happen on the diplomatic efforts. And, you know, I'm now going to step back and feign that, you know, although I'm a policy analyst, I'm an engineer and I'm not a diplomat. I'll add, Ian, that when we say we look to leadership of this sort of issue, this is what we're talking about. We'd like to see nations get together and discuss what is that pathway forward before technology catches up to that eventuality because technology will run fast here and we hope that nations will be able to have an open dialogue and come to some sort of solution. And I think if I can also add to it, I think that there's some good news in the complete, in the situation. There have been collaboration where objects from different countries, including Russia and U.S., docked in orbit, right? And this happened in the past. This kind of collaboration was possible in the past. And this is a field where we have to put aside, where governments have to put aside competition on a military scale to really look into collaborating to address a common problem. And if it has been possible for the ISS, it has to be possible for the brewery removal. And because we all coexist in the same environment, we all benefit from the same environment and this cannot be treated in the usual competitive way. It's not possible. All right, so we are unfortunately almost coming to the end of our time already. There are well too many questions in the chat that I'm going to be able to get to, but I do want to go one round around the table here with a wrap up question and give everybody a minute and a half to try to wrap up all of the great thoughts in the brewery time. So in the spotlight talk, Darren told us or suggested that we are decades beyond urgency in addressing the arbitral debris challenge. So in a minute and a half or so, what is the immediate next step that we must take to start addressing that urgency to start solving that gap? So just go around. I will pick on Charity to start. Let's see at the bottom of the screen. Sir, I think that's a great approach. A lot of folks are thinking of active debris removal of, you know, it was decades away and we have time, but we don't have time. So what can we do now? Right now. And then what do we build on to get ready? So I really think domestic national priority on space environment management, active debris removal, whatever you want to call it, make it a priority, make it a statement and have that drive the discussions of who owns it, how are we going to fund the R&D aspects to it? How are we going to develop the PPP economic models? How are we going to do the international pieces? But it all starts with, you know, laying down the policy. So get the policy right, Luke. Well, there's not much to add to what Charity just said. I think for us, we see it exactly the same way. I think governments have to lead the first efforts. In Europe, it's already the case. I think he's demonstrated that today there's more European agencies that are starting looking into that. So this is moving in Japan as well. And I think this should be a global effort. There's not a dimensions read this dimension of building up international collaboration to address those problems. And that's something that has to be driven probably with a very similar model that what has been done for the ISS. Claudia, you're next on my screen. So I think in my opinion that I'm a researcher. So what is my job is to understand the different solution that we have on the table. And we discussed the different solution about PPP solution. But if we go through this way, we have to think about if there is a market to sustain these PPP models and to understand how the business model of active debris removal is based on. It's based on to give profit to private sector or to save the profits. So this is a distinction that is important to understand how to develop a sustainable business model of the active debris removal. So this is the first thing that I wanted to share with you. But the second thing is that if it's not sustainable, so if it's not sustainable, the PPP model is not sustainable to think about if the market can have the economic incentive to solve this problem alone. For sure we need the intervention of legislation. And to think about if we need for budding legislative intervention or if we need other solution, for example, to pay a fee. So each satellite operator pay a fee in order to invest in this kind of technical solution. So depends on the risk, as I said before, if the risk is now or if the risk is long term. And then to position an intervention on the public and private sector in different way along this timeline. Asha, last word. Great. So I'm going to give two since I have a last word. One is I really do think we have to develop these risk and cost benefit models that clearly I was talking about and develop them in a holistic way that's transparent and people buy into. So I think we really need the evidence behind whatever next steps are going to take. I would say secondly, and I do not speak on behalf of anybody, I speak on behalf of myself and representing the Science Technology Policy Institute. I do not represent the US government here. But I do think that the US is losing an opportunity to get in in terms of technology development in ADR technology and to help to both look at their own missions as an example of a customer to use these technologies down the line, but also to buy down risk and try and better understand some of the challenges that we have on the policy side, some of the concerns we have on the legal and policy side and work that out. We can't admire the problem so much more unless we go forward and do it. And in order to do it, we need action from at least in the US, we do need some direction on which agency is going to take the lead in doing it and who's going to be funded to do it. Yeah. All right. So thank you all. So to activate active debris removal, we need to know that governments must act. We need to get environmental management, space environmental management policy in place, international cooperation. It was essential. We have some models that we can consider for that, the ISS cooperation, public-private partnerships. Then we really need to understand what the technical and cost-benefit risks and analyses are in sustainable active debris removal business models and the overall risk portfolio in orbit. And we have to look for opportunities for leadership and we need a US government champion to step up and take this responsibility. So very simple, straightforward steps that we need to do, but I'm sure that we have ample opportunity to continue this conversation and we've identified some good work to go forward. So thank you to the panelists. I wish we could keep talking. Thank you to the audience for the number of questions that were submitted. Again, I wish we could get to them all, so we certainly had a good discussion. I want to welcome my colleague, Crystal Beck, up on stage, our conference chair here to take us out for the day. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you, Ian, and thank you again to all of our panelists from all three of our sessions today. I really couldn't be happier with what we've been able to bring you with the discussions that we've had and with the opportunities for follow-up that this gives us. So just to let you all know, this is day one. We're concluding now. Starting tomorrow, we're going to have another day of packed content for you. Two panels, one on the Space Race or what we really should call it. The second on the Space Force and what should be really focusing on what should be its prime directive. And then I'm also incredibly pleased to offer you two keynotes. One is an interview-style keynote with Tori Bruno from ULA and one is Bavya Law, a senior advisor at NASA to hear a little bit about the Biden administration's priorities on space sustainability. So join us tomorrow. If you know anyone else you'd like to invite, please have them register. And we are excited for our event to continue. Thank you so much.