 I'm Crystal Hazelton, Director of Space Application Programs at the Secure World Foundation. Welcome to the second day of the Summit for Space Sustainability. We had some great discussions yesterday. In our opening panel on satellite and climate change, our illustrious speakers highlighted the need for better communications between the policy community and scientists, the need for more leadership from NASA and other organizations to address both the short and long-term needs in this area, and the value of partnerships, technology transfer, and data sharing. Yesterday's panel on megaconstellations featured legal, economic, space science, and astronomical perspectives on the challenges posed by large global constellations, especially their effects on ground-based astronomy and their impacts on the health and sustainability of the space domain. Our discussion on activating active debris removal focused on the next steps to field active debris removal capabilities in light of the increasingly urgent space debris challenge. These steps include a policy commitment to space environment management, building out international collaboration, developing detailed technical risk analysis and economic assessments to support business planning, and following through on the high-level political leadership statements. If you missed any of these, we have a full recording available on YouTube. Please check it out and share it with anyone else you think might be interested. Next, I want to thank our sponsors for whom, without whom, we wouldn't have been able to host this event. Our digital content sponsors are deeply committed to this issue and have provided materials for you to explore regarding their efforts on space sustainability. These are posted on our summit website. Further, they've generously supported our young professional outreach, including providing mentors for tomorrow's networking sessions. We're also grateful for our media sponsors who've helped get the word out about this event and has always provided great coverage of space sustainability and other news for you to follow along. I also just want to remind all of our young professionals in the audience that we are hosting two mentoring sessions tomorrow, one at 9 a.m. Eastern and one at 7 p.m., or 1900 Eastern time. If you haven't already registered for these, please do so. Your invitation is in your inbox. It might be in your spam folder. We've got an exciting lineup of mentors ready for you to engage with, so be sure to sign up if you haven't already. Finally, I'd like to turn to an announcement from one of our partners. The Space Sustainability Rating Design Team. They're here to tell you all about their great project and opportunities for you to get involved. We have a little video so you can see that. Good afternoon. My name is Nikolai Hlystov and I'm lead for Space and Mobility at the World Economic Forum. It was just several years ago that the Global Future Council on Space created the concept for the Space Sustainability Rating. And it was really in response to the growing risk that space debris poses to orbital operations. And the time couldn't be better. The idea is really to encourage better and more sustainable behavior on orbit with this voluntary approach. Today, we are glad that after several years of development together with our international partners to announce the transition of the Rating to its future home organization, the EPFL Space Center. The decision couldn't come any sooner. We see the risk of debris continuing to grow. And we believe that EPFL Space Center will be a terrific organization to operate and grow the rating into the future. It was a long process also of selection with a number of very qualified applicants. And after several months of discussions together with the advisory group, this is the decision that was taken and we couldn't be happier with it. We wish all the best of luck and look forward to continuing working and transitioning the SSR to EPFL Space Center. It will come as no surprise to you when I say that certain orbital regions are currently congested with space debris and operational objects alike. Decades of space surveillance data analysis and forecasting have consistently highlighted the need for post-mission disposal and operational collision avoidance processes as a necessary precondition for the long-term sustainability of outer space. They've also indicated that slowly but surely the attitudes of operators can shift from solely being focused on direct mission goals to taking long-term considerations into account. As part of the rating process, we wanna take the next step. Methods have been developed to quantify the risk and the impacts of space missions on the effolutions of the space debris environment as well as on the collision risk to other active spacecraft. They provide an operator with direct feedback on the risks implied by simply going into or being on orbit. Indeed, in this context, space itself is treated as a limited but shared resource. And the risk is just a quantification of how this resource is being consumed. This quantitative value and impact footprint as known from other environmental issues around the world ensures that we can measure how much a mission from a single CubeSat to a large constellation contributes to the goal of long-term sustainability and rate it accordingly. The space sustainability rating has been designed by a five-part design team, including the World Economic Forum, the European Space Agency, the University of Texas at Austin, FRISTECH, and my own team and in my team. We work to identify concrete ways that operators of space systems can help reduce collision risk, increase space situational awareness, and make sure that we're reducing the creation of new space debris. Our documentation and modeling tools now provide an excellent design that EFFL can take forward into an operational system and we're so excited to see them take it forward and continue to support them through our research. The space sustainability rating will continue to evolve as other rating systems do and will continue to seek your input. It's been wonderful to dialogue with many of you through conferences and workshops, virtual and in-person over the last few years as we design this process. There are still more ways for you to get involved. Governments can take some of our recommendations and use them in their regulatory environment. Space operators, please contact EFFL if you're interested in playing a role as one of the early adopters or beta testers as we continue to refine the design of the SSR. It's going to be a journey for all of us as we work towards space sustainability and we're so proud that EFFL will play a key leadership role in the operational SSR. Space sustainability is in EFFL and Switzerland DNA, in particular as one of our research projects led to the creation of ClearSpace, a pioneer spin-off that has been selected by ESA for the first space debris removal mission. In addition, we are hosting since 2019 the Research Initiative on Sustainable Space Logistics, aiming at exploring technologies and solutions to ensure a long-term use of outer space. This is why we felt that at EFFL, we have the expertise, the energy and the willingness to host and operate the space sustainability rating. With our partners that will support us at EFFL, in Switzerland and at international level, we aim at launching in 2022 what could be a game changer in how space missions are carried out. We want to thank the World Economic Forum, the Space Enabled Research Group at MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with Bryce Tech, the University of Texas at Austin, for their tremendous work and their trust in choosing us. We are working hard to take over from them, so stay tuned for future updates. I hope you all found that introduction to the space sustainability rating helpful. As you can imagine, it's a project that we here at Secure World Foundation are very interested in and active in. If it is of interest to you, please reach out to the team. For today's housekeeping notes, I just want to remind everyone that every panel will have time set aside for variance audience interventions, including polls and question and answer. Just click on the link below your livestream feed or go to menti.com and enter the code below and you can participate in the first poll of our day right now. We've also made a small adjustment today's agenda. Instead of Victoria Sampson, the director of the DC office, my colleague Daniel Porus will be stepping in as moderator of our first panel. I'd like to go ahead and kick that panel off with a spotlight talk by Aaron Bateman. There is much talk at present about space having become militarized and or weaponized in the past few years, and there's a growing narrative about an emerging space arms race. These ideas overlook the realities that space has been militarized from the beginning of the space age and that both the United States and the Soviet Union developed and tested anti-satellite weapons during the Cold War. Examining military space competition during the Cold War reveals that US policy on anti-satellite weapons was influenced by a broad range of US national security considerations, especially divergent presidential views on arms control and differing presidential perspectives on the proper military uses of outer space. In the late 1950s and 1960s, American presidents exercised restraint in the development of weapons that could be used to destroy satellites out of fear that even the existence of such capabilities would provoke the Soviet Union to act aggressively against US reconnaissance satellites. By the late 1960s, intelligence satellites were the single largest source of US intelligence on the Soviet Union and preserving the ability to conduct reconnaissance from space was an overriding objective of the US government. Despite this emphasis on restraint, the United States did conduct the world's first anti-satellite weapons test in 1959 and it did deploy a nuclear anti-satellite weapons system in the Pacific in the 1960s. The latter was, however, a limited capability that was designed to defend against orbital nuclear weapons and was quickly moved into a mothball status. US government commissioned studies from this period concluded that the United States was more dependent on satellites than the USSR, especially for reconnaissance and that US anti-satellite weapons would be a very limited deterrent value. Additionally, the United States had learned during the 1950s and 1960s that using nuclear anti-satellite weapons would not only produce harmful environmental effects but would also inadvertently destroy American and allied satellites as well. US officials had concluded therefore that anti-satellite weapons were a very limited military utility. These early efforts did nevertheless provide the Soviet Union justification to move forward with its own anti-satellite weapons program. By the early 1970s, US intelligence had learned that the Soviet Union was testing a co-orbital anti-satellite capability. President Richard Nixon did not, however, want to pursue a similar capability out of fear that it would undermine ongoing arms control negotiations. Satellites were identified as the primary means for verifying SALT-1 in the 1972 ABM Treaty. The latter precluded the development of new land, sea, air and space-based missile defenses. The interpretation of this treaty would be especially contentious in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan sought to develop space-based missile defense. The 1970s was a time of transformation in both American thinking about space and the military uses of space by the United States and the Soviet Union. Both countries had begun to use reconnaissance satellites to support tactical military forces. Consequently, because of Soviet space-based naval tracking capabilities along with Moscow's anti-satellite program, the White House commissioned a panel that had concluded that it was, quote, no longer tenable to think of space as a sanctuary, unquote. Notably, détente between the superpowers was breaking down and President Gerald Ford authorized the development of a new US anti-satellite weapons program not to match the Soviet capability, but rather to be able to hold Soviet space reconnaissance systems at risk. Additionally, the Ford administration maintained that verification of an arms control agreement constraining anti-satellite weapons would be especially problematic. President Jimmy Carter sought to push forward with a new arms control agreement in the form of SALT II and wanted to prevent an arms competition in space. He believed that controls on anti-satellite weapons were essential because he saw them as being a very limited military utility and he also saw them as a direct threat to the arms control regime his administration was pursuing. The US and the USSR were making progress in anti-satellite weapons talks until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 that significantly derailed the strategic arms dialogue. Notably, unlike Ford, Carter believed that verification of an arms treaty limiting anti-satellite weapons was indeed possible. Oftentimes alleged problems surrounding verification were used during the Cold War as a political argument against arms control. With any arms control agreement, verification mechanisms cannot be properly evaluated until the parties involved determine what they specifically want to limit. President Ronald Reagan pursued the most overtly militarized space agenda of any Cold War president. His 1982 space policy stated that the Soviets had initiated a campaign to capture the high ground of space and he pushed forward with an air launch anti-satellite capability, which he said would deter the Soviets from using their own anti-satellite weapons systems. The deterrence argument was not compelling to the asymmetry in Soviet American space capabilities and in particular, the United States was still more dependent on space systems than the USSR. In 1983, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was a missile defense program to develop land, air, and space-based missile defense interceptors. Because limits on anti-satellite weapons would have constrained the development of SDI, Reagan rejected any proposal for limits on anti-satellite weapons. The administration used verification issues as a primary argument against constraints on anti-satellite weapons. Recently declassified US documents revealed that neither the president nor the joint chiefs believed that the US anti-satellite weapons program was especially useful, but they had concluded that it had to be preserved to move forward with the administration's missile defense agenda. The US conducted a debris producing test of its air launched anti-satellite weapons capability in 1985, but Congress prohibited further such tests and the program was ultimately canceled due to technical difficulties. We also find from the archival record in allied countries to include the United Kingdom, France, and West Germany that many senior defense officials and diplomatic personnel believed that space arms competition could be constrained through arms control and that doing so was in the interest of the entire transatlantic alliance. Cold War military space activities can be best defined as a competition that ebbed and flowed based on geopolitical circumstances at specific points in time. Additionally, space security was inextricably linked with arms control and missile defense, especially in the 1980s. Rather than viewing the present situation as an unstoppable race, we must recognize that it is driven by a wide variety of geopolitical factors that are contingent and therefore subject to change. Characterizing the Cold War and present space security situations as a race can lead to reductive policy positions that waste precious resources and lead to further instability. Hello, everyone. My name is Daniel Poros and I am filling in for my colleague, Ms. Victoria Sampson, who can't be with us today. I'm the director of strategic partnerships and communications at Secure World Foundation and I'm very excited to be moderating this panel today. It's not a race. Across sector discussion of competition in space. Now, as an increasing number of countries develop counter space capabilities and geopolitical rivals seek to position our space programs as drivers of economic growth, diplomatic leverage and security advantage, there's an emerging narrative that there is a new space race underway. This is evocative of the Cold War's US-Soviet competition and suggests a winner-take-all struggle for future domination of space. But is this too simplistic an approach? If there is a race, to where and to what end? Is it better to frame it as a long-term competition driven by national, regional and geopolitical goals? Is there still room for cooperation and collaboration? Is there such a thing as healthy competition and space? And if so, how do we achieve it? I don't take credit for any of that. Those are the words of my colleague, Victoria. So thank you for that. And before we start to try and answer these great questions, I'd love to hear from you, the audience. What do you think about this? So please click on the link below. I think it's down there. There's a link below the video that says poll Q&A or you can go to www.menti.com and enter the code 92149679. That's 92149679. Either way, that'll take you to a poll where you can tell us. In one word, one word only, what kinds of competition are happening in or over outer space? Now, while you're filling that out, I will briefly introduce our panel of experts. More complete bios are available on the conference website, of course. That's swfsummit.org. But in alphabetical order, here we go. First, an old friend, Ms. Artie Hallamain. She's the secretary general of the European Satellite Operators Association. Artie has been the secretary general of the SOA since 2004 and has 23 years of experience in the aerospace industry. She doesn't look a day over, but she certainly knows her stuff. Claudia Leopoldino, head of disarmament and sensitive technologies division, Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Brazil. Claudio has been a career diplomat of the Brazilian Foreign Service since 2003, during which time he served in the delegation of Brazil at the UN, amongst other postings. Next, we have Chelsea Robinson. She's chief operating officer at the Open Lunar Foundation. Chelsea has been leading Open Lunar for three years where they work to catalyze a peaceful, cooperative lunar settlement on the moon, driven by the best human values as a truly international effort. And finally, Mr. Richang Wu, associate professor at Renmin University of China. Richang received his PhD in political science from Tsinghua University, China in 2012. Prior to that, he worked for six years at the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation as a missile engineer. So, truly a panel of experts, a murderous row as they say in baseball. So let's start this conversation. Richang, to you first. Can you, you know, China is one of the major players that is always mentioned when we talk about base race, broad overview of China's perspective on great power competition and priorities for Chinese international security goals. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the invitation. It's my great honor and pleasure to be here. Actually, great power competition is American term, not the Chinese term. In China, China's term is a so-called new type of great power relations. This kind of two terms, the difference, I think the difference is their focus, they have different focus. The American term, the great power competition, of course, is about competition. Although the secretary of state, Brinkham said our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be collaborative, and adversarial when it must be. But obviously, up to now, I think the better administration is China policy. I mean, the dominant paradigm is still competition. From Chinese perspective, it seems that not much differs between Biden and Trump administration. Of course, the different style, but the reality. For China's policy, the so-called new type of great power relations is about cooperation, focus or cooperation. You know, the new type of great power relations is about non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect, and the living cooperation. So we believe that China and the United States face a lot of common problems, such as space debris, and like climate change and nuclear proliferation, and we need to work together to solve those problems. So, but, you know, as China's capability rise, you know, it's naturally, there will be some degrees of competition. We realize that, but we hope that the competition would be healthy. It should not be a zero-sum competition and both sides should try to avoid the conflict. Okay, I think that's really encouraging and a very encouraging position. So we just have to figure out how to make sure that we're all getting the same messages. Claudio, how does Brazil view this notion of competition in space, and what role can emerging space actors play in ensuring that space is accessible to all over the long term? Mm-hmm. Thank you. Thank you very much, Daniel. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, from our side, our perspective, competition in space is basically a reflection of how important space has become to all of our society. If your space infrastructure is a critical infrastructure and the functioning of our societies depends on them and not just for space-faring nations, but for all nations. And this is the reason why for Brazil and I think for any nation, space-faring or not, any conflict in space, even of a very limited scope, would have catastrophic risks for the sustainable use of Earth's object for peaceful purposes. And for Brazil, these capabilities that have been developed, or offensive capabilities that have been developed progressively, and this is not the recent trend as our keynote speaker has made clear, but this trend has intensified in recent years. They do present a clear and present risk. Unlike cyberspace, there's a little incentive in our perspective to initiate a conflict in outer space. There's little to be gained and a lot to be lost. However, the fact that space infrastructure is so critical for military applications, and this coupled with the fact that it's very difficult to ascertain intent and to verify capabilities, these two factors may create the conditions in which miscalculation and misperception might lead to an escalation into crisis in the future. Brazil's a developing country that has a wide range of space capabilities and plans to significantly increase those capabilities in the future. So it's in our utmost interest that the space remains peaceful, stable, safe and accessible for all nations. And we believe that the emerging space actors such as Brazil can and should play a key role in advancing the role of preventing conflict in space. We are ideally placed to act as honest brokers among major space powers in between those and states without space capabilities. We are not perceived as threatening. I do believe that no one believes that middle powers in space have a hidden agenda when it comes to offensive plans, but we have enough technical knowledge and skin in the game to participate. And this is trying to play precisely that role as an active participant in multiple discussions on this topic in New York, Vienna and Geneva. We have played a key role in particular in the CD. And also Brazil chaired the GGE on Paris that recently concluded, however, without a consensus report. I'll talk about this later. And but though we have chaired the 67 section of hope use where the 21 guidelines for long-term sustainability about space activity activities were formally adopted. No, thank you for that. And thank you also for bringing up the role that Brazil has played in particular in the discussions on arms control. I had the pleasure of working with Ambassador Giotta from Brazil who was the chair of the GGE on Paris. And just like you said, despite the fact that it was not successful, the work that he did and the way that Brazil was able to bridge a lot of the divides that currently exist in this issue was brilliantly handled. But switching over, Artie, to you. And again, apologies when I introduced you, you're right. It's not the European Space Satellite Operated Association, it's the EMEA. Sorry for that. But Artie, how does the space competition affect the commercial sector? What are the priorities for the security and stability of outer space, in particular for those countries that we regularly see included in this narrative about a space race and space competition? Thank you, thanks Daniel. Thanks for inviting me to be here on behalf of Isoa and our members. Yeah, operators typically thrive in a competitive environment, but now it does very much feel like there's a new space race going on. And it has an upside, but a very serious downside too. The upside is on the one hand, innovation. Whether it's on the launch side with drastic falls in cost and other innovations like reusable launchers, which are more efficient and maybe even greener, but also innovations in the space and ground segments in response to the realization that in fact, satellite is an important player in tomorrow's data-driven economy and it will address potential mass markets like moving vehicles or even mobile devices. The downside, however, is what we all know, the increase in traffic in space and all the threats that that brings with it. It's not like a car crash where you can clean it up and life can continue as normal for everybody else. In space, everyone is affected and if the Kessler effect is ever triggered, then suddenly future reliance on space services, which today underpinned the normal functioning of society in a way that I think most people have no idea about, who have come to a grinding halt. The risks are definitely not what they were a decade or two ago. Back then it was high impact, but low likelihood. And now we're looking at high impact, high dependency and increasing likelihood. I think another downside is that the sense of purpose is being lost. So for me, ultimately the value of any technological advancement has got to be the value that it brings to people on earth. And if we think about the race to put the first man on the moon, for instance, it was a genuine technological feat that was worth going for and the technological development that was necessary paved the way for space exploration that brought a greater insight into the origins of the universe, et cetera. Now we have to ask ourselves, is mankind really at the center of what's happening now? Or is it more about geopolitics? The consequences of which are not only increasing risks in space, but also affecting other communities like astronomers. Leo Broadman is certainly a worthy cause and potentially a commercial opportunity, but I'm not sure that every region really needs its own system, especially when any single business plan would typically require a global market. So from my perspective, I think it's a shame that there isn't a greater sense of cooperation and trust rather than competition. And that's why the plethora of announced Leo systems have both a commercial and a political element. And just like before, the new systems require both private and public stakeholders in order to be sustainable. So the commercial space sector finds itself in a bit of a predicament with all this going on. On the one hand, making the business case for Leo Broadman systems has and still is a troublesome one, but the ship is sailing. And if I can use a metaphor, the more operators that weigh in, the more difficult that ship is going to be to turn. So whether it's with private or public support, operators are increasingly jumping on board, not knowing the destination, but they don't want to miss out on the ride. It's a bit like the Gold Rush that was as much about the adventure as it was about potential wealth creation. And sometimes I get the feeling that the race to space is quite similar. What I can tell you is that ISSAW members take this, both the opportunities and the threats very seriously. And I believe nearly all of them participate actively in some kind of space traffic management system, whether it's through the Space Data Association or the EU SST Initiative or another one. And our members are concerned, not only about space traffic management, but also about ensuring a fair commercial playing field where competition can thrive with the assistance of government, but without skewing the market. Thank you. So there was a lot there, already I think we'll be looking at it. Thank you also for driving home at that same point that we heard yesterday and the spotlight talk about the Leo constellations and that soft power seems to really be a driver for the demand, even though there may or may not be a lot of utility for so many systems. So I think that is another very important component to keep in mind. Chelsea, moving to you to one of the more, I think one of the headlines that we often see around space competition and the space race, the moon is the moon becoming a flashpoint for competition in space. And if so, how can the international community work to support policy and partnerships that actually promote and facilitate lunar efforts? Yeah, thank you, Daniel. And thanks to everyone who's here today. It's fantastic to see everyone on this great topic. So the moon is where we will have our first interactions between all of these different stakeholders, governmental and commercial in deep space. So beyond low earth orbit. So that means it will become the immediate focus for the development of questions and answers regarding competition and collaboration outside of that Leo environment. And to your point, there are many things that we can do to make this a more collaborative and healthily competitive ecosystem. I'll just mention a couple. So first of all, there's a difference between toxic competition and noble competition. Noble competition strives for that win-win whilst avoiding monopoly. So this kind of economic policy is what we really need to be looking at for space now. We can't assume that that sort of first come, first serve basis approach would be correct. There does need to be some guidance, not too heavy handed, but some guidance. So the key word here, if anyone's interested in these ideas is noble competition. Have a look at that, see what you think. Secondly, going back to what was being discussed about the commercial industry. In industry, we do see many competitors on the moon already and they are making duplicate forms of technology. A lot of them are building subsystems which are not going to necessarily create competitive advantage for their work or for any one country or company. And so really a lot of those subsystems or components could be better off built together or built in some way that is more standardized. So in the lunar community, we could be sharing radio systems, comms protocols, location determination, any raise all boats, group of technology projects, lunar operators could be funding collective efforts on. And so this concept is collective invention and this has been widely used in solar power cars and the space industry could benefit from that approach too. And just quickly, all this investment that's going into getting us to the moon right now, we were talking before about being driven by humanity and humanity's purpose and the shift to geopolitics but it's also being driven by investment. And the private investors are investing in the predication that lunar resources will be able to be extracted, bought, sold, traded and used. And so having clear guidelines and policy from the Co-op US and also bottom up from these companies themselves as to what the right guidelines would be to build balance policy on resources will help prevent monopoly as well as prevent fail investments. And again, that will promote that healthy competition aspect. And I'd love to talk more about the US and China but just very briefly, I think science is a fantastic bridging opportunity. Science doesn't require the sharing of technical plans or trade secrets in order to share that data. And so just having more and more normalization of sharing scientific information, I think is a great way to start off that relationship when it comes to the moon. That's true. Chelsea, I understood that there was a big development on lunar resources in the recent legal subcommittee of the United of Copious. Can you give us an update a little bit on what happened? Very briefly, the legal subcommittee of Copious met for two weeks in early June and the outcome was to create a working group with a mandate to develop some understanding between the Copious membership and different stakeholders of what the right kinds of resource regimes or resource guidelines might be for the future of lunar resources. It's very much a starting point but it is a fantastic starting point. So we're very excited to see that happen. Excellent. Okay, so before we go to the next round of questions, I'd like to call up the results of our poll. What do you, the audience think of competition is in or over space? Ha-ha, commercial, that's surprising. But I think it's also quite telling and maybe quite hopeful as well. Good to see prestige there. Of course, we do know that typically when a lot of countries are engaging in some of these missions, they love to tout it as national prestige. So certainly that goes a long way. Military seems to be the next one. Okay, so that's certainly taking us into another direction that could be stabilizing or destabilizing for the long-term sustainability of outer space. But certainly we'll see. There's some really fascinating terms in there and I think we'll probably have some additional time to explore that later on. But I do just want to highlight commercial is very surprising. Okay, now I've been doing a lot of the questioning here but I still have a few more questions and then we'll soon get to the audience. Audience, please click on the link below down there and go to menti.com. Remember, the code is 92149679 so that you can ask questions. Okay, so next set of questions real quick for me. Claudio, back to you, sir. Multilateral discussions on space security are expanding to include the establishing of norms of behavior and responsible uses of outer space. Of course, we've got the UN resolution 7536 that the UK put forward to address challenges in outer space through norms and principles. How do these norms and meet governance questions raised by the increased competition in space? Now, what can these norms do to help us address these competitive issues? In fact, we've always been, since time immemorial, supporting the commencement of negotiations of a legally binding instrument that would complement and expand the obligations established by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. But however, for many decades now, at least since the 1980s, these discussions have been basically leading nowhere. Modalities for negotiation of a legally binding commitment on Paris have repeatedly stalled be it in the Conference on Disarmament, the CD, or in the wider framework of the UN. As I said before, the best shot we had in recent memory has been the GGE that was established by the Group of Governmental Experts, sorry for the acronyms that has been established by the UN General Assembly. And that concluded in 2019. And we had the honor to share, through Ambassador Papirot that we have already mentioned, very skilled and experienced diplomats. And this GGE was tasked with coming up with the basic elements that should guide negotiations of a new treaty on the matter. We had extremely productive discussions in this GGE, which were convinced into a very substantive and balanced draft reports. But at the last minutes, it became apparent that the consensus could not be reached on the adoption of this text. And we believe that this result was not due to any shortcomings of the draft report itself. It has been generally recognized as a very, very coherent and sound basis for future discussions by basically everyone. But this was due in our perception to the general political environment in which the group was operating, which was married by a lack of confidence in mutual, basic mutual trust among space sectors. At the CD, likewise, discussions on Paris on the prevention of arms race and outer space have been paralyzed since 2018. It's against this background that Brazil, despite always have supported a legally binding treaty on the prevention of arms race and outer space, we have decided to support a different approach. Given the impossibility of adopting a mandate for negotiations, we believe that the international community cannot afford to wait for the ideal political conditions to materialize. Things are progressing very fast and we basically might lose the train of history if we decide to do so. But this is why Brazil has opted for supporting a gradual development of norms, rules and principles based on political commitments, which could be described as a bottom-up approach. And we decided to support the resolution that you mentioned, 7536, that was tabled by the UK last year. We do expect that these discussions will contribute to the adoption in the short to medium term of political commitments of a coherent body of political commitments that will build upon the existing transparency and confidence-building measures that have been adopted in the context of the UN. And that these commitments, hopefully, will pay the way for formal law-making efforts in the future. That's a really interesting shift that we've been seeing that you've just described also. For years, we heard that legally binding instruments were a non-starter, but more and more we're hearing this position that we'll let's start with some political agreements first and then see if we can't build to something more sustainable. I also recommend that everyone go and check out the submissions to UN 7536. I believe there were like 18 states that submitted along with some academic institutions. If you just kind of want to get a sense of where a number of countries are thinking in these issues. Arty, back to you. And this is always a difficult blend of topics, but from the commercial perspective, what is more destabilizing? The proliferation of counter space capabilities or a lack of, say, rules of the road for space actors and why? Sure. So proliferation of weapons in spaces by its very nature destabilizing, obviously. But that's a different question to what the biggest threat is to space sustainability. And I think that the real threat to space sustainability is the lack of full space environment impact assessments of systems before they're deployed. It feels a lot like climate change. We can see the threat, we understand the threat from a theoretical perspective, but we don't actually do anything about it until it's too late. And I think we should not fool ourselves that technology like debris removal technology is gonna solve the problem because technology takes time to develop. And just like carbon capture, debris removal technology is always gonna be five or more years away from being done at scale. And in the meantime, thousands of more satellites will have been launched to make the situation even worse. So indeed, without rules of the road in place, these satellites themselves, I mean, almost become the weapons to fear the most, if you will. We need rules to be able to do, but they require international consensus and fixed time. And some of the key voices who need to agree have got obvious industrial interests to protect. I'm sure we all read about how the G7 committed to the safe and sustainable use of space. And it's all well and good that this gets onto the G7's agenda, but they cannot deny the race fully or broadband, the geopolitical significance of which appears far more important than safe space. This isn't a game, it's real life. And as I said before, society at large really relies on space services in a way that most people and I hope this isn't too politically incorrect, but I'm beginning to think that even includes world leaders just don't realize, because nothing has gone dramatically wrong yet. But from the private operators perspective, rules of the road are not just about physical space, they're also about preventing interference between non-GSO and GSO systems. And this is something that our members really care about. So the fact that some rules that NGOs need to comply with and date back to the days of Teledesik, Celestri, Skybridge, and at that time, Teledesik's 840 satellite proposal was already an unimaginable number of satellites. I'm sure some of the people watching remember that. So those rules were not designed to protect today's GSO satellite systems and they're incomplete as far as they do go. And it's unclear if and how today's NGSO systems can actually comply with those rules. So we have a situation now where regulators are looking to the ITU for guidance, but the ITU doesn't know how to move it forward either. But meanwhile, the satellites keep launching based on rules that are blatantly out of date and need to be revised to reflect the realities of today's networks and systems. Yeah, I think it sends a very strong message that industry itself is asking to be, to get more clear guidance and regulations. But of course, this is gonna be important for providing legal certainty, safety, and of course, hopefully, the long-term sustainability of all these activities we've been at from. Richian, coming back to you, sir, and coming back to China, what are China's views on crisis escalation and deterrence? This is one of the big topics that we consistently talk about when referring to counter-space capabilities, but does China see arms control in multilateral negotiations as a way to shore up its own national security? Or perhaps, does it see it more as an effort to constrain China? Yeah, I would like to talk about nuclear deterrence, because my focus, my work focuses on nuclear stuff. And nuclear table plays a very important role in China's nuclear deterrence doctrine. So, as Chairman Mao said, nuclear weapons are paper tigers. So, in China, we believe physical use of nuclear weapons is unlikely. So, modularistic threat is nuclear blackmail. So, based on that philosophy, so in China, Chinese scholars generally speaking are less concerned with nuclear escalation than American scholars, because these are simple, because nuclear weapons are paper tigers, physical use is unlikely. So, I'm not saying we are not concerned, we are less concerned. So, regarding China's attitude towards arms control, I think definitely China sees arms control and multilateral negotiations as a way to shore up its national security. But I'm not saying that China is ready to do arms control and multilateral negotiations in space or in nuclear domain. I want to say that China has some experience in multilateral arms control negotiations such as CDBT, but we don't have such experience as US Russia, bilateral nuclear arms control. So, currently, both China military and the government realize that sooner or later, we are going to engage in some kind of arms control dialogue or answer, it goes in there. But so, we are trying to learn how to do that. And for scholars like me, we are trying to educate our government and the military to learn how to do that. Interesting, that one doesn't ordinarily think of something like that as just the sort of the historical experience with something like multilateralism. But I hope that that is something that continues to develop and that we see more of. Chelsea, back to you and the moon. The United States has proposed the Artemis Accords to establish shared principles to shape the governance of civil exploration and use of space, which seems particularly relevant to lunar activities. Now, Russia and China have proposed their own international lunar research station and have invited others to participate in that. So, we seem to have competing efforts here. How do these two efforts relate to each other? Are they complementary? Are they competitive? Or is it something in between? Yeah, thanks, yeah. So, this goes back to what you were saying about legally binding instruments being created after political instruments. And so, for anyone new to the Artemis Accords, this is a non-binding political instrument between the United States and any countries that are working with them on their Artemis program to go to the moon. So, it adds detail to some of the gray areas of the outer space treaty and sort of pushes that work forward. The Russian-China MOU that you're referring to, this was a similar agreement, but towards a program of work to create a research station. So, similar, China and Russia have actually both said that they're not opposed to the US coming and participating in that project and finding a way to be part of that agreement as well. So, as a counter example, when the US approached Russia to sign the Artemis Accords, Russia refused. And just as a, you know, because that's not my world, but I could speak drawing from the voices of those who are closer to that. Dr. Walensky, who some will know previously at Roscosmos explained recently at a moon dialogue that this was actually because Russia felt a lack of respect from the United States in the way that they approached Russia. And then from the Chinese angle, Dr. Jin Wansu from Wuhan University and also a Chinese copious delegate said that the China and Russia, China-US relationship would require a lot more trust to have been developed before some practical steps were taken to work together. So, I think we all know that trust is a very slow process. And of course, it's even harder when damaging statements have been made, nation-level, nation-state-level laws and political comments have been made that will generate mistrust and animosity. So, we as a community here today, all of the panelists, everyone in the room with us, anyone watching this video afterwards, it's our responsibility to foster a story of cooperation. So, I mean, from our standpoint, let's stop writing news about tension. Let's stop writing news about how bad this is gonna go. Let's start writing news about every indication of bridge building and every little opportunity that we see for the development of mutual respect. Because the long story short is that the technology folks, scientists, engineers, those who are hands-on in the labs in all of these nations want to work together and they want to just get on with it. And the opportunity is to foster that same sense of purpose within our political community. So, yeah, thanks. You know, and once again, we find that as technologically advanced as we think lunar exploration is going to be deep down, like a lot of the issues that we're dealing with are just very simple human issues, very basic things about hurt feelings sometimes and just lack of respect and mistrust. So we, I think we can also say that this, if there is such a thing as a space race, if there is competition, it's really just reflective of how we see one another down here on Earth. Very difficult to dissociate the two. Okay, so let's open it up to the audience. We've got some great questions here and I'm going to pick out a couple. We won't be able to get to all of them, I'm sure. But let's start here. And I might, excuse me if I rephrase some of these a little bit, but over the last 40 years, we've certainly seen that there has been polarization among UN member states and amongst the international community in terms of how we should be approaching space regulations. There are new countries that are becoming space actors. So how can we prevent some of these countries from just joining one or the other side? Is there a way that we can try to break down some of these divisions and these gaps in terms of how we see space cooperation? Claudia, I think that one might go to you first. I do believe that this is an urgent matter. I think that we should not see space as a divided camp. And I think that all middle powers, so to speak, middle space powers, emerging space powers have a key role to play in this regard. And I think that the private sector as well, nurturing and fostering a more cooperative stance. And I think that the points made by RT and by Chelsea speak volumes about that. It's not just a responsibility of states. Private sector NGOs have a key role to play in shaping this narrative as well. And I think that there's good respect for that. Rulemaking will be a crucial aspect of it because without the basic rules for the world, it will be very difficult to ensure that there's a framework for cooperation. But I think that I'm optimistic. I was a little skeptical in the beginning of this process that we've seen in the first committee of the UNGA last year. But the responses that we've received to the ones you mentioned, to the request for national positions on responsible state behavior, at least into my mind, point a promising way for this process in the future. Richard, let me also put that to you as well. We've seen, for example, there are efforts by China to use soft power to try and pull greater or more partners around the world. And they're certainly doing this in a number of industries and space is one of them. Do you see that there's a bit of a competition right now for new space actors or for up-and-coming countries to try and pick sides? Or is there a different dynamic going on? Hopefully not. I would frame China's behavior as a result of Americans' refusal to cooperate with China. Actually, through my dialogue with Chinese, Swiss persons, Swiss people, they are all eager to cooperate with other countries and especially in the United States. But the United States, because of the domestic law and so China cannot cooperate with the United States. So that's why China said, okay, we have to do everything by ourselves. And while we are doing that, we are open for everybody. So I hope China's, this kind of cooperation could encourage general cooperation for all countries rather than to build a divided domain. I hope hopefully with the former. No, yeah, and hopefully the United States and China will find some area that they can cooperate on and just start making small steps towards building some trust. Already, Claudia already kind of touched on this, but there's a question here on it as well about the commercial sector. What can the commercial sector contribute to these dialogues around competition, particularly on security side of things? Certainly the UN has been asking for the input from the commercial sector. How can the industry join these conversations, especially at the multilateral level? First of all, I think they need to be invited to participate in them. There's always this perception that industry is with their vested interests, their commercial interests, they don't really care about the greater good. That's not true, obviously, because we are the ones, the operators are the ones who have made the largely private investments and often huge private investments into the assets in space. So they are very serious about this and they are very genuine in their desire to protect those assets. And therefore the contributions that they will bring to this dialogue are extremely valuable. They're the ones with the firsthand experience of how to manage assets in space, how to exchange data, how to do that in a confidential and secure way. So you find even competing operators are working very, very closely together because they do succeed in keeping corporate interests at the door when it comes to talking about something which is essentially the greater good. You know, in this dialogue, you make me think of the World Radio Conference which is the ITU event where spectrum is decided, who can use which spectrum and so on. Spectrum is often referred to as a common, a global common, and we do the same about space. But yet in the spectrum field, we can still manage to have a global consensus building process which comes up with a fixed outcome every four years and which updates a treaty every four years. If space is a global common, why can't we do that in space as well? And the private sector would be central and key to that. Chelsea, same question to you. What can industry provide to the multilateral discussion on lunar resources and in situ space resource utilization? Yeah, I mean, any operator community is going to know their work better than any regulator for the most part. And so I think what would just be so fantastic to see more of is companies dedicating the time and energy to actually formulating their opinions on some of these issues. For some of these companies in the lunar community, I do understand that it is very pressing and challenging to dedicate time to policy development thought processes in addition to getting to the moon, obviously that's a hard enough challenge. But I do think that if there was a little bit more fostering and some proactive position development, then that would then allow them to come to the table with a bit more power and strength of that narrative that they wanna see put forward. We do have some very prominent voices in the investment community and in the private community of the lunar transit groups that exist. But a lot of times it's an oversimplified set of narratives that we're hearing rather than in the nuance. Artie's point about the commons that you're referring to in regards to the ITU, that same type of leadership could be coming also from some of these lunar actors in concert as well. I think one of the challenges is that there is quite a big difference between some of these larger transport companies like the SpaceXers and the Blue Origins and some of the slightly smaller transport companies in the commercial lunar payloads groups such as Astrobotik and Intuitive Machines and all those good teams in the ice space and whatnot. And because of the difference in their sizes of organizations, they also just operate very differently. But what would also be great to see is a little bit more of an equal playing field approach to some of those conversations between them. It'd be great to see more transparency and more sort of outreach from one company to another about opportunities to formulate opinions together. Yeah, so those are just a couple of examples. Yeah, here's another great question from Artie and Claudio. Maybe you can help with this one. What, you know, at the United Nations where we're often asking like, okay, how do we get industry involved? You know, industry is doing, they're doing so many activities in space. We clearly need their input. But what input do we need? What does the United Nations need to hear from industry? Well, I believe that there's more opportunity to do so when it comes to copious, which deals with the peaceful applications of outer space. And there is a more, it's more receptive to that kind of input. The CG, the conference on the arms control side, there's been little to non-input in that respect. The CG is not the particularly suitable body for that kind of interaction. But as I said, I think that he, it's one asks, you know, what possible shape that could have in the CD is almost too mind boggling to consider. But in this new process that we're witnessing, the one that was initiated by last year's resolution proposed by the UK, I think that all options are on the table. It's still very unclear what shape those discussions could take, but at least from our perspective, the ideal setting for this would be an open-ended working group along the lines of similar initiatives that have been undertaken in the past by the General Assembly, open to the participation of all member states, because this is an issue that does not concern only space-faring nations, that concerns the entirety of the UN membership. And with appropriate mechanisms to ensure that private sector and NGOs and academia can meaningfully contribute. I think that a model for this can be sought, not necessarily the be-all and end-all, but at least a baseline for how to move forward in this respect that would be the open-ended working group that has just been concluded on cyberspace, on cyber securities, in which there was a mandate for these actors to be heard and to present their views. It was not optimal in our perspective, but at least there was an opening for that to happen. And it has been extremely important in that respect. I think that the private sector, academia, and industry play a similar role in the case of outer space. They are key actors in the beginning of the space race as states were basically alpha and an omega, but now it's increasingly not the case anymore. So any negotiating or discussion forum that emanates from this new process will have to take this reality into account. You heard it here first, folks. We're looking for an open-ended working group. And I think that would be a very interesting next step. In particular, because one of the things that at the United Nations that we were starting to hear a lot from member states was that GGEs seem very closed off and the consensus makes it very difficult. So maybe an open-ended working group provides more transparency and makes it easier for other states who are skeptical about the process to feel a sense of ownership. Richang, there's a very interesting question here that I would like to throw to you. Somebody is discussing the history of space exploration and the differences between the US narrative and the Russian narrative. Likewise, I'm sure there's a very different narrative from the Chinese perspective. So we often hear these very conflicting stories about who's the good guy, who's the bad guy, who are the good actors in space, who are the ones that are creating threats. How do we bring these narratives and bring them together and actually try to come up with a, how do we reconcile these different stories so that we can get something that is closer to a shared story? That's a good question. I'll try to answer. It's a natural that people prefer to believe that I'm good guys and other countries are bad guys and people should know I'm good guys. If you don't know I'm good guys, you are doing something bad, something like that. You can see these kind of narratives in almost all the domains. So for Swiss domain, when we look at America's policy that when America justify its development of space weapons or building other space force, as they say, they usually say that because of the Russian and the Chinese doing something bad. So we need to do to defend ourselves. Actually, if you look at, if you put us from China's perspective, actually America is doing a lot and much better and much more work. I think the academia should try to put them together and everybody has their own country and has their own buyers. So all we can do is that try to put, maybe you can do an effort that put different scholars from different countries and they could bring different perspectives. So maybe we disagree with each other but together we could build a different perspective. More neutral maybe. I'd like to open that question to the rest of you as well. Do any of you all have thoughts on how we might try to change this competitive narrative to stop talking about like, oh well someone's trying to dominate space or someone's trying to gain ground? Is there a way that we can open up this language to more cooperative and less confrontational language? I have a couple of comments on that really briefly. I just wanna repeat and endorse what you said, Richang, about utilizing scholar relationships as a bridge building function. I think that's a fantastic point and I agree with it completely. I also think what Claudio has been saying about middle powers is really important as well. And some of those smaller nation states in regards to the countries that are just finding their feet within space. So the New Zealand's and some of the amazing new missions we're seeing out of the United Arab Emirates, some of the policy making leadership from Luxembourg, these smaller countries could offer just such an interesting platform for a different kind of sort of power as we develop new forums for sort of those collaborative discussions to take place. So I'd really encourage anyone involved in those countries to just really utilize the strength of whether it be middle powers, emerging state powers, emerging space powers, et cetera, to just really lean into that as a convening force. And then additionally, just to, oh, we've, okay, he's gone. And then I think also to come together around the idea that power in politics doesn't look the same as it used to. And so it's not a zero sum game. And I think that's been said before today as well. But just to say that, look, it's not about whose policy is the best. It's not about whose accords are the ones that should rule them all. It's not about, you know, whose interpretation of the OST is the right one. It's really about this more distributed development of not even necessarily consensus, but some degree of alignment, some degree of just saying, let's come together and figure out where do we agree, where do we disagree, develop some initial nuggets of a starting point for each of these topics. Look, in the Open Luna Foundation, we're really interested in emphasizing the fact that on earth, we do not have monolithic agreements and consensus on everything. And we also don't need to do that in space in every case. And so we don't always have to drag it into the arena of consensus versus conflict. Those are not the only two versions of the world, consensus versus conflict. There are so many different ways to come together in sort of an interesting combined set of regimes that complement each other and reinforce each other. And we need to get creative in that regard and stop seeing, you know, the moon in particular is this monolithic rock in the sky, but actually really complex system. So that's my wrap up. Thanks for having me. That was perfect. And actually, I think that leads us into, you know, a great question for final thoughts as we are running out of time here pretty soon. Is there such a thing as healthy competition in space? And if so, how do we achieve it? You said before, Chelsea, of course, that there is this idea of noble competition. Can we do this in space? Is there enough space for everyone? I will start with you. Oh, yeah. Or Chelsea, yes, please, go ahead. I was just going to say I highly encourage folks to learn about anti-monopoly law and the fact that that has been implemented only within nation-state boundaries. So we don't actually have international demonopolisation techniques, but I think that's going to be a critical and very interesting thing that we're going to have to embark upon as our globalization becomes as significant and interconnected as it is. We're going to need new tools for that. So I would definitely recommend checking out noble competition concepts, but also thinking about in the future how we're going to demonopolis massive international companies without the jurisdiction powers that we might have right now. Well, I do agree, and I think that the reference to competition, I don't think it's necessarily the best one. I think we have spaces of finite resource in all respects, but we've been, and of course, this is a potent driver for competition, but at the same time, there's infinite opportunities for cooperation and for a rational use of those finite resources. We have a very good and sound basis for this, legal-wise, the Outer Space Treaty. There has been a paralysis on the development of this legal framework in the past few decades, but there's reason for hope. The adoption of the long-term sustainability guidelines and sustainability guidelines by Copey was in 2019 is a very important step forward, but I do think that a similar breakthrough must happen also on the security, the international security side of it. And even though the conditions are still a little tricky, I think that the recent examples of, I like to use it as a benchmark because the situation is somewhat similar given that the subject matter is not cyberspace. Situation 2018 was extremely difficult as well. We had two different bodies established by the UNGA with competing mandates. And however, despite all those challenging circumstances, both bodies, the GG and the OIG on cyberspace have been able to adopt consensus reports earlier this year. And I do believe that the same can happen in the Outer Space realm if there is enough goodwill and commitment by all state actors, space actors, be they major space fair nations, middle space powers and non-space fair nations which have a lot to gain or lose from these discussions. Agreed. Artie, what do you think? Yeah, I think that healthy commercial competition in space requires a level playing field. And it will become a chess game where policymakers aren't just enablers. They're actually trying to play as well. And that means that suddenly the playing field may not be level anymore and the regulatory framework might then get skewed. So it shouldn't be a gold rush land grab, especially when the stakes are so high in terms of both investments and risks. And as I said, the value of the technology advancement has got to be in the value it brings to people on earth. The user's got to be at the center of the equation. And right now we have Starlink. We're receiving US government support. We have Amazon getting involved for cloud services, China planning a system for its Belt and Road initiative. The EU pushing the system because the US and China have got one and they can't be left behind. And then Russia, obviously with its Vera program, who's going to be next? India? These are all unsustainable land grabs where the user is completely incidental to the discussion. So it's nice talk about safe space amongst the top guns, but no meaningful and open discussion about the cumulative consequences of these initiatives and whether there isn't a better way of achieving what the world really needs. And I think that would be a healthy discussion to have. Absolutely. Thank you. Richard, sir, we give you the last word. Thank you. Definitely. Yes, we can have a healthy competition in space. A lot at first, we don't forget cooperation. And second, we have good rules of law. That's all. Perfect. What a closing. Short and sweet. Well, thank you everyone. I want to thank my panelists. This was a fascinating conversation. I've got lots of notes to take away and I'm sure we'll be discussing this. If anybody, if any of your friends missed this panel, don't forget to tell them that the entire event that's been recorded and will be available soon. I know they're going to want to listen to this one. Finally, I just want to, I'm delighted to introduce our first keynote address for the day, Tori Bruno, CEO of United Launch Alliance in a conversation with the Atlantic's Marina Karen. Folks, there aren't going to be any questions for this interview. We're going to let Marina do that. But again, thank you very much everyone for joining us. We're delighted to have been able to have this conversation. And I hand it back to our producers. Take it away. Hello and thank you for joining us today for the third annual Summit for Space Sustainability hosted by the Secure World Foundation. I am Marina Coran. I am a staff writer at the Atlantic where I cover all things space. And I'm glad to be here today at the summit in conversation with Tori Bruno, the president and CEO of United Launch Alliance. Hi, Tori, how are you? Hi, Marina, I'm doing great. Where are you beaming in from today? Today I'm coming to you from outside Denver, Colorado. Okay, all right. How's the weather there? It's actually pretty hot here right now. Yeah, same here in DC. Well, thanks so much for joining. So the other day I saw that you virtually attended a house hearing on the future of the FAA and well, the FAA and the future of spaceflight. And in your written testimony, you described Earth orbit as a natural resource, which is true, but at the same time it's very much an economic space. And I'm wondering how you square those two realities as someone who's in the business of launching things into that arena. Oh, absolutely, what a great question. So, it is a natural resource because it's in a way a global commons that we all use to observe the Earth and understand climate and environment better, but we also do business there. We have substantial economic activity in Earth orbit somewhere in the neighborhood of three to $400 billion a year of business is done in space both in communications and in national security and in science and of course, climate. So the trick is to balance those in a way that does not harm that natural resource, doesn't make it an environment where we can't all utilize it to do peaceful things in space, while at the same time doing good things for science and for the planet. Right, yeah. Also at this congressional hearing the other day, there was discussion of the FAA recently streamlining its launch and reentry regulations and you said that launch providers who don't comply with new rules should face impactful consequences. Can you elaborate on that? What kind of actions do you see as requiring more stringent enforcement and what kinds of consequences do you think that launch providers should face? Oh, absolutely. And really the context for that is this wonderful environment we're in where there are more providers and new things being done in space and exciting missions like what we referred to in that hearing is the mega constellations that will be taking the internet to space and bringing new functionality. So there's all this wonderful, wonderful things that are happening while at the same time it's much more open commercially. So new providers, original, sort of traditional providers in what we need to be mindful of are really two things. Public safety, the most important thing and preserving that natural resource which primarily comes in the flavor of being responsible around orbital debris. So in terms of the public safety matters the FAA is charged in the commercial arena with making sure the general public is not harmed or impacted primarily by rocket launches, by going to space. And it's important to recognize that a rocket is an incredibly complex machine and it has enormous destructive potential. We make it look easy, but it really isn't easy and it's not an airplane. Even a big jumbo jet sitting on the runway that might have 100,000 gallons of fuel in it could be a pretty scary thing if it landed or crashed in the wrong place. A rocket has a million pounds of fuel in it and it is much more energetic. And while an airplane never really flies much more than 500 miles per hour, a rocket will break the sound barrier in about two minutes flat. So the regulations that FAA applies and the licensing procedure that it applies to commercial space launch providers are really all about safety and they have to be taking seriously. And so if a new provider or a traditional provider violates their license or does something that is contrary to these safety regulations there should be a deterrent set of penalties that will cause them to think twice and not do it even if they're not necessarily, bought into the whole process of obeying the regulations and being careful with public safety. And what kind of penalties could those be? Well, the lot today allows the FAA to end or prohibit a launch and they also allow them to apply fines of $100,000. I can tell you that on a major space vehicle launch a delay of a day or two can cost a million, $2 million. So $100,000 fine in comparison to that isn't really a deterrent and the interruption of launches is but the financial penalties are really a little bit out of balance with how expensive it is to actually stand up the launch crew and all of the assets that are involved. So I would advocate for a set of penalties that are effectively deterring the behavior of operators who would not otherwise be responsible. And I also wanna say that you shouldn't have to do that but you do in some cases I think it will potentially be necessary as this environment expands. Yeah. I'd like to talk a little bit about the proper and safe disposal of rocket stages because obviously these pieces of hardware can seriously contribute to space debris. What do you think that ULA should be doing differently or better in this realm? Oh, what a great question. Well, I wanna say first that there are government guidelines on how to mitigate orbital debris and for commercial providers these are largely voluntary. We take them very, very seriously no matter what the launch is. And in terms of upper stages there's really three things that go on. The first is deorbiting the stage. Whenever it is possible and it is possible when you go to a lower energy orbit like Leo we will deorbit our stage and that needs to be done in a controlled reentry fashion. For two reasons. One is when you deorbit in an uncontrolled way you could of course endanger people or property. But also when you're doing an uncontrolled deorbit the path that you follow is very variable. It's very indetermined and the area that you affect is vast. And so you're even whether or not you were eventually to land on land and perhaps endanger someone you're still affecting the national airspace and you're causing people a lot of concern. So it needs to be a deorbit whenever it's a low energy orbit and it needs to be in a controlled fashion. We always deorbit into the remote deep ocean of the South Pacific. In fact, there's a specific place that we all go to when we do that called the point of Nemo or the point of oceanic inaccessibility. Very remote, no traffic. And in fact, on any given day the closest humans to that location are actually in the International Space Station. That's how remote it is. So that's the first thing you do and we always do that. The second thing is, well, what if it's not possible? What if you've flown to a higher energy orbit and you can't get back to the earth such as geosynchronous orbit? Well, there is a designated graveyard orbit and in both circumstances whether you're going to the graveyard or you're deorbiting you have to save enough propellant so that when your mission is done and you've dropped off your spacecraft which by the way is smaller because you did that you have enough residual propellant to then raise yourself in this case to the graveyard orbit and which is out of the way of the traffic that is typically out there in the geosynchronous belt. And then the last thing is something we pioneered on our Delta II rocket which we call passivation. And what that means is when you're all done and you're on that final flight path into the deep South Pacific where you've locked yourself into this higher energy graveyard orbit that you render the stage inert. You blow down all the propellants, you vent them, you blow down all any stored gases any high pressure bottles of gases you turn on circuits and you run all the batteries down so that there is no energy residual on the stage that could later result in a stage failure or a stage explosion. Before we began that practice that was actually a common occurrence in the early decades of space travel. And so that renders your stage inert so it is stable either on its way down to the ocean or there in the graveyard orbit. So that's what we do today. We're gonna continue to do that but the most exciting thing about the future is you asked me, well, what are you gonna do that's different? Well, our new upper stage, the Centaur 5 that will go on our Vulcan robot which is the rocket rather which is over my left shoulder right now will actually be a reusable stage in space so that its life is even further extended and you need fewer of them and they're actually off continuing to do work instead of being disposed of either in the ocean or in space. So what was going through your mind last month when China's Long March 5B rocket was making its reentry and I think everyone not just in the space community was watching that and I asked that because that rocket nearly matches the capabilities of the Delta IV heavy. Well, I'm gonna be direct and I'm going to say that a responsible launch provider does not deliberately perform an uncontrolled reentry of a stage. I mean, there's just no two ways to talk about this. That particular rocket is designed to perform uncontrolled reentries and that stage is very large. I mean, that's essentially a 10 or 12 story tall metallic structure that as you saw in the news will make it all the way down to the surface of the earth. You saw the wide swath of flight path that it took that was uncertain where it would be within that giant funnel. Air traffic was diverted. People were concerned about whether or not it would come down on land and potentially in an inhabited area. That was a terribly irresponsible thing to do. And so as we talk about the future of space traffic control, we're going to need to have international agreements on what the appropriate standards of behavior are and how we will all abide by them. Yeah. Yeah, and speaking of those international agreements, I mean, the international space community hasn't agreed on truly expansive principles since the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, as you know, and a significant portion of space activity relies on basically everyone playing nice. So I'm curious for you, what is the space community doing well right now and what is it doing poorly? What is it doing well in terms of sustainability and safety? Yes, and basically best practices, industry norms, the kinds of things that there are not necessarily very strict regulations for. Oh, yes, very good. Most players internationally do the sort of types of things I talked about that we do. They de-orbit stages when that's possible. They take them to the internationally recognized, designated graveyard orbit. Before several years back, I'll say that success in getting to that graveyard orbit was actually pretty limited in the commercial industry, at least a third of spacecraft that attempted that were unsuccessful. But today, even the international community and especially Europe has a very high success rate, better than 90% of taking the spacecraft short of its actual life being over as a result of running out of fuel and reserving that fuel, essentially shortening the life, shortening the revenues to reliably get to that graveyard orbit. We also cooperate on where all of that is, where the designated graveyard orbit resides. We cooperate on tracking of objects in space, so all of that is being done well. And by and large, most of the space-faring countries work very hard to be responsible. So that's the goodness. You also asked me, what can we do better? Well, we need to include China and newer players who are putting now large amount or large quantities of spacecraft into orbit that in previous years, they had not been to that degree in all of these agreements because it's a global commons. Your spacecraft does not only stay over your country. It orbits the entire earth and everything that we do affects one another. And we need to have more comprehensive agreements on standards of self-safe behavior because it's just like being on the highway. When you're out on the road driving around, if you stop to think about how dangerous this would be if we all didn't stay in our lanes and we all didn't agree on the rules of the road and how we'll all behave, well, it's even worse in space. The velocities are unimaginably fast. And if you get an offender bender, you don't both pull over to the side of the road and stop, you stay on the highway for months, for years, for the outer orbits, even for thousands of years. So these standards need to be more defined, more comprehensive, and we all have to agree. Yeah, and that's a great analogy, but I think you've described what driving is like in New Jersey, where I'm from. Sounds just like that. And so speaking of China, NASA administrator Bill Nelson just congratulated China on its launch of crew to its space station. Do you think the United States should become more involved with them in the way that they haven't been before, obviously because of policy rules in place, especially as China becomes, and other countries and private companies become way more active in Earth orbit than ever before. What should the country be doing, our country? Yeah, absolutely. Space has been traditionally a place where even countries that were competing with one another, such as the United States and the Soviet Union, could go and have peaceful cooperation with one another and build understanding and build trust. So absolutely, and I also congratulate China on a tremendous accomplishment in what is planned to be a very long duration mission for their astronauts. That is absolutely wonderful, and I join the administrator in hoping for future, you know, peaceful cooperation in space. Absolutely. So ULA is preparing for an Atlas V launch soon that will put a satellite into orbit for the space force. Recently, you decided to delay that launch because of some technical concerns. So I'm wondering if you can give an update on the investigation into the issue and when you might expect to fly. Yeah, absolutely. So you are referring to an observation we had on our upper stage engine, the RL-10. And, you know, you would want to view this sort of in the context of our record. You know, we are now at 144 launches, 100% mission success. We specialize in the most difficult, complex, most critical missions, and we have a whole mission success culture that's built around that. So when we look at the Sibir's Geo5 mission where you saw that observation, the engine performed beautifully. We hit an absolute bullseye in the insertion of that satellite, but we also saw something we didn't understand and didn't expect to happen. This was the first flight of an extension onto the nozzle of the RL-10. And so the job of that nozzle is to expand the gases coming out of the engine's combustion chamber all the way down as close to the outside conditions as possible, which in this case is vacuum. But by having a longer extension, we get more expansion, we get just a little bit more performance out of what is already an eye-wateringly high performing engine. But that extension that we bolted on, it was made out of carbon, was ringing. And you can see it in the live feed video if you watch it. You will see this sort of ball shape happening that's large enough in amplitude to be visible to the eye. It occurred at about 23 Hertz. And on the back end of a rocket, there is so much energy happening that anything in that frequency range of something like that that can oscillate will be stimulated and it will oscillate as we saw. So what we're doing right now is really taking the time to fully understand that. Is this something that is harmless and we can live with? Is it something that we want to eliminate by stiffening that extension of the nozzle? And do we know what frequency to stiffen it to? Are we sure we fully understand everything that's happening on the back end of the rocket? That's what we're doing. We're getting a very good progress on our analysis. We think we're on a pretty good path to understanding this and putting together a relatively straightforward fix. We don't need that nozzle extension for several more flights. It's a new thing for the types of missions we normally fly. So we will find exactly the right place to insert that corrective action. And in the meantime, we'll be flying the older configuration of RL10. Do you have a timeline in mind for when you'd like that correction to be in place and be preparing for launch? Well, we do and I'm not gonna give you a specific mission because it's not firmed up yet. So I don't actually know which mission we'll put it on. But our forecast or our projection is it'll be several missions down. So it may or may not happen this year. In fact, it may likely happen next year when we actually need it and we'll have been fully satisfied that we understand it. And if we've decided to make the modification I talked about whether it'll be stiffer or some other corrective action. But it'll be several missions down before we do whatever it is that we do. Got it, thanks for that update. I wanna also go back to your congressional testimony from the other day. The rapid, you said that the rapid increase in the number of satellites in Earth orbit over the years could, among other complications, render the affected orbits unusable for decades. And this possibility comes up a lot in my own conversations with orbital debris experts. And I'm wondering if this in your opinion is a short-term future or a long-term future. Do you think that in your lifetime at the pace that we are going there will be certain orbits that actually become unusable? Well, my hope is that that doesn't happen. However, in terms of context and timing, it's important I think to appreciate what's happened. We've been talking about orbital debris and needing to manage it and needing to be responsible and potentially needing to remove debris and people even talk about sort of wild scenarios like the Kessler syndrome where you have a cascade of debris. And no one has really done a lot about that issue because it's always been tomorrow's problem. It's always been several years in the future. That's changed. We have our first mega constellation in low Earth orbit now. And the physical density of that shell of spacecraft is much higher than anything we have ever experienced in the past. And today we now have to be concerned with space traffic management and understanding the implications of access to orbit through a shell like that and being very proactive about orbital debris management mitigation. We absolutely are gonna benefit from this new technology, these mega constellations that will take the internet and other services to space. We want to have that. It is a manageable problem, but it is no longer tomorrow's problem. It is here this minute today as you and I are speaking. And can it be managed at this moment? What do you think that this space community should be doing differently and industry and especially the FAA in terms of regulating mega constellations? Yeah, I absolutely believe it can be managed. There's a handful of things that need to be done. The first thing we need to do is to manage the density of the shells. We can handle what we have now, but now that we know that there's a need for large numbers of spacecraft in a relatively small volume, we're gonna have to decide what is acceptable and set standards and manage to that and potentially regulate that or provide guidance for that out of FAA. So that's the first thing. The second thing is we need precision nearly real time tracking so that that density is something that doesn't affect our access to space. So today, when you launch to space, for example, or when you decide later that you will drop a satellite off to occupy a specific orbit, the Space Force does modeling an analysis of the likelihood of having a collision in space. And they track objects using a radar system that can see anything that's about 10 centimeters or four inches or larger. And they track all of those objects as continuously as possible. And then you don't exactly know where each object is at any instant time. There's a certain amount of inaccuracy to that tracking. And so you add that additional volume around the object is some volume you need to avoid. So that you're certain you won't have a collision. And then we map all of that. When we want to go to space one day, one afternoon we plot trajectories and then we run to the Space Force who then does modeling and says, okay, that's great. You're not going to hit anything or it's not great. Your window is fine, but you need to avoid with small portion of time here and this small portion over there. Given the number of objects we're talking about, the precision needs to shrink those volumes down. And the understanding of where they are needs to be almost real time. There's a delay right now as they observe and track and understand where it is in order to have continued access like we do today. So that's the second thing. And then the next big thing we need to do is we need to treat these just like any other spacecraft. We need to reserve enough fuel on the spacecraft shortening its life effectively in order to do a control re-entry of that spacecraft when it is finished with its mission. All right. And just last question for you before you wrap up. What do you see as the biggest challenge or what are you most worried about when it comes to this industry? Your job, ULA in the next couple of years. What keeps you up at night? On the one hand I'm very excited about this industry. I'm gonna start with the positive. This is a great time to be involved in space. The industrial base has gone wide. There's so many more players and there's new innovations and there's new missions and there's the potential to go back to the moon and even develop this self-sustaining cis-lunar economy I like to talk about which will take mining and heavy industry eventually off the earth which is just a wonderful opportunity for sustainability. So there's all of that and that's all great news. Now on the other side. Well, we now have other nations who have brought weapons to space. So this isn't another problem we worry about in the future like orbital debris management was kind of always really a challenge for the future. The same was true with that. Space has always been a peaceful high ground where we want to go and do commerce and do science and have peaceful international collaboration and in the militarization of it in terms of anti-satellite weaponry and capabilities like that we're not something that was occurring today. Well, I can tell you it is occurring today now. And so it is so much more important that we have these international standards of behavior and that we can do the things we need to do as a nation and as a leader of other nations to maintain the peace in space and to deter especially terrestrial conflicts from extending to space to this global commons that we all enjoy there. And as we talked about in the traffic analogy once it is damaged it potentially stays damaged for a very, very long time. So that issue keeps me awake at night. Well, I think that's a good place to end. Tori, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Thank you to the Secure World Foundation for having both of us here. And thank you of course to everyone watching and joining us today at the Summit for Space Sustainability. My pleasure. Wow, so thank you so much to Marina and to Tori for that amazingly candid and useful conversation. We're always excited when the commercial industry really gets engaged on space sustainability. So thank you again for the rest of our audience. We are about to go to our break. So we will be away until 1115. When we come back we're gonna have another great panel for you this time on what should be the Prime Directive of the Space Force followed by our brand new keynote with Bavia Law from NASA. So please rejoin us again in just about 30 minutes. Thank you. Welcome back everyone. I would like to introduce Sarah Manero from the Center for New American Security who'll be giving our spotlight talk on the panel what is the Space Force's Prime Directive. Also as a reminder, don't forget to fill out our poll for this panel. Just click the button right under your streaming feed. Thanks. My name is Sarah Manero. A few years ago I had the opportunity to play a big part in the establishment of the United States Space Force and the re-establishment of the United States Space Command. I was the staff director for the Strategic Forces Subcommittee in the House of Representatives in both the majority and the minority. I now happily serve as a senior defense fellow with the Center for New American Security where I focus on space and strategic forces issues. Let me say thank you to the Secure World Foundation for having me to talk a little bit about Space Force, how it happened and where it can go in the future. Let me first recognize that the call for an independent Space Force really started around 20 years ago with senators like Bob Smith from New Hampshire, the 31st Marine Corps Commandant, General Chuck Kriliak, as well as at the time the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It wasn't until almost 20 years of reform and reorganization had occurred that Congress started to believe that these challenges were so big that the executive branch was not capable of fixing them on their own, which is where Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama and Jim Cooper of Tennessee entered the scene in 2017. The gentleman asked a pretty simple oversight question. Who's in charge of DOD military space? And instead of getting a simple answer, what they got back was a labyrinthine chart with over 60 different organizations, all of whom were able to say no to a specific space acquisition, but none of whom were responsible and authorized to say yes. Over the next couple of years with the help of individually motivated senators and the executive branch, the reasons for developing a Space Force started to really crystallize and there were four of them. The first was really resourcing in a resource constrained environment who was advocating for space unique budgets. And if a tough choice needed to be made between an air breathing platform and a space system, how is that going to be made? The second was really about requirements and acquisition. With the rise of threats to our space assets coupled with the innovation and the potential that's coming out of the commercial sector are the processes that the DOD uses for defining requirements and for buying and purchasing and developing satellite systems adequate to be able to address these concerns in a quick and responsive manner. The third was really about culture, about cadre development. Who wakes up in the morning and thinks solely about space operators? How are they trained? What is their career progression? What is their opportunity for growth? And how will that be fostered into the future? And lastly, with the recognition that space was a war fighting domain, how did this fundamentally change how terrestrial operations would be executed and how future war fighting concepts would be developed? Space Force is still less than two years old. They've made consistent progress in addressing all four of these issues. And I anticipate that they will continue to do so. In general, I think Space Force would be well served by going back and looking at those first four issues or challenges that were identified by Congress in the establishment of Space Force and the re-establishment of Space Command. I think they need to build honest and transparent relationships with their oversight committees and have the courage to shape their own destiny. And this is important because it's not just some science fiction kind of trope. It's about recognizing that Space Force has the opportunity not only to make history but to shape the future. And it does this by prioritizing space resources, by choosing winners in the private sector, by making big bets on advanced technology and by challenging legacy architectures that have been with us since the Cold War. In this way, Space Force gets to define itself in other ways the services only wish they could. At the same time, let's recognize that Space Force will encounter challenges. Let's be honest, all of the Space Force leadership prior to 2020 was Air Force leadership. And so as an individual, it's now up to them who were raised in Air Force culture to navigate these challenging incremental steps towards independence. Let's recognize how personally and professionally challenging that will be for them. Nonetheless, it is their responsibility not only to change how they were taught to think about space but to make demonstrably different decisions about how they acquire and operate space systems. I'm really loathe to talk and perpetuate Star Trek references when talking about Space Force. And I've been counseled plenty of times not to do it. I'm actually gonna kind of open the aperture a little bit here. If I had to give guiding advice to the Space Force, I would probably quote Mae Jemison, one of our NASA astronauts, never limit yourself because of others' limited imagination. Never limit others because of your limited imagination. Thanks for having me. And I hope you have a wonderful conference. Hello, everyone. My name is Brian Whedon. I'm the director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation. As Sarah discussed in her spotlight talk, the creation of the Space Force was the continuation of a long-running debate on how the US military should approach its activities in space domain. Part of that debate has been what is the role of the US military in space? Is it primarily to create capabilities that support and enhance terrestrial operations? Or should there be more of a focus on in-space activities and capabilities to suit missions in space? Today we're gonna have a panel that's gonna unpack all that issue. But before we get started, we wanna make sure we get some of your thoughts on this issue. As Crystal mentioned, there's a poll running over Mentimeter. We're gonna be wrapping up in just a minute here where you can add your opinion on this question. While you're finishing up filling out that poll, let me go ahead and introduce my speakers for this panel. First, we have Colonel Casey Beard, who is commander of Delta Nine, of Space Operations Command of the US Space Force, which focuses on orbital warfare. Prior to that, he was deputy director of space strategy and plans directorate in the office of Secretary of Defense. We also have Dr. Bledin Bowen. He's a lecturer in international relations at the University of Leicester, and he's an expert on space warfare, international relations in outer space, and strategic theory. We also have Ms. Caitlin Johnson, who's the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and one of the editors of their annual Space Threat Assessment Report. And finally, we have Dr. Mir Sadant, who's the founding editor-in-chief of the Space Force Journal, and a former director on the National Treaty Council, as well as a prior intelligence and space officer with the US Navy. Their full bios are on the website, and I welcome all four of you to our panel today. So as Sarah mentioned, the creation of the Space Force involved multiple different problems that were trying to be solved. How do we deal with the proper resourcing of the US military space activities? How do we reform and update the acquisitions process and creating requirements for military space activities? How do we create a professional space culture and cadre and sort of break away from that air-focused mindset that Sarah mentioned? But what we want to talk about and kind of focus on in this panel is the things she mentioned at the end about imagination and how that affects how we think about space activities. And it really gets to this core question of what does the future of space activities look like? How should the US military be using space? And is it gonna continue to have this focus on space to support terrestrial operations, or is that focus gonna shift towards more of an in-space? Before we get to the discussion, can we go ahead and show the results from the audience poll? So very interesting, at least to me, we have two-thirds of the audience thinks that the focus should probably shift towards developing these new missions and capabilities towards an in-space activity. That's pretty interesting. I was expecting a little bit more 50-50, but that's quite interesting. So now let's go back to the discussion. Caitlin Johnson, I'd like to start with you. We heard Sarah talk about the role the military is being a driver for the Space Force. Can you sort of expand on this? What was that historical debate about the role the military in space and why was it important? Sure, well, thanks for having me, Brian, and the Secure World Foundation. It's always just an incredible pleasure to talk with you guys. And with this awesome panel, I'm really excited for the discussion. Sarah, as always, was brilliant in her spotlight talk, and I think really laid out the foundations of why the Space Force was created and what the debate in Congress was like. As she mentioned, it was not new. And the debate of what and how the military should operate in space is also not new and has been ongoing really since the start of the Space Age and the launch of Sputnik. So we're really talking about who will advocate in own space, who will determine what the missions are and what those missions will be. Often this is talked about in the concepts of warfighting for the layman's terms. The way I kind of think about it without military jargon is the supporting or the leading mission in space. And I don't necessarily believe that one is better than the others. And I know that my colleagues, Mir and Levin, have written on this extensively. So I'm very excited to see what their perspectives are and how they articulate those. But the debate has always been, while space provides an incredible supporting infrastructure for the US military through communications, through command and control of our nuclear forces, intelligence gathering through ISR and remote sensing. We're really seeing this debate pick up and a new focus on and partially, I think driven by the Space Force and Space Command establishment of, is this the right mission that we should be focusing on or should we start shifting towards whatever these future missions are? And we often see people talk about Cislinor space as providing incredible national security advantage and how to start developing missions there. And so I think right now within the department we have a couple of different camps, not just new versus old, but also where should we, where should the Space Force and Space Command really start focusing their efforts and planning for future systems? Cause as we know, space systems take a long time to acquire and develop and launch. So we have to start thinking about this now. Yeah, thank you, that's an excellent point. So, Levin, she's first said that I'm great and I'm going to turn to you. This is not the first time this question of what is the purpose of military space force has been posed. Can you give us a quick summary of sort of the history of how that debate has played out? Yeah, sure. And thanks very much for the invitation to be here today and congratulations on a great summit. Yeah, so a great introduction by a ceremony there as well and background on this and the debate and the conversation within the USA Force goes back far more than 20 years, arguably the idea of a space core or a space force or anything that's sort of more independent as a space entity within the DOD goes back to arguably the start of the USA Force itself, definitely by the late 1950s when military space activities and applications were certainly going to be a thing, especially after 1956 or so. So those ideas have been running around in various corridors of the DOD for a very, very long time and they had been flow and the USA Force traditionally faced a few push and pull and tensions in this because of course, as any bureaucratic entity it enjoyed the budget that came with space. So more budget means usually more influence. So we wanted to keep hold of the space budget and the Army and the Navy did try to compete to keep their various space budgets and activities in the 1950s but eventually lost out to the intelligence agencies, NASA and the USA Force. So as well as giving the budget it had to make sure that it didn't neglect space too much otherwise Congress would take space off of it but also if it did space too well, arguably it would create enough of a subculture and bureaucracy within the Air Force so then spin off into a more separate organization which is arguably now what has happened that due to political intervention from former President Donald Trump which jumped on the pre-existing bipartisan drive that was already in the works as we already heard from Sarah. So those general arguments of a culture really have been pretty consistent and there was some headway of course in the 1980s after the Goldwater and Nichols Act which provided a bit more operational coherence within the USA Force with regard to space and more joint military planning and execution of operations within Strategic Command and US Space Force Command as well. So a lot of these old structures are being resuscitated and also brings things back that were ended under the George W. Bush administration as well. So there's a lot of old bureaucracy and arguments that are now taking part in slightly different bureaucratic settings with the Space Force. Yeah, thank you for that. So, Mir, you were serving on the National Security Council while the most recent iterations of this debate was unfolding. How did it play out there? What were some of the changing geopolitical dynamics and space domain dynamics that you saw playing into this? Yeah, thank you so much, Brian, for the invitation and Secure World Foundation for hosting this event. I'm extremely humbled to be on such a great panel with everybody. Just first of all, I'm speaking my personal capacity and representing myself, not the US government or any of its agencies, departments or services. And the perspective is a national security perspective, right? So one of the things that I was very keen on after the new administration took off to see how their major policy, which I would consider as a China policy, plays out. And we see that is very much an extension of the previous administration's policies. Of course, there are the means of which those policies get enacted, maybe and are probably very different. One of the things that the last administration faced was turning the tide on China. And what I mean by that was a lot of turning of the Nelson's Eye on what China is doing, a lot of they have us in a unistrategic location where we can't, they backed us into a corner. We didn't have that problem with Russia because our supply chain was independent of any Russian production or means of supply. And so that is interesting. And it's interesting to see how in Congress we see a bipartisan movement to see how we can get China to start playing along with everybody and start appreciating sort of the rules of the road, some of the international systems, norms and values that have been guiding our system for about 80 years or so. And then the primary drive for the White House has been and I think will be is to ensure that United States and our allies and partners around the world, those who believe in democratic norms and values, ethical practices and business, financial transparency and not polluting the environment and staying within bounds, I think those are the ones that we'll live on that we will also lead in space. And I think the single best long-term initiative that the Biden administration and Congress can undertake is to really address China's ever ambitious revisionist aspirations and really the Biden administration has an opportunity to take something out of the Kennedy Johnson playbook and go all in sort of what Sarah mentioned earlier in American space development. And I think that is something that is very important. The one piece that I think the last administration just couldn't get to it is Artemis program. The Artemis program is not NASA's program. It's the program of the United States of America. It's the United States Artemis program. And so that is an important piece. If we don't understand the full spectrum of space power, right, then we find ourselves following the next century leaders and Artemis is part of space power and does the calculation of national security involves it because our adversaries, nations that don't consider us as friends have integrated their national security, commercial and civil seamlessly. And so the question is, do we want to lead in space or not? And, or do we want other nations to lead and we follow them? And that's fine if we want to do that. And so I think that is some of the discussions that we had in the White House without getting into specifics of it. But that was what the themes were. And I'm assuming that that will be the themes as we see in the media and in some of the statements being played out right now and the inter-agency meetings. And of course, every agency has their particular perspective. And so that is going to be negotiated. Great, thank you. So, Karin Berthel, on a turn to you now, you were also on the ground floor some of the discussions both within the Air Force and your time with us at your defense. Can you add in what you were seeing both from an operational perspective and maybe also on sort of some of these policy considerations about this changing nature of the space demand in the last few years? Sure, yeah, thanks, Brian. And again, like my colleagues have mentioned, thank you to Secure World Foundation for the invite to participate on this on the stellar and esteemed panel to discuss a very important and timely topic. So very much appreciate that as the rest have mentioned and also appreciate Sarah's comments at the opening and those that have been mentioned to this point. What I would add maybe another perspective to all the spot on statements that have already been made from an operational perspective is the threat environment itself. And so the way I would look at this, the two bins that I would categorize the evolution and the development of the Space Force and the rationale for it is the combination of the United States and our allies and partners increased reliance on space for national prosperity and for security coupled with, again, an increased growth or a trend in the threat environment that could potentially deny that access. And if we go back to a shorter period of history and there's always a danger, if you will, of trying to oversimplify historical correlations to what you see now. But I think there's an important time period that it's important to understand here. If we go back 30 years to 1991, two seminal events occurred in the same year. The first was Desert Storm in Iraq. And the second was the collapse of the Soviet Union and ultimately the end of the Cold War. And those two events really did contribute to the next 30 years, the culture that had been developed, the perspectives, the paradigm, if you will, of how space contributes to national security and what the military's role is in that. And I would say with the first example, Desert Storm really introduced, as some have been quoted in the past as saying the first space war, introduced space capabilities into the theater fight, position navigation and timing, military satellite communications, missile warning. And the asymmetric advantage that we gained and we witnessed and realized in Desert Storm was largely attributed to those space-based capabilities. And that set us on a course to exponentially grow those capabilities that the demand signal and the Department of Defense in particular was exceeding what we could even develop and acquire and field. And so that was the world that we grew up in over the last 30 years. And we're at a point now where we do not project or employ our instruments of national power without space. On the flip side, the second example with the fall of the Soviet Union, collapse of the Soviet Union into the Cold War, we effectively lost a peer competitor that could challenge us and prevent access to the domain. And so while maybe smaller threats in terms of jamming and other capabilities or operations may have persisted over the past 30 years, at the end of the day, our peer competitor had been lost. So what that effectively meant is that we could acquire, develop, field more highly technical, highly capable systems to support theater operations and didn't have to necessarily prioritize the end domain requirement or capabilities to protect those systems because that just wasn't there or wasn't as credible or as persistent or prevailing. And what we've seen over the last decade plus, for example, China's direct descent launch in 2007, that's well documented and recorded in a series of other activities, the threat environment now has begun to increase and mature and become more complex. So ultimately it's that addition to the operational environment and again, in addition to the four imperatives that Sarah had mentioned, that really give rise to the need to have a separate service that is exclusively designed to develop the doctrine, the capabilities, the professionals that are steeped in understanding the domain and are able to be able to leverage the domains, capabilities and characteristics for again, national security and prosperity and the threat environment is probably is a central reason for that. Thank you, that is a great recap of sort of that more near history and sort of what the military saw and how we've been changing some of the around some of those capabilities. So, I mean, I wanna go back to you and sort of now get to sort of the crux of the question that we're trying to get to this panel. You've been pretty outspoken in recent writings and some of the discussions that the Space Force should move beyond just sort of this support orientation of supporting trust operations and you hit into that in your initial remarks. Can you summarize that argument in let's say two minutes or so? You know, why do you think the Space Force needs to look beyond just the traditional supporting role? Two minutes, okay. So it took Shaggy Beard nine months to write the capstone and it's not two pages, but okay. So yesterday, if you didn't read Space Force Guardian Captain Chris Fabian wrote an excellent piece in The Hill. So I would recommend you for you to read that and look at all the links. So China has proclaimed themselves that they wanna become humanity's dominant space power by 2045 and China is not containing themselves to Leo, right? And they're looking beyond. And so that is something that should concern us. That should also be something that should have a chilling effect on how we are calculating because we see on earth around the planet how they behave, right? The extermination of Uyghur Muslims, the Hong Kong protests, the harassment of China, the COVID pandemic cover up and so forth. And then also in space, we saw that and things have changed and I've seen their behavior changed for the better. We saw their reckless 2007 ASAP test. We have debris still orbiting until 2027 or so, right? And while they're still interested in Leo, they are now looking beyond Leo and they're integrating commercial and civil technologies into their national security system enterprise and they're set their targets on Geo and X Geo and as was mentioned, X Geo has been coined as assist lunar area of operation, right? And so that's an important piece to think about. And I like this terminology. We hear blue water, brown water, but I like this terminology that Coast Guard Captain Mike Sinclair coined earlier on last year called look down space infrastructure, right? Which provides us everything, PNT, Geospatial imagery, communications and also other sort of non-security related things like weather, aviation control, maritime traffic, even well left trafficking control and then climate and earth science research, right? Today, the DOD is very focused and as it should on look down operations, right? And defense of our United States based assets that facilitate those operations, right? We cannot stop doing that. We should not stop doing that. This is starting, but the idea is starting to become more encompassive and inclusive and we see some evolvements in that. And we took yesterday or today AFRL released a primer on the assist lunar, right? And so we need to start looking at that. We need to start planning for that because we're not there right now. I know the argument is always, hey, we're not there right now, but guess what? The Chinese are planning and they're building and they will be there. And then we're gonna be looking like fools without proper planning, right? So we will have to have the capabilities to protect our look down infrastructure, but at the same time we need to start looking at what is needed for look up national security space operations. We need to start looking at what acquisition authorities need to be made more flexible. We need to have a gap analysis. We need to start thinking up corresponding closing of operational authorities to address that, right? So we can have that full spectrum capability. And also most importantly, as a national security person, I'm concerned because I don't want the Chinese government having unilateral dominion and control and holding my critical capabilities at risk, whether it's the look down capabilities or the look out and up capabilities, right? So that's the important piece that I think we need to be looking at. And so one of the things that we know we like to think about is, and I'll compare this to, we've been talking some history, is how our highways were built, right? And so, in the same way, President Eisenhower had the foresight to do look out development of our interstate highway, even before there were enough cars and trucks to utilize them, right? We must invest in the same way to secure a space infrastructure today because we know it will be there, right? Everybody's looking at the economic projections. And so that is what China is doing. And that is what we really haven't started yet, right? And we need to start thinking about it. And for example, space systems need to be part of the 17, 16 plus space needs to become part of the 17 critical infrastructures that DHS lists, right? I would say, I would end with this, that if Eisenhower would be alive today, and I wish he were, he would totally support developing the space highway system of tomorrow, right? Just as the interstate highway knitted us together and introduced our country to each other, we can introduce humanity to each other, but it really needs to be who will build that infrastructure and who will be in control of that infrastructure. And if we are not, then we relegate that to China. And that is where we're at right now. Great, thank you for that. So, Plot, I want to turn to you now. You've recently written a book on space strategy that argued, essentially, the other side of this issue that space is likely to remain largely a support function. Can you summarize that argument in a couple of minutes? Yeah, thanks for having me. Condensing eight years worth of work into two minutes. Well, look, we still have people with the book, right? My book is, the analogy I push in my book is that we have to see a little bit more of a coastline and concepts of blue water see power that a lot of people like to use about military space thinking and strategy. That sort of fits more with what may or may not one day happen with interplanetary space. When we talk about satellite in Earth orbit, the coastal mindset is really the best one to think because it really is about infrastructure and support of needs on Earth, military, civilian, economic, commercial, security, intelligence, the lot. But even in Earth orbit, though, I would disagree with that interpretation at the start there that it's rather the implication with the poll at the start of this panel that it's either or it's not support versus combat. As we know in Earth orbit, combat and support operations have a long history in space and in Earth orbit. So even in the environment, in coastal operations, it doesn't exclude military, offensive, or warfare operations and not just logistics. So both do happen. But the way we approach space power is about the influence of that environment on the terrestrial environments, on the land sea and if you can't use that infrastructure or if the use or non-use of orbital infrastructure of space makes no difference on Earth and there's no point to waging space warfare in the first place. The same with the Navy, the same with the air. There's no point just doing stuff in their own environments for their own reasons if it has absolutely no impact on what goes on the ground. So conceptually, that's the starting point. It's about the use and the influence you gain from that medium. Battle is a means, not an end. So continually seeking battle is not necessarily the right mindset. So when thinking about space culture and new space services or more units within military forces around the world and I was doing space, for me it's the logistics mindset is where you start and then combat operations and thinking has to then support those logistics operations. So that's the way around I would argue it and it's not a one or the other approach but I would keep it to Earth orbit and leave Sizzluna to the fantasists. Thank you for that. So we're gonna turn to audience questions here in a minute and I see there's already several that have been piling up in there but one of the ones that you just mentioned that one of the audience questions we've gotten in here is exactly that, right? That we sort of created a bit of a manufactured choice here between one or the other when it really is kind of have to do both. So Colonel Beard, I'll turn to you now because you were part of the team that wrote the Space Calfsman publication for the Space Force. How did you guys approach this issue? And is this where you felt that you felt that Space Force had to deal with both? Yeah, no, that's a great question and I would continue on with just the last comment that was made that at no point in time part of the team that had drafted this in advance of the service becoming a reality did we parse it out in that stark of a manner? What we did realize and what we wanted to emphasize in writing this first Capstone publication were three things, three motivations behind it and those all tie into answering the question here. The first was that space power had matured to the point that it warranted its own independent articulation and that was the first prevailing motivation that drove us to this. The second motivation was that when we were to have a new service should we have a new service? That that service would need a central document that provided its purpose, its identity and its culture separate from but coordinated with and integrated with the other services those that joined the Space Force would no longer be Marines, airmen, soldiers, sailors, et cetera. And the third motivation which is equally related I should say was that the joint force would also have to understand what the Space Force brings and what space power brings to the joint fight to national security. And it's in that framework that this discussion really kind of started to abound and we identified in addition to those three cornerstone responsibilities of the service. The first is to preserve freedom of action in the domain. The second is to enhance joint lethality and that's you could you could suggest that that's what the space capabilities and military space has been doing for decades. And the third cornerstone responsibilities was to provide independent options. And if you look at that context to this blue versus brown looking down versus up discussion it really is a combination of both. We have to first and foremost preserve freedom of action to those capabilities that enable us and provide the prosperity and security that we have. And that is an inherently brown water if you will dialogue that we have to maintain access to those capabilities which already exist and which might be threatened and potentially could be removed in a detrimental fashion. And at the same time though, we do put hooks in the capstone publication in the doctrine that speaks to CIS Lunar XGO with the anticipation that national interests national objectives would expand beyond geocentric the geocentric orbit and that the concept of preserving freedom of action providing independent options they are not contained to a specific geolocation or geocentric location if you will, or orbit regime. And so those requirements that cornerstone responsibilities would expand as national interests expand and that the military would have a role pervasively to be able to provide those no matter where we are. But I would also say regardless of when and when and where that happens the fundamental premise of defense and space power and combat power in the domain has to also and always remain in our geocentric regime which is providing support to terrestrial operations. But again, we are not limited to that. Should we expand the military and the space force in particular must be on guard and on call to be able to provide that and continue that support freedom of action beyond. Great, thank you for that. So Caitlin, I'll turn to you and sort of get your thoughts on this. And in particular to me one of the issues with doing both is that creates some resource challenges particularly on the budgeting side. So how do you see this and what do you think some of the challenges aren't working through this? That is exactly what I was gonna say. So it's not a one or the other approach. However, in the current state of our resource constrained environment and in the future looking at a further resource constrained environment we're going to have to make tough decisions not to eliminate the great capability that we already have but decisions on what to further invest in. And as Sarah said at the beginning the space force has incredible opportunity and responsibility in promoting commercial space in starting and investing in new technologies and new missions. And so that's kind of where this resource issue plays in. I don't think there are pros and cons to this debate on all sides. What I'm really excited about is that having this debate in open forums like this is causing further research, deeper discussion and even more study and getting attention onto the issue and smart minds thinking about it will help us make more informed and technically informed policy. So not just what we can dream of and throwing in Star Wars and Space Trek reference but really what are we physically capable of and where is the conversation leading us while keeping in mind that we can't just posture ourselves against what we think our adversaries are doing. We must do what will protect and support our troops and our capabilities and our national security at home. Thank you. Mir, I wanna pull up one of the audience questions here and sort of get your reaction to it. And it's something that I wonder myself. And that's, you mentioned that China has talked about dominating space and becoming sort of the global space power the next about 2050. But the US has also talked about that dating back for a few decades now and has had US policies or doctrine statements from the US military talking about space down, space superiority, how much do you think that maybe China's thinking on this was influenced by prior US thinking and are they both approaching the same way or is China really thinking about it differently than the way US has in the past? Yeah, Brian, that's a great point. Let me just also reiterate, I'm a violent agreement with Casey Beard. So I think the document had a great, like he said, stepping stone for expansion, right? And to the blue water sort of space aspects. So once we get there, we will be able to expand. So I think that was an important aspect that I was very happy to see in the capstone. So when we talk about a domination, right? Nobody can dominate space. Like I had a conversation a couple of days ago with someone about Lagrange points. Like they're as big as the Mediterranean ocean. Like how are you gonna dominate the entire Mediterranean ocean, right? Even physically on earth, it's not that easy to do, right? So we're not talking about dominating space. What we're talking about is different things. And like you said, China's really smart move of the Beto system, right? The alternative to GPS, who are they bringing on board for that is very shrewd, it's very smart. It's something straight out of our playbook, right? But they are making sure that there's no dependency on the US, they're making sure that the little coalition or the big coalition that they're building, there's no dependency on the US. And that then if they wanted to, they could tap in and get national security or intelligence information from that system, right? The belts and roads are processed, right? It's something very similar to the Marshall plan but different, right? And so they are doing that. And they should be doing that. If I was in China and I was advising the Chinese leadership, I was Chinese, I would tell them, do that. What are we doing, right? So what I'm saying is that the industry, the commercial industry is being dominated by China, right? The aggressive manner in which they are making sure our companies are being driven out of business where they factor and they disband and they send our production lines overseas similar to what happened with solar panels, right? The US has created another mass producer of solar panels who are dependent on them. These are ways where they dominate. So they dominate in that aspect, right? The US really doesn't have a problem, the US military doesn't have a problem of dominance, right? The Navy's goal is to always be dominant. And the Navy is gonna be much more robust about it than the Air Force. Air Force talks about air superiority. I'm pushing for, hey, we need space supremacy, right? There's a big difference between dominance and supremacy and superiority, right? Superiority, hey, any day one group can win, right? Supremacy at a specific location, at a specific time, you will win. But when we dominate, the Navy dominates, they will dominate at any time, any location, anywhere on earth, they will dominate. That's their goal, whether they do or not is a different discussion. And so when we talk about the US being a dominant military force in space, that is what I mean, but the Chinese are looking at it. They're gonna be dominated from the civil side, right? They're gonna create a very unique ecosystem where everybody wants to be part of that system. They're gonna upgrade their military capabilities so that they can do things that we can't legally yet do, right? Because there's restrictions. The Space Force just signed an MOU with NASA, right? This is a first time, this is a great start. But there are certain things our government cannot do where we're bound. And then of course, it's the overall, the national idea of what's going on, right? What do Chinese people as a whole want and what do we want as a whole? So that is the importance of when we talk about dominance. And I think the Chinese are working towards that. We just need to sort of wake up and see whether that is what we wanna do. Yeah, thank you for that. So I'm gonna turn to you, Caitlin, and then I'd love them to see what your thoughts were on this sort of same question of how to view the issue of dominance. Sure, well, Brian, as you mentioned earlier, our organization, CSIS, writes a space threat assessment every year in tandem with Secure World's global counter space assessment. And in this research, we look at the language directly coming out of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, India, the United States. And between that research and continual research, the language is not much different from the US and China. I think you can talk about intentions. Obviously Chinese public released information is much more controlled than here in the United States. I mean, someone could be watching this right now and hear what, you know, Carl Beard is saying, what we're all saying and take that as US policy or US movement and policy. But also we need to think about what the impact of the United States' roles, responsibilities, and communications are on our allies as well as our adversaries. After the US stood up the space force and the space command, we saw a ripple effect across our allies. The UK has stood up their own space military force, so has France. And there are significant investments in space and space organizations across Europe, but also from NATO. And so I think, you know, we need to be careful about how we communicate and posture ourselves, not just looking at what China and Russia are doing and saying and thinking, but also what are our allies investing in and what kind of direction are they taking from us? Pardon? Yes, so I think when it comes to the question of doctrine and language, I guess to Americans, they say, well, there's no better flattery than an invitation and the Chinese are learning from the best at military space and that is you, the United States. And there's been studies that's done on this showing the remarkable similarities in the learning that a lot of the People's Liberation Army have gone through in thinking about military space operation. So the language is in many ways deliberately similar and also because they are learning from similar sorts of strategic concepts, you know, from military theory. And then I think in terms of thinking more broadly about what China is doing in space, I think that's to be a bit more caution and I guess I'll put a bit of breaks on some of the more sort of space-racy arguments that we've heard in that I think it's worth bearing in mind that China has spent the last 30 years investing so much money in its massive array of military and civilian space infrastructure to try and get to almost where the United States was in the mid-1990s, you know, that sort of which China is now today in the bulk of its space infrastructure. Now there are some targeted areas like space weapons where of course the Chinese do have a lot more capabilities than the United States did in the 1990s but China has been in catch up modes. And also if you look at a lot of documentation from China on its exploration plans in, you know, on the moon and perhaps deep space probes, you know, the deadlines are always optimistic. The same as they are in the United States and Europe and Russia, everybody likes having those diagrams and the dates that I never met. You know, in the year 2000, China was saying that it was gonna have boots on the moon in 2020, you know, it's 2021 and they're just putting up their long-term space station into orbit. So I think we have to be a bit more careful in terms of thinking or China's gonna take over CIS lunar tomorrow and we have to stop seeing all scientific and exploration activities as inherently dangerous and a threat as well because that's not how the United States would like to see its Artemis program as, you know, even though there may well be some military involvement and, you know, the space forces talking about CIS lunar operations, you know, that's a sort of language that China will jump on in the same way that a lot of American analysts jump on any sort of PLA involvement in any kind of space activity with the Chinese, that are not necessarily threats like the space station, for example. So there's a lot of mirror imaging and there's a lot of similar sort of action and reaction going on on both sides here. But also it's worth remembering that the CIS lunar environment really is not politically, sorry, is not militarily or economically significant today and probably will not be for a very long time, especially when getting orbital infrastructures to work for real important issues, real important needs here on Earth is still something that's quite difficult to do and quite temperamental. I mean, how is GPS3 rollout coming along? Oh, it's been quite a interesting discussion. So Colonel Barrett, I'm not going to ask you to comment on GPS3 specifically. I do want to pull up another question from the audience here and touch on something we mentioned a few minutes ago and that's sort of the role of commercial in this. And so the question is, what is the US Space Force's role in terms of fostering commercial and space activities? How is it you guys are seeing that? Is it part of this equation of increasing, you know, American space power that we talked about a little bit earlier? Yes, another great question. And I would say broadly, and many of you probably have heard General Raymond say very similar comments that the Space Force from the get-go is built to be innovative, agile, fast and future-looking. And so we are really looking at everything that we can with an open canvas. I would say that as the Space Force continues to mature and our presence continues to expand and adjust to meet the needs of the nation and the sport of our allies and really to contribute to a safe, secure, accessible space domain, we're also partnering very closely with the commercial sector. And I believe that there's a symbiotic relationship between both that we can continue to seek some of the great technology learning innovation that's being done in the commercial sector, which we're in fact, it might be even exceeding the DoD. You know, we've seen an inflection point over the last couple of decades where the DoD has largely been the leader of technology and the fielding of that technology. And in this case, now the commercial sector really has the preponderance of that. And so we have already established several connections and bonds with our commercial partners to understand and leverage some of the approaches they take in the digital transformation that you've probably heard several times that the Space Force is trying to undertake to get us more into the 21st century and beyond. From that to infrastructure, to other technologies that could be fielded to continue to provide robust capabilities for what we need here on earth and beyond. So I think the growth is absolutely there. In fact, I know it is. And there's evidence throughout just the first year and a half of our existence. And I absolutely see a continued growth in that relationship, more formalized growth going forward. And as if I could, before I step off too, I'd also like just to add more to what Caitlin had mentioned previously about also the need to partner with our allies. This is not go it alone. The objective of being able to maintain the security accessibility requires a team approach, whether it's commercial allies, partners, et cetera. And so that is absolutely where the Space Force is focused. And we're already seeing the benefits of that at this point. Yeah, great, thank you for that. Mir, did you just want to chime in on this question as well? Yeah, and I think this is one of the important pieces, right? I mean, one of the reasons for the creation of the Space Force was to help with the whole procurement acquisition process. So the fact that the Space Force is doing that is an important aspect too. Don't forget that it's while the major primes have always been the backbone of a lot of the heavy lift, the innovation really lies in the smaller companies. And we need to find ways, I've this COVID year, I was at home giving free advice to, as a government guy, I can't take money for this, but I was giving free advice for a lot of startups. And I would tell you how much time I would spend with people from the CEO down to their finance, people saying, we are baffled by how this process works. It's not just space acquisition and processes, but others. We need to find a way to streamline that, really find a way to streamline that because there are some amazing capabilities out there that are not integrated too. The other part that's not really looked at upon that much is how we are leveraging commercial when it's an idea that's not currently in the architecture. It is currently not something that we have imagined and getting that in there so that that becomes a requirement for future planning. That's an important aspect. So I've talked to companies where I'm like, have you talked to General Raymond or like, no, and there's a reason why he said that they're not talking to General Raymond, but the idea that this needs somehow to be incorporated into the imagination of the service so that then they can say, we are looking for stuff like this. Can you approach us if you have this? That is an important piece. And then lastly, I wanna just clarify, maybe I misspoke, but when I talk about space power, I'm not talking about militarization, right? I'm talking about the national instruments of power and how we project that power into space. And so just like the Food and Drug Administration is part of our national security as we witnessed in this COVID year, the same thing is happening with NASA and space. So they are part of the national security calculus and space power. And so the DOD really must return to some of their historical roots in going back into commercial, going back to supporting civil like we did in the 50s and 60s. I mean, the president mentioned that he wants to create a DARPA-like agency for science during the state of the union. So these are things that we need to start feeling comfortable with. I know it's maybe it's uncomfortable for some people where we need to start feeling comfortable with, thank you. Yeah, it's actually a point. And that's a difficult thing to try and balance, right? How do we integrate all that stuff without sort of the military sort of, the military aspect sort of taking over all those other things, right? And NASA now being pursued, proceed as potentially a military entity or having a role with that. I think that's an interesting question. So there's another question on the chat. I wanna bring it real quickly as we're sort of moving the last few minutes here. And, Bledna, I was thinking, maybe you could give kind of a quick answer to this. And the question is, how can the US use the words like space, supremacy, dominance, while at the same time talk about norms of behavior, which I think it's been a big talking point for the US military the last several years. Thanks. Yeah, so in terms of squaring this circle, I draw a distinction between words like dominance and supremacy. They really are more about military doctrine and strategy and what you want to achieve in a time of open hostilities and conflict versus international cooperation and norms and rules of the road is something that you want to do with an absence of open hostilities. Therefore, when the United States Space Force will talk about denying the use of space for two adversaries, it doesn't mean denying the use of that environment in a time other than war. And the same way that the US Navy talks about dominating particular sea lines of communications and particular oceans in the event of open conflict, during peacetime it ensures safe passage of all legal traffic. So that's the distinction I make and I don't see a contradiction there because rules of the road, things of that, are really more about everyday governance in times other than open warfare. So that's how I would square that circle in the language that we see coming out of these different parts of not just the US government but many of the United States allies and also some other states as well today. Yep, great, thank you, that's a great point. So as we wrap up here, I wanna give one last question I'd like to sort of each you to chime in on and that's sort of, as the Space Force and the US government in general continues to ponder this question of, what does military space look like going forward? Give you an opportunity to pick up sort of maybe one challenge you think we should really think about as we go through that, whether it's resources, this is the policy, is it legal implications, whatever else, and maybe a minute or so each is sort of one final round up for wrap up that. Mir, do you wanna start and then we'll go around? So I think the issue that I'd like to stress is what we don't have and what we need and we are constrained by the way our government works, the election cycles, the fiscal cycles and all that is we really need a national space vision. Bruce Kay and I had wrote about it a while back in a report for DIU and AFRL and Space Force but I think we need to have that. The second piece that I would really talk about is we need to talk about how, why and when we should classify space systems as critical infrastructure, right? The debate is rife right now, there's legislation appending in Congress about that and we need to start thinking about that because that will drive how we protect our look down space systems but also start planning our reliance and our future capabilities of the look out piece of space infrastructure and systems. So I think that is the major piece I would want everybody to leave with and we should and we can't do both. We can look down and look up and about. So I think that is something that I wanna leave everybody with. Great, thank you. Caitlin? Thanks, Brian. You mentioned a lot of challenges. Obviously we kind of talked about the resource one earlier so I wanna pick something different and I think that is the challenge of integrating commercial capabilities that already exist into our services architecture and using them actively in missions while balancing the security aspect of using commercial services and software. So making sure that, as we know, US military satellites are highly protected from attack but commercial services might not be in the same way and so how do you impact these requirements without cycling innovation or putting too much burden on commercial industry but if I think if commercial industry really wants to make that impact and have the government as a customer and as a reliable customer they do also need to think about adopting a lot of the best defenses or protections in the case of a conflict or attack or an operating in a denied environment. Yeah, and of course in doing so, what does that do for their cost and business model and that itself is a hugely complicated subject. So, Levin, I'll turn to you. Thanks. So I think the most interesting thing I'll be watching in the years ahead of military space in the US is the evolution of the culture in the US Space Force. So as Sarah said at the very start, the Space Force is inheriting a lot from the US Air Force both in terms of actual personnel but in terms of procedures, institutions and what it's done as a US Air Force part for the past 60 years or so. And but also in space, what is interesting to see what could develop is will there be a greater emphasis and prestige roles given towards what is effectively a logistics job. Logistics and IT support to keeping US terrestrial forces active and deficient and working whether or not the space environment itself is degraded or not because in space, space as we know it today, we don't really need the top gun fly boy jocks. We don't need the big gunners. We don't need the flashy naval captains. You need the engineers. You need the logisticians. You need the computer geeks. So those are the people, will they see a proper home in the culture in the US Space Force? So I'll be keeping a close eye on how that turns out in the years to come. Yeah, and to that point, there was a recently a statement about the Space Force, Brandon says the digital service and sort of trying to attract some of those exact skill sets. So sorry, Colonel Beard over to you for the final word. Yeah, Brian, thanks. Great points, all legitimate challenges, all that we were facing in here. I don't have necessarily anything new, but I want to maybe add a small tweak to those. First, I'll start off on the comment or the question that had been asked at the very end and I completely agree with his comment that the concept of norms of behavior and the need to attain space superiority or supremacy are not contradictory to one another. In fact, in many ways, they're complementary. And I think one side benefit or one important benefit of being able to establish norms, how we get there is really the challenge. But the benefit of those is that you can identify and all can identify and agreed upon set of bad behaviors or unwanted behaviors that could trigger further deterrence or if necessary, defeat mechanisms. And in the absence of that, that creates the challenge. What are the ROEs? Who is in the right and who is in the wrong and that if you will, if you want to put in those terms. So the ability to attain norms of behavior in this domain is going to be a challenge but one that we absolutely have to pursue if we're to be perfective in defense of it. And the prosperity of it. The other pieces on the resources resourcing of it, it really is in the context of the DOD writ large. So now that we have a new service a year and a half and an existence, what is the prioritization scheme? How does the space force itself fit into the rest of the joint force? And there will be trade-offs in strength, budget lines, et cetera, all those challenges that we know and how does the joint force and how does the space force integrate into the rest of the services and armed forces from a prioritization standpoint to be able to get the resources it needs and understand that those trade-offs might have to be made with the more established services who've been doing this for a while. And lastly, I'll just do want to reiterate the point that Meir had mentioned about classification. Highly classified business, highly classified world and we're not able to talk a lot about it and I know that's always creates intrigue and mystery behind it but collectively going forward we need to have the right balance of what we can talk about, what we need to talk about to continue to advocate to solve these challenges and of course maintain the security that we might need to like we do in any other domain. And I would say those are the three, most of those have already been mentioned but I agree wholeheartedly with those. And thanks. All right, well, thank you as well. Thank you to all of you for a great discussion. I wish we had an audience here person to give you the round of applause you all deserve. But with that, we'll wrap this up and I'll turn it back over to Crystal to introduce our second keynote speaker. Thank you, Brian. First of all, the speaker, thank you for that invigorating debate about the space force. I know that it gave me a lot of insight into where we are. I'd like to go ahead and welcome Bavia Law who serves as a senior advisor to the NASA administrator for budget and finance. She was also a member of the Biden transition agency review teams for both NASA and the Department of Defense. This is going to be one exciting opportunity to hear about space sustainability from the new administration. Welcome, Bavia. Thank you, Crystal. Can you hear me? Yeah, you sound great. Awesome. Well, thank you for inviting me to join you today. It's been, as you said, an incredible five months at NASA. I know better now than we ever did that we are in a new age of space development full of opportunities, constellations that involve tens of thousands of satellites, CubeSats from elementary school children that have little ability to maneuver, and on-orbit servicing assembly and manufacturing that can upend our current Earth-centric paradigms. What we thought was disruptive before, say, reusable launch vehicles is old news. We are onto the new. And while the new is great for growing the space economy, as you all know something so close to my heart, it also presents challenges. As I know, you've been discussing in this conference and other venues, the orbital debris population follows a power-law size distribution, meaning that there is more small debris than large. There are more than 100 million objects ranging from dust particles to flecks of paint from satellites that are too small to be tracked. And these are the debris that present the most near-term mission-ending risks to operational spacecraft. And to date, and this is something that is actively under consideration, these are the debris that we have worried the most about at NASA. And while the utmost precautions are taken to reduce the potential for collision, especially with our flagship International Space Station, impacts with these objects do occur. I'm sure some of you know, just a few weeks ago, during a routine inspection of Canada Armed Two, experts from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency found orbital debris damage to one of its boom segments. Luckily, the debris did not affect their arms' functional abilities. The damage is mostly limited to a small section of the thermal blanket, and Canada Armed is continuing to conduct its planned operations. But the strike highlights just how important this issue is and how seriously NASA is taking it, and always has. NASA is a founding member of the Interagency Space Debris Coordination Committee, IADC. IADC established the first international consensus-based space debris mitigation guidelines in 2002. The guidelines emphasize that reentry of a spacecraft or orbital debris stage or orbital stage should not pose an undead risk to people or property. NASA has also been instrumental in supporting the U.S. delegation to UNCOPYUS to develop the copious space debris mitigation guidelines in 2007 and guidelines for the long-term sustainability of outer space in 2019. NASA has promoted the U.S. government orbital debris mitigation standard practices with the international community and continues to work with the international community to further improve international orbital debris mitigation best practices, such as these guidelines. And we can talk a bit more in Q&A about specific NASA activities underway. But there is so much more to be done, which is why we actually, this is, I'm so excited to tell you all about it. We've assembled an orbital debris review team in-house to evaluate how NASA can be a more effective leader in the area of space sustainability. But the reality is that orbital debris is not something NASA or even the United States can take on alone. In my mind, and this is how I'm conceptualizing our review team as well, orbital debris mitigation has three parts. Reduce the amount of debris we generate, know where everything is, and not just obviously not just the debris, but also valuable things that debris would hit, and be able to maneuver so you can avoid getting hit, and of course, remove the debris, the three parts. Given the speed with which the space sector has grown and is expected to grow, we are facing challenges on all three fronts. To reduce the amount of debris, we need to agree as a community, among other things, not just within the United States, but internationally as well, on standards and best practices on how to design launch and operate spacecraft so they don't produce debris. To know where everything is, to understand the space and debris environment, we need more and better sensors, better data analysis and fusion capabilities. Again, global agreement on how we collect and share data is critical. To be able to maneuver, assuming the quality of the information about potential close approaches or collisions is good, satellites need maneuvering capability, which as we know, not all satellites do. Last but not least, we need to start to think about how we will remove some of the worst offending objects. This active debris removal will be expensive. ESA and other funders will pay the equivalent of well over a million dollars per kilogram to remove a secondary payload adapter left by Ariane Space's second mega mission in 2013. Again, I'm not implying that we need to remove all the debris out there, but just a little back of the envelope math, given that there is more than 8,000 metric tons of debris in space, if we extrapolate from this one point calculation alone and there's probably range of costs, we are talking about trillions of dollars in debris removal. This is a challenge, but of course it's also an opportunity. Space is a big diverse and innovative sector and together we can come up with amazing approaches that don't just involve technology, but also regulatory policy and other kinds of innovations. We are also lucky that we have somewhat of an analogy, not a perfect analogy, but nonetheless an analogy that we can learn from, climate change. Think about it. The orbital debris problem tracks the climate change problem pretty closely. We want to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we put out. We want to monitor, track, model what we are doing and how much progress we are making, and we want to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Each of the things that earlier I said were issues we want to address in the space debris world as well. Now, in the climate world, there's all sorts of clever technological policy and regulatory schemes under consideration, carbon sequestration technologies, gap and trade schemes, regulatory fees, and these are only some of the tools that have been used for environmental management and the space community should really build on these lessons. Both Congress and the White House have laid out plans that were developed with interagency input, space policy directive three, the national space policy. Earlier this year, OSTP with input from NASA and other agencies put out an orbital debris R&D plan. It is important that we begin to implement this plan. I spent about 25 years in Boston before I moved to D.C. In Boston, we would call the orbital debris problem a wicked hard problem. To solve problems like this, we need all hands on deck and the hands had better be global. It is not a problem Americans can solve alone, but we can and we should be the leaders. The solutions the government co-creates with the private sector will lead to an even bolder and brighter future in space for all of humanity to enjoy. I want to keep my remarks short and I want to turn it to Crystal for questions and I'm looking forward to a really good discussion. Well, thank you, Bavia. That was a great quick overview of where the agency is at, what they're thinking about about some really important issues around space sustainability. I know that I immediately took note that there is a new active debris review team at NASA and I look forward to hearing more about that in the future. In fact, I was fiercely taking notes. I do want to turn this over to the audience. So if anyone out there, I've seen that some questions have already come in and we will just jump right into these. Bobby's agreed to take a few questions. So we won't probably be able to get to them all but please go ahead and add those into Mentimeter. The first question that I wanted to hit on you if you, Bavia, is touching on international community issues. And so you can see it on screen there. What steps, nope, I'm sorry. That is actually not the correct question. I apologize. I'm going to grab the correct one. So here it is. Are there opportunities for emerging or non-traditional space countries to participate in Artemis? So as you know well, space exploration is neither inexpensive nor easy. We want the world to join us, not only for sustainable presence on and around the moon, but stay with us as we go on to Mars and beyond. NASA's Office of International and Interagency Relations, OIR, is an interface with NASA's counterpart around the world and our folks there would be happy to engage in potential collaborations related to Artemis program. NASA has publicly available reports on the potential for specific science and technology development activities on the moon and around the moon. And we would be excited to engage with both current and new partners on the potential for joint activities. There is plenty to be doing together and not enough money to go around. So all hands on deck, let's do it. Great. I'm sorry, I'm returning to the first question that we flashed up. I just put them in the wrong order. My apologies. The moon is a busy place these days. And so one of our audience members is wondering, what steps does the international community need to take to ensure operations can be coordinated and conducted safely? There's a new set of opportunities. So how does NASA see that? The great question. Thanks, Crystal. I mean, as you know, and our administrator is this morning was in Congress testifying on the hill. He is moving aggressively forward on the Artemis program, which includes landing the first woman and the first person of color on the moon in parallel with the program itself. And that kind of relates directly to the question you asked. NASA has also developed a statement of a shared vision to create a safe and transparent environment to facilitate exploration science and commercial activities not only on the moon, but deep space, Mars, comets and asteroids. Artemis Accords, as these principles are called, establish a commitment to ensure transparency, peaceful uses of space, the open and timely sharing of scientific data and compliance with all international obligations. As you may know, the Accords have been signed by 12 nations. We hope to be having the rest of the world join us as well. Just recently, South Korea, New Zealand and Brazil joined in the past month or so, the first signatories under the Biden administration. The Artemis program will be the largest and most diverse human space flight exploration coalition in history and note, I underscore the word coalition. We are not going there alone, we are going with partners. We expect that over the course of the coming months and years, more countries will join the Artemis program and commit to the principles of the Accords. And I mean, obviously, if the Accords represent a strong initial start, there is much work to be done to establish responsible norms of behavior in space. Specifically, along with the departments of state and defense, NASA will be participating in an inter-agency process to support the development of norms of behavior in space for all operations, including national security. So, yes, the moon is a busy place in the coming years, and there is a lot we need to do together with international community to ensure coordination and safe conduct of operations with Artemis Accords as a center of our strategy to do so. Wonderful. I'm sure we're going to be hearing more and more about that in the coming months. The next question I'd like to is actually referencing back to your remarks. So it's fairly specific. One of our audience members would like to know, is the NASA Active Debris Review Team the same as the previous years, O-D-M-S-P-I-W-G, gotta love acronym CITY, specifically is it government only or does it include commercial and academia? So the Orbital Debris Review Team I'm leading is an internal NASA only team and our goal is to better examine how NASA could be a better leader in ensuring space sustainability. Up until now, NASA has focused mainly on protecting our own assets, right? I talked earlier about making sure ISS is safe. We have a team at Goddard that looks at our robotic missions. We have an Orbital Debris Program Office which does love the modeling characterization, the data around the space debris environment. We are looking in this review team on things that NASA could be doing beyond what we do in protecting our own assets and being leaders in the broader community. And we hope to be sharing our thoughts with you in the coming months. Great, well, I know the community is gonna be eager to hear from you on that and I'm excited to hear that you're actually leading the team. So wonderful. Our next question switches topics just a little bit. And so what specifically in terms of plans or programs does NASA have to help mature and field active debris removal technology? So overall big picture NASA is globally recognized for its technical competence and has played a leadership role in promoting Orbital Debris Mitigation and best practices with the international community on the debris removal front specifically. NASA is currently focusing and this may change in going forward but we are currently focusing on early stage technology developments as opposed to operational systems. So since 2011, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts NIAC program has funded six early stage research studies relevant to Orbital Debris Mitigation and Removal and we can get you the studies if you'd like. More recently at the request of Congress, NASA conducted several agency-wide reviews of technologies that support active debris removal. The last such review was 2019 and described 16 different investments. Our space technology mission director, STMD, was funding to remove or otherwise mitigate Orbital Debris. These reviews continue to identify technology gaps that need to be closed in order to enable active debris removal. But have not identified major technology breakthroughs that would warrant another in-depth study at this time but things change. More work needs to be done in areas such as proximity operations, sensors and instruments, efficient propulsion, guidance and navigation, autonomy, robotic manipulation and many of these technologies are being matured through currently funded projects such as solar electric propulsion, satellite servicing and other small spacecraft missions all in the STMD directorate. In addition, NASA is funding research through academia with a primary focus on improving algorithms related to de-spinning uncooperative debris and controlled the orbit of large objects. NASA routinely attracts new Orbital Debris removal concepts through its annual NIAC, New Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. I mentioned earlier a small business innovative research and small business technology transfer, SBIR and STTR programs. And also, and this is something I just recently learned the space technology research development demonstration and infusion ready solicitations. These solicitations draw participation from a number of commercial entities interested in pursuing this capability as business venture approaches ranging from debris capture to the use of small spacecraft or sales as rack devices. You know, we are thinking about the possibility of future public-private partnerships and these programs demonstrate the potential for commercialization of NASA developed technologies. And all throughout, STMD continues to invest in promising early stage concepts and technologies that could alter the landscape for identifying technically cost-effective. And again, I want to underscore the term cost-effective. I was talking earlier about the back of the envelope cost of ADR. So we want to be thinking about cost-effective, viable or build debris removal approaches. Our review team will have more on this and we look forward to feedback from the community as well. Yeah, and we had another question that really builds on your comments there. And so they're kind of broadening the scope a little bit and they're curious, do you think NASA is going to support or would support a new international agreement to remove or reduce Orbital Debris? How do you see this playing out in the international field? So that's a great question and one we should probably consider in our internal discussions. If you want to send some more thoughts on potential approaches, please do. But NASA is a strong proponent of doing things internationally. I think I read somewhere recently that only about 30% of debris is, or 30% of everything that's in spaces is US owned and anything that we do in space has to be, and with respect to Orbital Debris removal has to be coordinated internationally. So international coordination is critical and we need to be doing this in that way as opposed to some unilateral approach. So send us ideas and we are listening. Excellent. So we do have another international question and I understand that this is one that's, the policy is probably still forming. You are a new administration, but we did have someone ask if Congress would decide to lift restrictions on cooperation or engagement with China, what is NASA's thoughts on that and how would you expect NASA to react? So NASA will continue to follow US law in particular the Wolf Amendment that provide guidance on how and if NASA can engage with China, there is no ifs, buts, or thens around that. In recent years NASA has engaged in certain cooperative activities with China in full accordance with this law. For example, both NASA and China have spacecraft in orbit around Mars, along with ESA, India and the UAE. NASA and CNS say the Chinese National Space Agency are sharing data on our respective spacecraft as NASA does with other agencies with spacecraft around other celestial bodies to assure spacecraft safety and collision avoidance. We will continue to do whatever is in the best interests of the United States and as long as we are in accordance with the law, which is one of our most important criteria, which is the criterion for engaging internationally. Wonderful. So just to close out on one final question for you, you've had this incredible opportunity and you've been a driving force in the Biden administration and deciding what they're gonna do about a lot of topics and space sustainability obviously being one that we care the most about here at this summit. And I was wondering if you just have any concluding thoughts or remarks you'd like to make on just your impressions. What is this administration's commitment to this topic? Are there any behind the scenes insights you can share in terms of where you expect things to go broadly with the administration in the next few months and years? So yeah, I think if you look at just the 2022 PBR, you will see the funding increases for earth science for climate change. So sustainability is a pretty strong priority for the administration. Space sustainability is not that different from atmospheric, you know, biosphere sustainability. So it is a clear priority. We are still developing some of our ideas on how we are wanting to proceed. And as we have more, another National Space Council gets in place and executive secretary is appointed, we will begin to speak about our plans and formulate our plans to greater degrees of specificity. So I hope you will invite me back and others from NASA and we will have to have a chance to collaborate more. Unfortunately, I think we need to start. We're looking at the OSTP R&D plan on orbital debris mitigation. That is a real clear place to start. But there's so much more to do. So hopefully we'll have a chance to work together. Yeah, absolutely. And I know we're thrilled to see the direction that the Space Council takes NASA, OSTP, everyone in the administration on all of these topics. So thank you so much for your insights today. We were thrilled you were able to join us. I know this is an incredibly busy week with NASA and obviously you guys aren't exactly at 100,000% in terms of staffing up. So we really appreciate your time and interest in speaking with us today. And I look forward to talking again in the future. Thank you, Crystal. Yes, it was a pretty exciting time at NASA this week. Pam Melroy, our deputy administrators here. So we have now a full compliment of leaders and yes, it's full speed ahead. Thanks again. Yeah, we love Pam. She was at one of our earlier summits. So enjoy and we'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Bye. All right, everyone. We are about to conclude the summit for space sustainability. I wanna welcome on stage our direct executive director, Peter Martinez for a few closing thoughts. Peter. Thank you, Crystal. And thank you, Bobby, for that excellent keynote and for sharing your insights with us. It's really been a fantastic two days. And I think what's sort of a golden thread that's run through many of the presentations and remarks on the panels is that space sustainability is really a multi-scale problem, both on spatial scales as well as on temporal scales and that we need both short-term, mid-term and long-term actions to address this issue. And so I'd like to look at how we address the issue through the lenses of technology, leadership and capital, which are sort of three general headings under which you could group many of the excellent comments that were made in the last two days. And of course, these three strands are interwoven. And so some of the things I will discuss under one of these strands could equally well be considered part of another. So beginning with technology, when we refer to technology, particularly as scientists and engineers in the space domain, we tend to think of the hardware and software approaches to address space sustainability issues. So we think of things like improved SSA sensors and algorithms, things like automated collision avoidance systems, and other technical capabilities to support space traffic management. We think of technical capabilities for things like on-orbit servicing, debris remediation technologies like post-mission disposal and active debris removal. And certainly we do need to continue developing all these technological capabilities. However, we also need to improve our ability to utilize the data that we already have and to broaden the access to that data and to the tools to process these data. And since not all countries have the same level of technical capabilities, one of the areas that I think we need to pay particular attention to in coming years is that of capacity building. And for those of you familiar with the UN space sustainability guidelines, capacity building is indeed one of the elements that runs through many of those guidelines. I particularly liked the remark yesterday that we need to ask policymakers what kind of information they need to make effective policy. And here I would like to pause for a moment to reflect on the difference between data for science and information for policymaking. Scientists and engineers tend to collect data to identify the underlying patterns or cause and effect relationships in the physical world, whereas policymakers need information they can use in a way that meets societal, economic and political objectives. And where scientists and engineers and only specialists that drill down into their subject matter, often acquiring their expertise over decades, policymakers are often generalists that have to address the pressing problems of the day and move from one domain to the next every few years. So I think we do need to reflect on this remark that was made yesterday about who is really the end user for the kinds of data that we're producing and to recognize that data for science is not necessarily the same thing as information for policymaking. And in other words, policymakers need policy-relevant information not necessarily data. And so we think we need to think of ways to better understand the needs of policymakers. Turning then to the next strand, which is leadership, we've heard a number of speakers indicating that our goal is to move from data to a scientific understanding of the problems of space sustainability, which then are expressed in terms of policy which is ultimately translated into action. And we heard in several panels about the siloed approach to space governance with different entities being responsible for different aspects of the problem. And I think this is a situation that is true in many countries. And so we need leadership at national level to overcome this current siloed approach to space governance in many countries and indeed in the UN system as well. And indeed, enhanced collaboration between government, industry and academia will allow us to overcome these siloed approaches with their inherent gaps and to harness the unique attributes of each of these sectors, namely the agility and innovation of industry, the rigor and multidisciplinary of academia and the policy and regulatory experience of government. But getting these loops going requires leadership. And as space activities become more international, perhaps being carried out by actors under several legal jurisdictions, we also need to think of ways to enhance regulator to regulator dialogues, to avoid fragmented governance and to address chain of custody issues. Reflecting on international cooperation, a number of the issues we've discussed, whether they're climate change or space debris, are inherently global issues. And no single actor or group of like-minded actors has the ability to solve these problems entirely on their own. And this requires a coordinated global response or global action in the policy, technical and regulatory fronts. So we need to strengthen the existing multilateral institutions to ensure that they're fit for purpose in dealing with these intrinsically multilateral issues. For example, yesterday we heard about the population of large legacy objects that from a scientific point of view, it would make sense to make them a priority for remediation. But this, as we all know, is not a scientific issue, but more of a political and diplomatic issue. So we need international cooperation to solve the regulatory registration and liability challenges associated with such issues. Turning then to the third strand, namely capital, several speakers have referred to the need to perform risk and cost benefit analyses for these new systems that we are developing and deploying into the space environment. And a number of speakers pointed to the need to recognize the complete overall lifetime cost of sustainable space operations. So this means looking at the economic aspects holistically and integrating them into the financial plans of operators. From the investment community perspective that is providing the capital for these space systems, this raises the importance of responsible investment in space activities. And when it comes to promoting investment in responsible and sustainable space activities, government of course has a role to play, both in terms of providing incentives and disincentives to promote certain behaviors and discourage others. Lastly, pulling all of these three strands of technology, capital and leadership together, perhaps we need to change our perspective and approach to space sustainability from seeing it as a series of necessary actions to avoid the negative consequences of inaction to seeing it as an opportunity for growth and prosperity to be embraced by the entire space community. So those are some of my key takeaways from the past two days. I'd now like to bring this conference to a close and thank all of those who made it possible. An event like this, even a virtual one needs considerable resources. And so I would like to begin by thanking our digital content sponsors without whom it would not have been possible to organize this conference. Thank you also to our media partners who are playing a very important role in covering the developments in space sustainability and promoting greater transparency in space activities. I'd also like to thank the spotlight speakers for their excellent talks that set the scene for the panel discussions that followed. If you missed any of these excellent talks, you can catch them all on the Summit website and I can strongly recommend viewing them all. I'd also like to thank all the panelists who shared their wisdom, insights and experience with us. Thank you to all of you. And also to congratulate the winners of the essay contest, sorry. If you have not yet a chance to check out these videos on the conference website, I encourage you to do so. Lastly, an event of this type takes a lot of planning and preparation over a long time. I would like to thank the summit chair, Crystal Asleton for her excellent leadership in organizing this conference and to all my secure world colleagues, both seen and unseen for their efforts to organize and deliver this conference. As well as to the folks from SHIC Productions who were the producers for this event. Thank you to all of you. This brings our two-day program to an end, but we still have another segment of the summit aimed at young professionals tomorrow. I'd like to remind all the young professionals about the mentoring sessions tomorrow at 9 a.m. Eastern and 7 p.m. Eastern. If you're a young professional, you should have received an email about this. If not, and you would like to attend these mentoring events, please feel free to reach out to us. Lastly, thank you to all of you, the audience for your attendance and active participation in the discussions. We hope you enjoyed participating in this conference as much as we enjoyed presenting it to you. We're looking forward to the next summit for space sustainability as an in-person event in 2022 in a location outside of the United States. Watch our website for more information over the coming months. With that, I now close the third summit for space sustainability. We hope to see all of you in person next year. Thank you.