 Welcome to our panel session on the topic of money, risk, shame, and reputation, incenting responsible behavior in space. Space domain has become increasingly complex. We have more satellites, space applications and technologies, space users and space operators relying upon having a stable orbital environment than we have ever had before, and that trend continues to The complexity of the operating domain will only become more complex in the coming years. New activities and new actors brings with it the potential for increased benefit, but it also brings challenges to space sustainability that cannot and perhaps should not be addressed through regulation alone. We must find business and community rationale to develop responsible and implement responsible behavior in space. There's been much discussion about using positive and negative incentives to encourage responsible behavior in space, but few practical proposals. This panel aims to explore how the best developed some practical approaches. We want to discuss themes such as managing an increasingly complex orbital environment. What role is there for voluntary commitment and best practices? How do we track and monitor performance towards those commitments? And what role does the insurance and investment communities have to play in incenting or encouraging responsible private sector space activities? Can we draw lessons or experience from other sectors and encouraging the private sector to act in sustainable and responsible ways in space? Over the next 15 minutes, we plan to dive into these topics. We have a panel of experts that I think is very well placed to look at these topics from multiple angles, technical business and economics. You can find their full bios on the Summit webpage, but I do want to briefly introduce each of them. Francesca Letizia is a space debris engineer at the European Space Agency Space Debris Office, where she leads assessments of general compliance space debris mitigation guidelines by operators and the development of metrics to assess the contribution of missions to the overall space debris environment. Francesca is also a member of a multi-organization team developing a space sustainability rating. So Francesca, I guess that means in terms of scope for our panel, you're covering reputation today. Chris Bashausen is an operating partner at DCVC, or Data Collective, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm where he leads that firm's investment in space and other deep tech companies. The space portfolio at DCVC includes such firms as Rocket Labs, Capella Space and Planet. Chris was also a co-founder of Planet where he was the firm's chief technology officer. Chris, looks like you're the money angle today in our conversation. Nishant Choksi is the managing director of ARIES Advisors. He has over 17 years of experience in space and insurance brokerage industries, where he specializes in risk management and large portfolio placements and claims. Nishant, clearly you're covering the risk angle in our discussion today. Jim Boyd is a senior fellow and holds the Thomas Klutznick chair in environmental policy at Resources for the Future. He's also the director of social science and policy at the National Social and Environmental Synthesis Center. An economist by training Jim's research emphasizes collaborations between ecologists and economists in order to guide decisions that affect natural resources. So Jim, I guess that leaves you with the shame angle. Sorry about that. So with that, we'll get right into the discussion here. I'm excited for it. It's just a brief word on format. We'll start off with some moderator-led discussion, but we're going to leave plenty of time for audience question and interaction. So please do submit your questions via the Zoom Q&A feature. Again, that's where we'll be looking as the moderator to see the question, so please do use that feature. And so with that, let me switch over to our first question, and that is for Francesca. In your work with the space debris office at ESA, Francesca, you're involved in research tracking and evaluating potential risks in the space environment. In your viewpoint, what are the most pressing challenges operators must address, and how can initiatives like the Space Sustainability Rating encourage those operators to do so? Hello, and thank you for having me here today. So to reply to your question, so what we are witnessing in these recent years is a dramatic increase in the launch traffic. So just to give some numbers, while maybe 20 years ago we were launching around 100 satellites per year, now already this year we have launched more than 600 satellites. And if we try to see what this means in terms of the impact on the environment in the long term, we find that the current level of activity combined with the current level of adoption of mitigation guidelines is not sustainable in the sense that if we continue, like now we would have served an exponential growth in the number of debris objects. So the main challenge to be addressed is exactly how to improve the compliance rate for what concerns the disposal of satellites at the end of their missions and the minimization of breakups in orbit. And so for this last point, there are several actions that operators can take to minimize the risk of breakups, for example from ensuring that the spacecraft is properly passivated at the end of the mission or testing new platform first at lower altitudes. And instead for what concerns the end of life disposal, we also see that there is a large margin for improvement. So if we look at the current statistics, we see that in Leo only around 20% of the satellites they should perform a disposal maneuver to actually try to do so. And so the improving in this in this aspect is really essential to ensure sustainable operation in space. And now if we want to be able to positive, we can look at the at the geo region where actually the level of compliance is much higher and consistently above 80% in in these last years. And so one can ask why there is this difference with respect to Leo. And one reason may be that in geo operators clearly see the economic and the operational advantage of keeping this region free from inactive spacecraft. And so in order to make this link more visible for for any operator, we have been working on initiatives such as the the spaces and ability rating that you mentioned before. So on one end, one of the elements of the of the rating is what we call the environmental impact assessment of a mission. So in essence, basically we perform this assessment by estimating which is the probability for a spacecraft to break up in orbit, for example, because of collision or because of an explosion. And then we look at which is the the potential effect of this fragmentation on other active satellites. So we do this basically to contribute to create this link between current behaviors and future operation. And we have seen that this could be part of the reason why we we observe better compliance values in in geo. And on the an additional aspect that says also that we believe that this kind of assessment of the mission provide an additional granularity with respect to just checking if an orbit or sorry, a mission is compliant or not. And this could be useful, for example, especially for new camera operators to understand how different choices in the mission architecture may have a different impact on the on the environment. And on top of this, if we look at operating in space as a shared resources, then these approach also encourage more transparency in showing how different actors are consuming this, this shared resource. And then as you mentioned in the also in the introduction, what we are trying to do with the spaces in ability rating is also to try to put emphasis on good behavior. So this means that we are not trying to create a new set of guidelines, but rather to recognize operators that comply to them, or they go even beyond by adopting measures that try to reduce, which is the disruption that they can cause to neighboring missions in the short term or more in general to to the environment. So in summary, the way we think that the the space sustainability rating can encourage operator is by making more explicit this link between current behaviors and sustainable operations by offering more transparency and also offering a framework for positive recognition. All right, well, thank you for that. And I think there's a couple of things that we can return to their importance, just the idea of transparency and how that may help us think about being being more responsible. And then the idea of a positive encouragement is something I think we will definitely want to return to. So Chris, the next question is for you. So Leticia has described or Francesca is described an effort to better kind of quantify and be more transparent about space sustainability challenges and our performance towards them. In your role as an investor and as a venture capitalist, to what degree do these space sustainability challenges even matter in making investment decisions? And what does and how does that relate to the role or any role that the investment community might have in encouraging responsible space behavior? Yeah, that's a great question. I think my answer is different because of my NASA and planet experience. So we, you know, at Planet, we, like before we started Planet, we, you know, we were working actively on new approaches to debris management and to conjunction analysis. And the people that we work with at NASA ended, ultimately joined Planet. So Planet had that in its culture. And so I've taken that to DCVC. I'm not sure that's universally true for the investment community at large though. And the reason for that is that they just don't have that shared experience. And they don't know about it. And so I think one of the, my main recommendations for, you know, new companies and Francesca, I think what one of my observations is the difference between Leo and Geo is that the Geo community have lived and breathed that for 40 years. And a lot of the new entrants in the Leo market are new operators. Sometimes space companies started by people with absolutely no space background, which on one hand is absolutely amazing. And on the other hand, completely terrifying. And so, sort of bridging that gap where we want to encourage new people to enter our industry and bring new ideas to us, but also kind of catch up on the history and the important dimensions of this business that they need to understand. And so I use my role at Data Collective to evangelize a lot of, you know, orbital, you know, debris and collision and space traffic management, space situational awareness concepts. And I promulgate that from my role. And I encourage my fellow BCs to do the same. But I think we do have an education gap, both in the investment community and the startup community. So education and information sharing is a starting point before we can even begin to think about incentives around behavior. So let's... Yeah, you've got to know the problem exists to be able to know you want to solve it. Excellent. Let's hold that point and come back to it shortly. So Nishant, over to you now for the insurance side of this. So it's often in our community suggested that the space insurance sector can enact policies and pricings to reward or encourage private actors to act responsibly. How would you react to that? Can we have a safe driver discount for space operations? Yeah, thanks Ian. Yeah, I think, you know, to answer that question more directly, we've already heard from Francesca and Chris and they've introduced elements of things that I consider on a daily basis from an insurance perspective. And that is what is the risk? Can we understand it? And how can we price it? And how can we price it to a sustainable level to maintain a space insurance industry that can support this broader changes in the space industry at large? So I guess to give you a bit of background, the purpose of the space insurance industry is to enable space businesses to help them protect their balance sheets against space related risk. But this needs to be done at a pricing level that's sustainable for the industry. We try to price a risk at a point where we believe it's commensurate with the risk being sought and those risk profiles these days are absolutely changing as Francesca noted earlier. So here we can offer actual real solutions but they have to be at a good price, have to be at a fair price. But clearly these are exciting times for the space industry and for us as space insurers. To respond to your question directly, absolutely we can offer a safe driver discount and I would say to a large extent this is actually already incorporated into our pricing models. However, we do see challenges for the new space operators. The challenge is how space activities are defined and today we do not see that they actually are. We have our own view of what safe means from a technical perspective, from an insurance policy perspective, but the expansion of the industry is creating these new risk profiles to evaluate and it's natural that the growth creates uncertainty and this leads to a potential increase in the risk. There's actually two pieces that I would kind of highlight from an insurance perspective. For liability insurance, those are risks that impact third parties, so everyone's concerned really about the collision risk, space situation awareness. We find that nations that require these have different requirements. At times it may be the case where it's not very feasible or practical even to measure what we consider to be the maximum probable loss, which is how rating and insurability is determined from a liability standpoint. It's a difficult calculation for not only nations, but also those actors that are required to insure against those liability risks. It is a bit difficult. Then from my perspective, I need insight into aspects such as operational plans for collision avoidance, deorbit plans, other contingencies that would help de-risk the liability and to what extent different space operators can actually do this varies greatly and I think Chris actually mentioned that as well earlier. The other aspect is the asset coverage which is the insurance against actual physical loss of your own space asset. We can also look at not just physical but also loss of revenues, but that's purely at the discretion of the space actor and at times it could be a requirement of their investors. So to give you a bit of perspective, the established operators who are familiar with space insurance and its benefits do see a safe driver discount because we have transparency in technical aspects such as flight heritage, technical depth and breadth of their teams. We have statistical evidence to support quality and reliability statistics that support overall missions. We would expect to see the same level of information and transparency on the new space operators, but that's really not always the case. In closing, I really want to highlight the fact that the space insurance industry has already in the last three to five years been able to demonstrate its ability to create new insurance solutions to cover some of these new risk aspects. It's the adaptation and awareness of those benefits of space insurance that continue to I would say elude the broader spectrum of buyers and operators in the new space sector. And it's the ability to ensure against the risk of loss that benefits not just the operator buying insurance but the customers, the regulators, the investors and the broader space community. So I really feel that that is the real value creation of space insurance to lead to sustainability in this industry. Thank you for that, Nishant. It's a couple of things there that I was trying to jot down here so that we can come back to, but there's a clear thematic link between you're talking about awareness of the role of the insurance industry plays in its products and ability to develop those things to what Chris was saying about just awareness within the his sector about some of the challenges that we face. So clearly there's a theme already developing around what we can do to educate and broaden awareness. So Jim, I want to come to you now. You're coming to us from outside of the space domain, but you've done a lot of work in environmental economics and natural resources management looking at what I might call analogous challenges in different sectors to what we're looking at in our community. So as you listen to the challenges that we've discussed so far on this panel and perhaps in the previous one, is there anything that you're thinking about from the experience with natural resources management and environmental economics that might be immediately coming to mind as relevant here? You're muted, sir. Sorry. Thanks, Ian. Yeah, several things. And I actually, if I had to pick one thing to focus on, it would be to build on Nishan's comments related to insurance. So there's an important analogy in the environmental policy arena to this space insurance issue. And that is that insurance plays a hugely important role in deterrence of damages and reduction of risk in the environmental area. Whenever you put an oil tanker out to see whenever you build a gas station, whenever you build a landfill, you actually are required by US law to have insurance coverage much like you're required to have insurance coverage as an automobile driver. And that requirement to have insurance plays this incredible behavioral role in my view. And that is we tend to think of environmental regulation as, you know, do this, do that. But these insurance requirements harness the power of the market, harness the incentives created by different types of pricing like Nishan's concerned about. And so that's a clear analogy. The one, the one thing I want to add to what Nishan said is the importance in my view of mandatory insurance. If you leave it as a voluntary thing, it can work to a certain extent, but I'd like to put out there for a discussion the idea of what are called financial responsibility requirements or mandatory insurance requirements, which actually helps stimulate the insurance market and level the playing field for all the actors concerned. So that's one analogy that's very clear. Shifting gears a little bit. The problem of orbital congestion also has analogues in the environmental arena. We worry a lot about automobile congestion and develop policies for dealing with that. So intuitively, you know, we impose tolls on cars to, in effect, raise revenue, but also lead people to change their driving behavior in a way that reduces congestion. Another alternative is kind of the HOV lane analogy. And I'm not quite sure how this would work in the space context, but basically what you're doing there is you're allocating slots based on particular behaviors. You know, how many people you have in the car, in the space context, I'd be interested in your thoughts on allocating space to platforms that have particular technological characteristics and things like that. That's another analogy we could explore. And then environmental economists actually did a lot of early work on spectrum allocation because environmental economists worry about public goods in the commons. And so there's a lot of lessons to be learned from my world, I think, in terms of any of those spectrum allocation questions. Again, how you allocate scarce spectrum either via auction or by giving spectrum as a property right and then allowing people to trade that property right to get to the highest value uses. So these are all all analogies that I think are worth exploring. But the direct answer to your question, I think the insurance angle is the most appealing. And in my work on environmental issues, arguably the most important thing to explore more deeply. All right. Thank you for that. And I think there's just a lot there that we could pick up for on discussion. And that's great because we're now coming to the portion of the panel that is meant to be that discussion. So I'm beginning to see some audience questions come in. Please, audience members, please do submit those questions through the Q&A and upvote the ones you really want us to ask. But I want to pick up on something, Jim, you were just talking about right there. And that was the potential to have a requirement for insurance. So there are a few, and I say few very deliberately, a few jurisdictions in the space world that require on orbit insurance. It is not particularly common. We typically have launch insurance, and that's to protect the business investment, but we do not typically require on orbit insurance. There's a current role making action moving through the FCC in the U.S., which has the space debris mitigation requirement role in the U.S. space regulatory system, that is requesting comment on requiring and putting into place an indemnification requirement so that private operators really indemnify the U.S. government against liability concerns around debris operations. So curious from, I think, Nishant and Chris, in particular, how you would react to some of the suggestions Jim just made around requiring insurance, given the context that we have in our industry and some of the emerging businesses that we're looking at. Yeah, Nishant, do you want to go first? Sure. I think, thanks, Chris. Yeah, when it comes to, I would say the early days of some of these new risk profiles emerging, we understand that there are risks related to collisions and liabilities, and space operators want to protect their own assets. So there's different classes of risks that we need to consider. What the right product is and how that fits into it, as Jim was mentioning earlier, is it going to be mandatory or required? Clearly, from my perspective, insurance, no matter what kind of vertical you're playing in, is a cyclical kind of business. You have claims that lead to rate movements. You have, introduces more capacity into the market. That capacity comes in, creates more competition and all of a sudden see rates dropping, and then you kind of go through that cycle yet again. When we're at the early days of these types of risks, there is a tendency for some insurers to take a view that certain risks should be excluded simply because we don't fully understand or have an appreciation for it. There's other risks that we do understand and we can price those, but those might come at premiums that might not be adequate or feasible for space operators to buy that level of insurance. It might be too expensive. So finding that commonality is possible. Now, if you take the route that it needs to be required, you're going to attract a lot of business. You're going to attract a lot of capacity because they see a development of a market. And these are for-profit companies. So looking to generate, expand revenue. If we see a market expanding, that's opportunity for insurers to enter. Until we see it start seeing a level of claims activity or lack thereof, that's really going to determine where that pricing goes and what insurers are going to or not going to be able to buy levels of insurance. So I think James actually brought up a great analogy, which is that of the automobile. So on our roads, we solved these problems a very long time ago. And most countries have mandatory third party insurance. So in space, if you, for your own business case, feel like you don't need to ensure your own asset for loss, that's okay. That's acceptable. But I think it's not acceptable that you could potentially cause harm to someone else. And it ultimately, right now, as you mentioned, shunt the liability transfers to the state under the treaty. So you're basically exposing, as we encourage more people to start space startups and other types of enterprises in orbit, we're increasing the liability for our governments. We don't want to lose our right to do that. So we really need to help them out. And so I think that's a fair ask from the government to mandate that companies have third party liability insurance. Another point about the car example is the situation we have in Lyra right now is you can be driving your car. And if it breaks down, you get out and you leave it there. And you just leave it there forever on the highway. And so space debris you can think of as a highway where just the broken down cars keep accumulating. And at some point you can't drive anymore. And so I think we need to go further than just having legal and fiscal tools to solve this problem. I think we also need to make sure that people can afford to pay for the debris removal. And so that's an additional layer of insurance that I think people should have where if their asset fails, they are on the hook for all of the recovery costs to restore free access to that public commons. And so I think this is a fairly new idea. But a number of companies and startups are pushing this. And I think it's probably one of the biggest tools that we need to put in place, which is you just can't leave your broken down car on the freeway anymore. Yeah, can I jump in here on Chris's point? Yeah, there's also an analogy to exactly what you were saying there in the environmental field that relates to mining activities, the end of the life of landfills, things like that where there are bonding requirements that ensure that money is available for any repair or accidents that occur after the lifetime of the landfill or the mine. And the insurance industry plays a role in that bonding activity as well. So I'm really glad you've made that point. All right. Thanks. All this is very interesting. I want to ask one more question as a moderator, and then I'm going to start going to the audience question and answer. But Chris, so you said it's acceptable behavior to leave your car on the highway and walk away from it. So the question I want to ask, and I think I'm going to ask Francesca to start and then the other panelists to weigh in here is, how can we talk about incentivizing or encouraging responsible behavior if we don't know what responsible behavior is? Do we have a baseline in our community for identifying what a responsible space actor, be that a commercial actor or a government actor, what that looks like? So Francesca, can you talk about that from the standpoint of the space sustainability rating and then I'd be curious to hear other panelists' reaction? Yes. So I think that on one end we have actually already the tools to define such baseline and somehow you can think that this baseline has already been defined even maybe not articulated in a single document or guideline. So if we think of the problem of space debris, we can see that there are two dimensions to the problem, the long term and the short term. So for the long term, there is a continuous ongoing effort in international bodies such as the Interagency Space Debris Committee to model the debris environment its sensitivity to different parameters as for example the compliance to mitigation measures. And this can help in identifying which actions are expected to have the largest positive impact and so define this minimum level of responsible behavior in space. And for the short term one, instead we can look mainly at the, for example, the collision avoidance process and how operators can minimize the burden on other operators, but also on the space surveillance systems in general. And so we look at action such as communicate the vulnerability of the satellite and screen and maneuvers, all these elements that were mentioned also in the previous panel. And here we see that the cooperation among operators can really be positive in shaping these best practices and contributing again to define which is the minimum level of responsible behavior. And for what concern the space sustainability rating specifically as you asked, these are all elements that actually are part of the rating. So the rating will be composed by different modules and some of the modules exactly are, for example, on what operators are doing in terms of data sharing or the collision avoidance operation, etc. And it's also always important to keep in mind that the step that should always be done when we look at these best practices is also to understand how we can then feedback these also to these long term simulation of the environment to understand really what are also the long term implications. But I think that the tools are there and it's possible to define this baseline. Thank you for that. And either the panelists have a perspective on either what Francesca has said or on the question of whether we even know what a baseline of responsible behavior is. Well, I think it's changing, right? I mean, back when we had really just one or two CubeSats and then more or less SpaceX and every other launch vehicle was launching a Geosat, I think things were fairly stable. But now that we've got a large number of small to largest satellites in Leo and Mio and increasing numbers of them, the situation is changing. And I think we've learned a lot. I mean, I think even some of the things we talked about today were not even considered at similar conferences five or ten years ago. And we talked about SSA, Space Situational Awareness was a topic, but not really about the responses to derelict satellites and collisions and so on. So I think these are the new dimensions that frankly we as a community are just discovering. And so that needs to become mainstream, but I don't think it is yet. All right. Thanks. So let's start turning to our audience now. We have a number of questions submitted through the chat. So I'm trying to start weaving those into the conversation here. And I want to start with this one. So we've been talking a lot in this panel about commercial activity, new actors and new commercial business models and new uses of space. We also should recognize that historically a lot of the activity in space has been government and some of the, a large portion of the debris objects that we are concerned about are legacy objects from government activities, right? So the question that's been posed is how do we incent governments to act responsibly? Is the incentive structure that we think about there a different set of mechanisms that we might think about for the commercial industry? And so Jim, maybe I put you on the spot if there's any lessons from your domain there and then to others that want to take that on. Sure. Just briefly, the government, the federal government in particular often does in the environmental context take a lead in order to stimulate and demonstrate good behavior. So you'll have energy efficiency requirements for federal facilities, for example, recycling, kind of life cycle recycling initiatives. So you do see some of that. Now the politics of that though, I mean, basically it's an interesting question. Why does the federal government do that? It's really about congressional politics. There's got to be a nudge from the Hill in effect to, and it can be a fairly direct way of getting some experimentation and leadership from the federal agencies happening. But I assume that the real driver there is, first of all, the agency's belief that it's the right thing to do, sort of a cultural belief, and then some political and political inducement and budgetary authority to actually be doing that. So to me what that means is if the private sector sees a role for the government to be proactive in a way it isn't right now, that is kind of a congressional and a political calculus to be my guess. So Chris and Nishant, can you maybe pick up on that? How can the private sector be more effective to advocate for government action on some of its legacy objects? Chris, on you this one. Okay. Yeah, I mean, there's not a lot we can do about them yet, right? I mean we can't go and get them and move them really, so that's hopefully coming into the next decade but we're not there yet. So all we can really do is track them and I think just being more forthcoming with their catalogue and the accuracy of their catalogue would be a big step so that people can predict their collisions and do their avoidance maneuvers with better information. That's probably the biggest step and then obviously having a commitment from this day forward to for instance stop tossing second stages into orbit and things like that which is something we all need to do. But one of the sad things about this problem is that once the damage is done it's done and at least in terms of our state of art right now irreversible. So until that changes, you know, but we kind of are stuck dealing with the problems that we've got. So I think at least sharing information is a good start. All right, back to the transparency and information sharing theme that we picked. We started at the beginning of this, right? Yeah. All right, so Francesca, we have a couple of questions here that relate to the sustainability rating itself and so just ask a couple of those right now. Now that they've moved, so give me a second to find it again. So the question has to do with what the rating is measuring. Talk about space sustainability rating and talks about operator behavior and so we're measuring and trying to define how to compare how operators are behaving in terms of responsibility. Should we also not be considering design of satellites as part of this? So satellites don't, you know, we don't want to design satellites to fail. Is that also not part of responsible behavior? Okay, so first I want to say that what we have been doing in these two years of the, in the development of the space sustainability rating, we see it as a first step. So we are not aiming at solving all the problems in these first iterations. So for sure, there are aspects that at the moment we are not considering but then maybe with the evolution that we have been mentioning already, there will need to be included later on in the development of the rating. But this aspect of the design we are already somehow taken into account because one of the elements that we will consider is for example the application of standards in the design of the mission. So for example if you apply the ISO standard then you will get a better rating. So somehow in let's say in a indirect way these aspects are taken into consideration. The problem specifically with the design choices which is one of the aspects actually that we considered in the really initial phase of the design of the rating is that it's an aspect that is difficult for an agency to verify. So what we would like to, so you will have to go through the documentation of the satellite and do this assessment which may be not so straightforward and also may rely on information that could be deemed to be let's say not controversial but maybe covered by intellectual property rights. So what we considered for the rating is as I said and I'm talking about this first iteration is to try to remove these kind of barriers. For example for sharing of data that could be problematic for commercial operators and this is one of the reasons why the design is considered but through the application of standards and not through really an analysis of the specific design that the operators is adopting. All right thank you for that. All right so let's and apologies are going to jump around in subjects a little bit here but let's return now to the discussion of information sharing awareness and education that we had at the beginning of this and so Chris I think this is going to be for you to start but I'm certainly welcome for any other panelists that come in on this. The question that we have in the chat is about how do we educate future space entrepreneurs about space sustainability challenges and is that do we want to look for the university system? Do we want to build specific programs around space sustainability but there's also a bigger question to this is then how do we also educate the investor community that you spoke about about some of these challenges and what are the means to doing that? Yeah so my real concern is people from outside the industry who get excited about space so you know an example in my world might be somebody who just sold a software startup and then you know it decides it's finally time to return to their love of space and so they go to Palo Alto VCs and raise a bunch of money and neither of those two groups of people know anything about space they just get excited by it and have a ton of money that's my biggest concern so those ones are hard to reach because they don't know what they don't know. For the rest of us that are in the space including space VCs who you know have been coming to space conferences for years but and know the issues and people who have degrees in aerospace engineering or have been to the International Space University or you know regularly attend the IAC those people know of the existence of this problem and I see that their behaviors are very different so I think we've done a pretty good job in our own community of educating the people that we know and we share the information and everywhere you go in this industry from from undergraduate university through to ISU and professional life you hear about it and it is baked in and I think we've done a very good job of that. The question is how do we get these other people to say go to ISU before they start a space company or you know come to this workshop as part of their learning process to building their business plan and that's the part that I haven't solved yet and I'd love to hear ideas about how to how to sort of broaden that net you know to sort of capture those people and bring them into the community we have here you know where we have people like Francesca doing excellent work that is available to them you secure world as well right so how do we how do we embrace them and welcome them in and tell them what they need to know if I can add something on this and an idea that we we are considering for the sustainability rating but also for our work internally in ISA is for example to provide a web-based platform where operators can let's say submit the main characteristics of their mission and understand how the this rating or the this environmental impact assessment that I mentioned before will change if you change some parameters in the architecture of the mission of the mission because exactly as you as you said Chris before we also think that it's very important to to bridge this education gap to make more clear how different choices can really have an impact in which is the effect on the environment on the on the long term so this is how from a purely technical point of view we are considering to to address this this aspect unmute all right thank you both both for that I mean it's clearly I think we can define that we need to do better there in terms of of reaching out to some of these new audiences that are that are driving activity in our in our segment but the the specific challenges of how we do that are something I think you know I know that I I'm challenged within my own work at secure world so it's a shared challenge for for all of us um all right uh I'm going to go back to a couple of of technical questions here so we have a we have a question that that looks at I think something that that's somewhat related to what Jim raised about certain orbital zones or you know the HOV concept right how if we can apply that to to space operations to in this question I think it's to any panelists who wants to take it we have seen some proposals in some new startups and new businesses to look at trying to utilize a region of space known as very low earth orbit so you know probably below 250 kilometers something that would decay naturally very quickly um the question is do we think this is an interesting way to balance space safety with with with new new areas of activity and new and new innovation yeah can you mind if I take that I think so go for it yeah yeah no I think um I think that's a really interesting idea so um one of the sort of big advantages that CubeSat's in the early days had was um you know they're small small surface area and and um low orbits they kind of naturally clean up um and you know we the earth is bombarded by you know several tons of meteorite material every day so you know a few satellites that can get completely vaporized as a fairly insignificant contribution there's no real pollution that I that I believe is measurable from a satellite re-entering the atmosphere um and so it's a pretty cool idea um and so if we can solve that at least those satellites are out of the way and when your car breaks breaks down in this case it cleans itself up and that's really true of any orbit below 500 kilometers is that you have enough drag that you just help clean up the real issue is people going higher than that and getting you know more excited so I encourage anyone to go as low as possible for your mission profile um and if you you know can use your last single command before your satellite dies or your last drop of fuel to push the orbit down you should do that because these very low orbits are are amazing for sort of you know self clean up and taking care of the debris so I strongly encourage people to look at ideas down there and you know of course you know if you're half the distance away from the earth you know if you have a camera you've got double the resolution so it's better for your business plan too um so I think there's some exciting business plans just around the corner there so that may be a an emerging norm we can continue to converse around is is if you can use a low orbit as much as you can possibly use it let's let's uh let's look look for that right exactly yeah okay um anybody else on that one all right uh one for francesca here kind of lightning fashion um does the space sustainability rating um consider environmental impact um to anything on earth essentially or is it just looking at the orbital domain so um yeah as I said in this first interact interaction we on purpose decide to focus only on the in orbit uh domain so we would just look at the space debris issue in itself and we are not considering aspects such as for example the impact of reentry or the impact on the atmosphere so these are these um factors are not present at the moment for this current uh yeah edition let's say of the rating thank you for that I've got one for Jim here from Mark Mulholland uh so Jim is there an analogy to the superfund construct uh phase one is to stop polluting space and start being responsible uh many operators understand this phase two being more more complex how do we clean up the historical mess that has been created by prior operations yeah and it it should worry you all a little bit the superfund story in a nutshell is that uh in an era prior to regulation I'm overstating this but in the era decades prior to regulation a lot of pollution was created and so when it came time to say wait that's a big problem we need to solve that problem there was then the question of who's gonna pay and uh superfund involved a uh a mechanism that was upsetting to a lot of people which was basically uh a reliance on what's called joint and several liability which it wasn't market share liability although that could play a role basically if you had deep pockets if you were still in business if you could pay you were in principle on the hook for anything um the government could get out of you so it's a cautionary tale I think there is a definite analogy here um if I were in the industry it would be a motivation for me to get really in front of this problem um because if there comes a time where the you know global institutions decide we have got to solve this legacy problem they're then going to start searching for responsible parties and that can be very expensive um and even for the deepest pocket leading companies all right so thank you I mean so challenges of um of balancing appropriate you know appropriate government role versus um encouraging you know and allowing industry activity to continue right is something that um is fundamental and I think and then the questions we're looking at is clearly a discussion that we could pull out of that of that experience as well so all right um so I'm gonna pose this one to everyone it kind of relates to something that we're talking about in this panel but also also the the prior panel and that is the role of standards and and standards for behavior and industry voluntary commitment standards versus allowing innovation and allowing new activities to continue and to and to to not become overly overly specific specific um so as as entities develop standards or norms for responsible behavior in space do we have any concern about that being a an activity that becomes um anti competitive or leads towards particular um standards entrepreneurs or innovators dominating things for their own for their own benefit so so the question is how do we balance the standards contribute to innovation or do they do they help us think about being responsible or are they a concern around around limitations yes just quickly yeah again this is a fascinating question uh sorry to keep using all these analogies but um you know this this in the auto industry for example fuel economy standards uh you know the industry leaders can in principle at least use tight fuel economy standards as a barrier to entry uh to reduce competition i'm not going to go so far as to say that's anti competitive in a legal sense but there is a close connection and intertwinement between competitive advantage and standard setting uh definitely so um chris in the shot maybe for you um is acting responsibly as a new operator is that a competitive advantage um i think right now there's still an inclination for people to cheat um and to cut corners so i'd probably in that suggested the answer right now is no um but you know i i think i have observed that at least people who have grown up in this industry typically behave responsibly um so um you know it's nice that they're not cheating um but i think we need to change that and then on the standards part yeah i would be reluctant to say see um you know one of the burgeoning um you know the upcoming space debris removal companies um you know patent their connector and mandate you know that everybody use that connector and then have them have a monopoly on that because frankly we need you know these are tow trucks right we need we need lots of tow trucks we need every country to have a tow truck um and so i think that's one thing where we might want to avoid um monopolistic behavior um now if you built the thing and you get to fly that's great but you shouldn't stop other people from um also um you know launching their their tow trucks um and cleaning up mess as well so yeah so one of the one of the other things that secure world is involved in is facilitating an industry group looking at standards and best practices for satellite servicing known as the consortium for execution of rendezvous and servicing operations or FERS and that's a that's a discussion we're having chris in that group is that we see interfaces and interoperability as an important future enabling factor um for this on-orbit infrastructure and on-orbit servicing development so how do we facilitate that conversation that allows you know individual business models to progress but you have that that commonality of functions and so that's a that's a that's a it's an ongoing conversation but it's a it's very interesting i think important one um another thing that you just you just hit on so is there a business advantage to being a responsible actor and he said you know I see see people in the industry are thinking about this and we've talked about people coming in from outside of the industry that maybe are not as as familiar seems it's an element of culture there right of corporate culture of you know industry culture and and so um you know sustainability space sustainability has an operational impact but how do we can we design or can we encourage firms to think about it from a culture standpoint what what mechanisms can we consider for that and that'd be curious to hear I don't want to I don't want to put this all on chris um but it'd be curious to hear reactions from the other panelists as well what why doesn't someone else go first yeah I mean I I can address part of that one um you know typically uh space operators that are seeking to ensure uh risks whether they be in leo geo uh wherever they may be in space um you know my job is to understand what their business plan is from a technical perspective financial insurance etc so there's a big uh there's a there's a large um uh process of asking questions that are very detailed and seeing how those answers are responded to uh typically when we say you know are these actors behaving responsibly the fact that they're even seeking insurance to me as an indicator that they are being responsible um so so that's a positive sign in and of itself that the the challenge is for the risks that I don't see that I don't get to evaluate and right now because the industry is moving at such a broadening at such a fast pace it's difficult to see who is the good actor and who isn't the not so good actor because I I tend not to think that anybody's really a bad actor because if you're investing uh money and effort and resources and building the right teams and putting asset into space you're going to do it at some point uh to some level of responsibility to me it's when I see the risk then I look at it then I can evaluate okay how responsible are you being versus are they being responsible or not yeah so that that comes back to I mean I've heard other people I think in primarily in the context of the student ability rating but say you know good behavior is the baseline and what we're trying to do is incentivize behavior beyond um beyond that right so um appreciate that all right um I'm gonna pick up on that a lot of question that I'm asking from moderators prerogative um in encouraging people that to stay on that good behavior baseline and I want everybody to answer this um what is more effective shaming bad behavior or diversions from that that baseline or highlighting incentivizing um better behavior so if I can if I can start um so somehow operations in space are quite transparent in the sense that uh is not so difficult to spot who is maneuvering who is not and in fact the the say the bad actors or the most dangerous objects are actually well known um however this has not uh been particularly helpful in these last years if we look at the the level of compliance to mitigation measures that they mentioned at the beginning and this is exactly why with the space sustainability rating we are trying to shift this attitude towards instead trying to highlight uh good behavior and spot put in the spotlight uh the operators that are responsible because we think that in this way this can serve also to present positive examples of uh technological or operational solutions uh that have been approved to be successful in terms of debris mitigation so that's why we want to go in the direction of yes uh promoting the the good behavior anybody else shaming or calling out positive behavior yeah and I just go ahead Jim go ahead okay I'd like to uh uh take it in a slightly different direction and not answer your question um and I think um one thought I'm having is um who's doing the shaming and the rewarding is an important question um and this relates to the power of kind of consumer attitudes and consumer demand the way um people in a supply chain for example will reward um socially responsible behavior or not and a question I have for your community that shame and reward thing tends to work really well when the consumer sees very clearly um a connection between what they're buying and what the problem is so you know conflict free diamonds would be an example there I'm having a harder time I don't think that at the consumer level there's an awareness of that connection to what's happening in orbit I mean I'll use myself as an example if let's assume starlink is screwing something up up there am I part of starlink's supply chain I have no idea and so I'll just throw that out there as an important thing to think about is who's actually doing the shaming or the rewarding and how strong is that connection going to be felt go ahead Chris yeah so I mean there wasn't one notable example last year of someone who did cheat which was swam and I mentioned them by name because I believe that having at least one notable example of something that is considered fairly aberrant in our community is great because it scares the crap out of everybody else and I think it did scare a lot of people and my observation in you know speaking to other people was just that it reinforced that I completed that that's really bad and that little neuron that flips and gets re-communicated to other people which is that's really bad is really important so I think there is an element of public shame that is valuable that said if you have people that are marginal where they're like they just don't know how it works there's no real value in shaming those people they just that's where you really want to just encourage them hold their hand through the process explain invite them in and the things we already talked about earlier in you know educate them I think that's the primary tool here keeps coming back to that that education awareness piece right yeah that's the critical element of this and Jim thank you for I think you just raised a very good point the space industry is not yet a particularly consumer you know as in terms of individual consumer driven market is a government driven market it's a business driven market but in terms of end-use consumers it's a very much several steps removed right you may be using maybe watching direct tv or something or using gps on your phone right but your connection to the orbital the orbital environment and the risk thereof is fairly removed right so I think that is a that is a challenge that we do face in terms of who's doing of where the pressure is is coming from very much so nishant anything to add to this for a good next one yeah I think from an insurance perspective you know one of the principles you know just a lot of large numbers right it dictates of the losses of the fewer paid by the men so inherently I think that buyers of insurance are incentivized to behave responsibly responsibly to do the right things that they need to do when they face technical challenges or business challenges to to de-risk their their profile and if they do that you know that that benefits them and it benefits the the next guy buying insurance and the next guy buying insurance although when you have an issue depending on how that issue played out that's that pain is actually felt not just by the customer dealing with the claim but also by the future customers that have similar risk profiles so I think you know calling out the good behavior is is the the right way to build that you know reserve of premium that's ultimately you know there will be claims we all have to expect that and if everybody behaves responsibly then that pool grows and it is able to cover and create a sustainable insurance community yeah thank you I mean it's an indicator of itself of success right is growing that that pool and that that available that purchase all right so I got about 10 minutes left here you know go back down to some some detail level questions here before before we wrap up so the first one here from the from the audience member has to do with that with a very core trend that we're seeing in our industry which is the emergence of these very large often called mega constellations in low-earth orbits Jim you mentioned star like that's one of the key examples amazon one of some others the question is and it's interestingly phrased it's phrased as why cannot or why can't we have some international body like the international telecommunications union govern the allocation of orbital altitudes in a model similar to air traffic control is that is that a model that we should be we should be looking at or is that something that is probably beyond beyond need or reason at this time so from the from the technical perspective we we look at the example of it you as an inspiration and we ask ourselves how this could be reflected in terms of allocation even if from our perspective we don't think that allocation based on altitude it's the maybe the most appropriate one but for example with this idea that I mentioned in the beginning where we look at the the impact of emission what we do is what we try what we can try to do is to understand which is the the maximum capacity of the environment how we call it so which is the number and the type of missions that are compatible with the stable evolution of the environment over time so to avoid that we have a condition where we have this exponential growth in the number of objects and our idea and we are doing some research and some activities on this topic is exactly how you can start from this concept to then derive an allocation mechanism that can take this into account and be sure that the new missions that are launched are within these boundaries so that also in the future it would be possible to have sustainable operations yeah so transparency and measurement and understanding and then think about what what regulatory changes or anything needs to be made that seems to be a reasonable perspective so Nishant I have an insurance specific question so this one's got to go to you cyber security is something that we're seeing more attention to in the space community right now we just saw in the last few days the Trump administration came out with an executive order relative to this topic so the question is how does the insurance sector look at cyber issues for satellite operations do you provide insurance specifically for cyber security risks or is it too hard to estimate the the cost and risk level associated with that yeah thanks Ian yeah it's a this this actually is one of the you know growing risk concerns in the space insurance industry today as of recently actually the risk is actually excluded for some very specific language that's in the policy wordings today you know does does it make it hard to estimate the cost it still does it is hard to estimate the cost especially when the security posture of a lot of the companies that we evaluate are different we have I think a lot of space buyers today that come seeking insurance will will now start getting used to seeing questions that are related to cyber as the broader space insurance industry tries to understand what that risk actually is and because it varies so greatly between operators it's difficult to establish what that baseline coverage should look like and what that pricing in concept should look like as well so it is today it's excluded not to say that you know in the future if we understand it better that they that couldn't be put back into to to a cover okay thank you thank you for that let's see just a kind of scanning through the the last questions here um we talked about um all right uh so this may be uh this may be a question that that that is rather difficult to answer but um we're talking primarily about responsible operations in the context of current um environmental challenges current space sustainability challenges and current business and technical practices right um so we're talking about responding to a current environment is there any way in which we can model or think about um future practices that we should be thinking about now to to mitigate um potential future problems so um you know I used to be a I used to be a market forecast uh consultant and you know our job was to was to forecast the future and I can tell you every single study that we delivered was wrong right because you you you can take the best guess and you can't you know you don't know the future but how um how do we think about um designing now for for for challenges in the future is that is that something that we can consider if I if I've ended the panel on a stumper you can you can you can tell me that as well um yeah I mean I I agree with you about us being wrong about our predictions I um had not expected Starlink to actually launch that many satellites um you know I didn't really think any of the mega constellations would really show up and so Starlink at their launch rate is actually on track to possibly launch 10 to 20,000 satellites over the next few years which is an absolutely astounding number of satellites and I just don't think we're prepared for that because none of us thought anyone was really going to get the money to do it um so I think we're behind um so even catching up is mostly what we've talked about here today um and then the um the the future stuff you know maybe we need to start modeling worse cases and we could have five years ago actually built the laws and regular regulations around mega constellations but then I've observed there's a there's a reticence to do that because it doesn't seem real um but we should have maybe we should take a lesson from that and actually plan around what we imagine to be future cases even if at the time they seem unlikely and if I can add on this um so these uh approaches that I mentioned before when we look at the I said with this impact assessment we want to have more granularity with respect to just checking the compliance to mitigation guidelines exactly to go in this direction we think that with this approach we can be a bit more future proof um because if we just look for example at the at the number of objects that are in orbit or this kind of classical assessment we may have only a partial um yeah representation of the of the current situation which does not really translate in how sustainable our operations in the future so also from a technical point of view we are trying to reformulate a bit the problem so that we can a bit more flexible in in the analysis of future scenarios um flexibility um flexibility is is is always is always important right um all right uh so we've got um about four minutes here so it's uh it's time for kind of wrap up and and closing thoughts um I think what I'm thinking about as as the moderator after this is really going back to the the awareness and education aspect of this I think that has been something that that each of the panelists has mentioned um at some point um in this um in this uh in this conversation um and I think that is um that is the the key thing that we need to do as a community is just be sure that we are um effectively communicating about where the challenges um to sustainability of the orbital environment are and that there are obligations that that we have um as a as a community to respond to them um so the question that I'm um delaying to give myself time to formulate here is um what is the what is the core of the business incentive that will that will cause operators um to to act responsibly and not require regulation to do that um and I think each of you may have a slightly different perspective on that but I'd be I'd be curious to hear your your kind of concluding thoughts on what is the core business incentive for responsible operations here well well one is to forestall future less flexible more draconian regulation um and then I'd also point out regulation is many things and I guess I would encourage the community to think about regulatory foundations that whether they're supporting the insurance industry whether they're supporting flexible market-based orbital allocations even though those are flexible and market-driven they work best when there is a governmental or regulatory foundation to kind of um oil the machine if you will and so don't just think of regulation as this very heavy-handed thing that's telling you all what you have to do it can also be a foundation for um a lot of I think the flexibility and efficiency you're going after as a community Chris anything add to that yeah so I'm a you know technologist at heart and and you know when given an option I'd always prefer to take a technological solution than a legal or regulatory one and so one of the things we did at planet was we designed a low-speed radio that has a very wide beam um that is very easy to use and so one of the advantages of this radio is that for instance planet um you know when planet drops um you know 40 50 satellites out into orbit at once particularly on a ride share where there might be another 80 satellites planet is always able to find all of its satellites within five minutes ID them get positive contact with them and then send it you know get refined TLEs from our GPS and then send those back into the community so that people can say well those 40 we know a planet so ours is this but other actors I observed sometimes spend two weeks sort of hunting for there's not sure which which object is there not really steering the antenna correctly so the business incentive for that is that you can you know get you can find your satellite you're not you never stuck with a lost in space situation um you can get your mission up and running sooner and you can avoid collisions with other people and and not lose your assets in that crazy mayhem of a launch so that's one example of a technological tool that helps everybody provides information to the other operators so they can ID their satellites and move them out of the way um and get control of them so everybody wins from that but it's a simple radio and so there are little things like that that I think should be possibly mandated maybe regulation can assist in making them adopted at the end of the day this we open source this radio design because we thought it was valuable for everybody um and so people should just use it because it's actually better for your mission and so all of the other things that we're talking about here today are side effects but you can actually put your own self-interest first and say gee I wish I could find my satellite quickly and get positive control and get on with my job and you can do that and benefit everyone at the same time so this is not a it shouldn't be a cost to people to be a good to be a good actor in fact it can be beneficial Nishant Francisco any quick closing thoughts sure as uh as Chris mentioned I mean uh good behavior shouldn't come at a um at a cost uh I mean there is a price but you know entrepreneur mindset you know they're they're success oriented um you know the insurance expense line item on you know that they're thinking about may not even be contemplated until after they've raised maybe you know a couple rounds of funding until the risk becomes real to them the risk of loss really becomes real and then they consider insurance not to say that that's too late by any means but if they start thinking about it earlier on you know coordinating more with the investors with the insurance community um and getting a feel for what that risk and how it develops and changes over time as their business grows looks like that's what we really need to uh to focus yeah and on my side to connect to what James was saying before so I also think that the actually the regulatory requirements are really important but for operators is also an opportunity the fact of being involved in this uh best practice definition as they can really contribute to define what is the the new norm and the more these actions are consolidated and more likely that there will be later on capture in new standards and new guidelines so it's better to be involved in this process than just be subject to it at the end of it so that could be also an incentive to to this kind of behavior all right well thank you everyone um I think that was a very interesting chat we could probably keep going um I think the message um that that good good behavior should not have a business cost but but bad behavior probably does it's something that we all can um can take away from this um and with that I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Crystal for some um logistical remarks and onto the next element of our agenda so once again thank you everyone on the panel thank you everyone bye thank you