 Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us. My name is Victoria Samson. I'm the Washington Office Director of the Secure World Foundation. The Secure World Foundation is a private offering foundation that focuses on the long-term sustainable use of outer space. We use a cooperative international global approach to promote norms of behavior and methods that ensure that space is usable and accessible to everyone over the long term. So that was really, I mean, well, we have a great panel. I don't want to take too much time. But I did want to talk a little bit about why we wanted to have this issue of US-China engagement. Obviously, China is a major space power. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists Satellite Database, as of the end of November of last year, China had 284 satellites. China is actively moving towards a commercial space program. There were news stories this week about an attempted and ultimately unsuccessful commercial launch. But trust me, they're going to get there as well. The Chinese have a very active soft power outreach in terms of using space to make connections internationally. And China is very involved and multilateral for our discussions on space security and stability. These are all reasons why the United States needs to figure out a way in which to engage with China on space issues. I know our relationship is uneasy on the ground as well in space. Due to congressional legislation, White House and NASA are not allowed to do bilateral participation with China on space issues. This does, of course, send a message. But really, the point of this panel was to discuss all those other ways in which we do and can continue to engage with China on various issues. China is a major space power. It is a force to be reckoned with. And it behooves us to figure out how we can coordinate and cooperate and engage together in the space domain. So we'll be having viewpoints on this issue from the US. We're going to first have a specialist talk about the Chinese perspective on space policy and cooperation. And then we're going to have a couple government folks talk about it from their agency's perspectives, US and China engagement. And then we'll have a commercial perspective looking at that. And then finally, a wrap up discussion from the NGO, Michael and Bernie. So with that, you should have a copy of the BIOS. I'm not going to read out anyone's BIOS. I'm going to start with them. Thank you. Hello. Today, I will be discussing recent developments in China's space program and opportunities for cooperation with the United States. My research, broadly speaking, focuses on Chinese status or prestige ambitions and examines how these ambitions shape Chinese space policy. It is from this perspective that I will speak about potential opportunities for the United States to engage China in cooperation in our space. China's space program, like that of other space-faring powers, is driven by security, commercial, and status concerns. In the domain of security, China is pursuing a full array of counter-space weapons and is integrating space-based assets into its military in an effort to achieve information dominance. China's space program is notoriously opaque and has close ties to the People's Liberation Army, with launches occurring on military bases, and even China's human space flight program falling under the People's Liberation Army's General Armaments Department. To many US policymakers, China's pursuit of space power represents a clear and present threat to US satellites and sensors, as evidenced by China's 2007 ASAT test. While security interests are an obvious and important motive undergirding Chinese space policy, they do not explain some of China's most costly and ambitious initiatives in space. China now has the largest space program on the planet. It's the second largest space program on the planet. China has achieved several milestones, new fact today. China's achieved several milestones in its space program, placing a human in outer space in 2003, and most recently landing the Chang'e floor on the dark side of the moon. China, moreover, has unveiled the core module of its planned space station with plans to launch it in 2022. From the outside, China's Chinese space policy is sometimes viewed as part of a large, grand, strategic plan. Yet it's important to recognize the role of domestic politics and nationalism in China. While limiting our own domestic politics, we often have the tendency to view other states as unitary, intentional, and strategic. But like all countries, Chinese domestic politics are complicated. While it is often easy to dismiss the importance of public opinion in closed states, the Chinese Communist Party cares deeply about maintaining its own power. It maintains extensive apparatus for collecting and censoring public opinion. China's new social credit system and even the innovation of an app for users to study Xi Jinping thought are just a few examples illustrating CCP's concerns over legitimacy. Chinese Communist Party in part legitimizes its rule by claiming to regain respect for China, lost in what nationalist narratives describe as China's century of humiliation. This is what Xi Jinping refers to when discussing the so-called great national rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. China advertises extensively to domestic audiences that it has the dressings of a great power. China has hosted the Olympic Games, built its own infrastructure bank, launched the One Belt, One Road Initiative, and now has an aircraft carrier, despite the limited strategic rationale of possessing one. Likewise in space, China's most expensive projects are designed to attain the dressings of a great power, placing humans in space, building its own space station, and landing on the moon. Chinese leaders, like in other states, recognize the political utility of outer space for promoting national identity. As such, Chinese leaders have a keen interest in obtaining recognition from the international community that China is an equal and a space power. These facts are important to keep in mind when attempting to comprehend China's policymaking and in understanding potential opportunities for cooperative engagement in space. Chinese interest in attaining recognition of its status as a great power provide a means by which the United States can engage China and shape its behavior. To Chinese leaders, the attainment of status of prestige is an invaluable political resource. Recognition of China's status as an equal in world politics is an important priority for Chinese foreign policy. We can see this rhetorically with Chinese efforts to get the United States on board with its framework of the so-called new model of major country relations, or to adopt language of, quote, win-win cooperation. One avenue by which to attain Chinese support for U.S. priorities in outer space is to entice it with the political caret of recognition. Engaging China bilaterally or multilaterally as an equal member of the international community, similar to the responsible stakeholder framework, provides an important source of external and informal recognition of Chinese status ambitions. Political engagement through the United Nations or bilaterally through cooperation with NASA provides an informal means of recognizing Chinese status aspirations as a space power. Bilateral cooperation, moreover, serves as an important confidence-building measure for reducing misperceptions between the United States and China. For the United States, it would also provide greater information about how Chinese space policy is actually made. Recognition, however, should not be given freely. After all, this is a political caret for enticing cooperation. China should not be rewarded for bad behavior or violating norms in space. At the same time, however, China should also not be indiscriminately punished. Should China act responsibly, the United States should give it fair credit. Cooperation with China, however, must also be a tailor to adjust to political realities. While Chinese and now U.S. leaders have stated their interest in placing humans on the moon, the idea of the two powers cooperating bilaterally in a manner akin to U.S.-Soviet cooperation during the Apollo-Soyu's program seems far-fetched in the context of today's bilateral relations, which is a shame. While important differences exist between China and the United States, bilateral relations are considerably better than those between the Americans and the Soviets during the Cold War. The cost of not cooperating with China are significant. The question is this. Is the current situation in space sustainable? In the long term, it is unlikely to be sustainable. Should China continue to be excluded from cooperating with the United States in space and be created its own order? In this case, I cannot help but think of the case of the Asian infrastructure investment. United States lobbied intensively against the creation of this bank, yet policy makers were shocked when the rest of the world did not follow suit. Consequently, the United States lost important opportunity to shape this institution and its rules. More broadly, should the two powers not engage one another, the possibility of misperception or the creation of a security dilemma in outer space is quite possible. Owing to the dual-use nature of space capabilities, the potential of a security dilemma emerging between the United States and arising China is intolerably high. Some of my points, Chinese ambitions or status provide the United States an important avenue by which to engage China. Although such engagement should not be unconditional, it must be tailored to today's political realities, the current situation is unsustainable. Thank you. Yes, good afternoon. I want to talk a little bit about the history of NASA's cooperation with China. So generally speaking, our cooperation began very soon after China's reform and opening up back in 1978. At that time, a delegation of experts from China visited NASA headquarters in May 1979 as part of the overall national science technology delegation to Washington, DC. One of the participants at that time was Ye Xu Hua, who was one of the first women to become an academician at Chinese Academy of Sciences. This initial meeting was followed by others, culminating expert meetings starting in 1982 on the subject of space geodesy. In 1992, 10 years later, NASA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, specifically the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, signed the first contemporary formal agreement that included satellite laser ranging, VLBI and GNSS scientific techniques and data exchange. This agreement has been extended every three to five years and it's presently active. In 2010, both sides met in Shanghai and were hosted by the academician, Ye Xu Hua, 30 years after her delegation first traveled to NASA. Space geodesy, the focus of this agreement, has been used by both countries to conduct laser ranging experiments from Earth-based observatories to the surface of the moon, including the retro reflectors left there by the Apollo astronauts. Various techniques are employed to understand how the Earth is situated in space to improve GPS, our own orbiting satellite infrastructure and deep space navigation, including missions to the moon and Mars. Other cooperation in the last 10 years has included scientific teams focused on Earth science, space science. These were initiated in 2006 at the conclusion of then administrator Crippin's trip to China. They were restarted in 2008. There were primarily means to exchange low-level, nonsensitive data related to space geodesy, as we mentioned, but also atmospheric measurements, seismic observations of Earth and lunar surface measurements in space science. These groups met several times over the soon years. In 2010, former presidents Obama and Hu Jintao signed a joint statement instructing their respective space programs to conduct reciprocal visits to human spaceflight facilities. But by the NASA administrator at the time, NASA was hosted by Chinese authorities at their human spaceflight facilities in Beijing and at the Zhouquan Space Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. Shortly thereafter, the legislation was passed that barred further cooperation and Chinese officials never, in turn, visited US facilities. Throughout the last 30 years, there have been major political issues that have affected cooperation. For example, after Tiananmen Square, the US and China significantly curtailed cooperation in many areas and space was included. For example, legislation passed in 1990 and 1991 to suspended the export of US satellites to China. In 1993, President Clinton issued a waiver that enabled several US firms to launch satellites on Chinese rockets. And of course, just three years later, US satellite exploded during the failed launch. The subsequent investigation and documented instances of technology transfer later formed the basis of the Cox Commission and the report that the Commission wrote. Legislation passed in 1999, cast a very long shadow over the prospects of space cooperation. Again, in 2007, after the Chinese ASAT test, cooperation was again shut down. In 2010, after the passage of the legislation including virtually all bilateral discussions between NASA and China, cooperation again slowed to a crawl. That legislation, codified in appropriations law, is currently enforced today. To summarize, low level bilateral cooperation over the years has likely been mutually beneficial in terms of scientific gains, including the spread of norms of free and open access to data. That's something that NASA champions. So there are significant recurring political issues that have made cooperation a highly complex proposition. Engagement is an issue we're going to have to wrestle with for decades to come. And it's not likely to get any easier. Just as some of the major scientific benefits to cooperation may increase, such as improving our understanding of climate change and exploration, many of the core concerns, such as technology transfer and the militarization of space have only become more acute and concerning over time. As for what lies ahead, ultimately NASA is a science and technology agency. We don't dictate international relations. We follow the mandates that are provided by the White House and Congress. And on the topic of cooperation, they are currently very clear. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Audrey Schaefer and I work in the Department of Defense. Thanks, Victoria, for inviting me to speak on the panel today. I'm really pleased to join my fellow panelists for this topic. Now, before I dive into talking about engagement with China from a national securities perspective, I ought to provide a little bit of context because to say that the US-China security relationship is complicated would probably actually be a little bit of an understatement. So I did just want to read a quote or two from our national defense strategy which was written under Secretary Mattis and has been continued to be champion by acting Secretary Shanahan. It provides the strategic guidance to our department and it's very clear. It says that long-term strategic competition with Russia and China are the principal priorities for the department because of the magnitude of the threats that they pose to US security and prosperity today and the potential for those threats to increase in the future. That's a pretty strong statement. And in fact, I think it was his very first day as acting secretary. Mr. Shanahan was asked about essentially what are your priorities or top three priorities and his answer was China, China, China. So in that context, right, with the context of that being our overall defense guidance, that's how we have to look at space. And frankly, we're not gonna treat space any different than any of the other traditional war fighting domains land, air, and sea when it comes to thinking about our relationship with China. But in space in particular, we have seen a number of really troubling developments. There've been several really great products that have come out of the intelligence community over the last couple of months that have highlighted not just space in some cases across the board, but in space highlighted things that really we hadn't talked about a whole lot before. The three reports that I would point you toward, one is the Director for National Intelligence Worldwide Threat Assessment. He has a testimony every year to both chambers of Congress. Second, and I happen to have my glossy copy of it, this is a defense intelligence agency report on challenges to security and space. And then the third is a NACIC, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center report on space security as well. Some quotes, the DNI Worldwide Threat Assessment says that we assess that China and Russia are training and equipping their military space forces and fielding new anti-satellite weapons to hold US and allied space services at risk. DIA basically says the same thing. The People's Liberation Army sees counter space operations as a means to deter and counter possible US intervention during a regional military conflict. And although I don't really want to get into like the specifics of capabilities today, just a couple of highlights from the DIA report, which actually is very consistent with the counter space report that the Secure World Foundation released last year. It talked about how China continues to develop jammers dedicated to targeting synthetic aperture radars, developing jammers to target SATCOM over a range of frequency bands, likely pursuing laser weapons, and they have operational ground-based ASAT intended to target LEO and probably intend to pursue additional ASAT weapons capable of destroying satellites up to GEO. So that's a pretty broad swath of activity when it comes to military space capabilities. And frankly, I mean, at their heart, a lot of them are directed at the United States as you can read in these reports. So now that I've gotten you all on a very sour note here, I do want to try and raise back to talk about the prospects for engagement and what do we really do about that? And so to do that, I want to just as actually, Lincoln did already just harken back a little bit to the Cold War and the competition that we had with the Soviet Union at that time because even then, when the relationship was just as strained, if not more so, we did manage to work bilaterally and multilaterally with the Soviets to really create mechanisms that would help reduce the risks of conflict and enhance stability. And in fact, actually a more positive quote if you would, if you will, from the National Defense Strategy says that the most far-reaching objective of this defense strategy is to set the military relationship between the United States and China on a path of transparency and non-aggression. So I mean, really that, yes, it's a far-reaching goal. It's a stretch goal, if you will. But I mean, that is the objective, one of the objectives of our strategy. So I think really, if you think about that US-Soviet relationship, it's probably a helpful model. Now things weren't exactly the same because during the Cold War, our primary focus was avoiding the threat of nuclear exchange, right? And so the agreements that were created were really crafted around that. But two things, one, either those agreements were sort of flexible enough or broad enough or just the link between our space systems for nuclear warning and nuclear command and control was there such that a lot of the agreements that cover nuclear risk reduction also kind of were applicable to space or were just broad enough that over time we could adapt those agreements to cover some of the space stability matters. And in fact, a lot of those agreements have actually stood the test of time. They're now agreements between the US and Russia as opposed to between the US and the Soviet Union. And I even see today that they provide that sort of baseline for confidence in the relationship even when we continue to have disagreements over security matters. And the fact of the matter is we don't actually have a lot of that really basic foundation in the US-China relationship. So as much as I know folks would like to talk about developing norms for, I don't know, for example, rendezvous and proximity operations. That's what I would call sort of a stretch goal because we don't even have the really, really basic stuff in place yet. So I just wanted to provide maybe three examples of where we do have things in place with the Russians which I know they're gonna sound probably really basic to an audience that's sophisticated like you all are. But frankly, I mean, if we don't crawl before we walk, we can't walk before we run. So we've really got to start kind of with the basics. The first is just routine exchanges of information. Literally sitting across the table and sharing a document like our national space policy or like our national defense strategy which in most cases we in the United States we publish these things online and that's not always true in the Chinese case. So even just having exchanges of basic sort of information I think it's a foundation on what you can start to build confidence and increase transparency. The second is launch notifications. So the US and Russia provide bilateral launch notifications of space vehicle launches for the start one treaty. And these are also notifications are effectively the same as the notifications we provide multilaterally under the Hague Code of Conduct against ballistic missile proliferation which by the way I don't actually have the number but it's quite a number of countries that provide those notifications. And you can imagine again and thinking about the nuclear context of how that started. You know you didn't want nuclear change to be started over a test of a missile or something like that. So we provided those notifications as confidence building measure. Well so that's a great example of one where China is not a signatory to the Hague Code of Conduct and doesn't necessarily provide launch notifications but that would be something I think very basic because once a missile has been launched space vehicle has been launched it's pretty easy to detect. The final example is secure and authenticated communications channels and the example I would point to there is the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center. We call it on our side or known as the NERC which is kind of cool if you ever have the chance to tour the State Department or if you know somebody in the arms control area they can show you around the NERC. It's kind of like a diplomatic ops center. It's staffed I think it's staffed 24 seven and it provides authenticated and secure communications channels between states, the US and Russia but also the US and a variety of other countries and we use it to provide everything from sort of just routine reports on numbers of weapons, missiles, et cetera to notifications of things like exercises or tests and all the way up to actual crisis communications channels and so it's a way that you sort of know the message came from the government that you thought it was and you know that it's an official communication from that government. During the last administration the US and Russia agreed to use that mechanism for communication on cyber incidents of concern and so I think that's just another interesting model to look at for just really basic sort of crawl type engagement on a security front. So the only point I'll make before turning over to Mike is I should say all the things I just raised were grounded in treaties for the most part. Now practically speaking I just don't see the opportunity for a treaty like this between the US and China right now but I don't think that should be a limiting factor. I think all of the things that I mentioned could be done on a voluntary basis and I think that's anyway the right place to start when we're talking about building trust and increasing transparency in the relationship. So thanks very much. So let me first, I have a comment. So let me first begin by thanking the Secure World Foundation. Secure World's never shy away from the tough issues and I appreciate you tackling this one. My only caveat is I think it's well known my love of Chinese cuisine and missed opportunity for lunch folks. Give it a time. Come on. Also before I begin my comments let me be clear that I'm wearing my hat as chair of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee which is the Federal Advisory Committee of the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation. I like my job, private school is expensive. So Jeff and Marcia I am not speaking at a corporate capacity today. So we talk about China and I think it's so different than the Soviet example. That this isn't a conflict so much as it is a competition. No one was ever worried about those amazing Soviet products driving US companies out of the market. And we really need to think about this in a different and new paradigm. And frankly I think it's one that the US system is fundamentally ill-suited to participate because we don't have this kind of government control in direction for the economy like China does and frankly many other nations are developing. And it is a very serious issue which is again well I'm glad we're getting some attention here. You know going back to the Comstack in Space Transportation we have seen China target industrial sectors and demand to dominate in those sectors and have been very successful in solar rays, et cetera. And from my understanding space launch is next up and that China will want to reduce those expenses by five times what even SpaceX is offering. And that's an existential threat to a critical capability for the US that I think we need to take seriously as an industry and as a company. At any time in the satellite world we're already seeing the competition develop from China that previously the Chinese when they were doing a treaty or an agreement internationally weave in a satellite sale to a country like Nigeria or a developing nation. They weren't really so much on the satellite scene in terms of big products with developed nations. Now we've seen satellite sales by China Great Wall Corporation to Taikon and to Indonesia winning contracts that Europeans, Japanese, American entities otherwise could have. And they're doing so with robust and substantial government support. Subsidies, even potentially free launches. Again, these are the concerns that America can't compete when we're looking at subsidized or potentially free launches of satellites financing that allow the companies to not even pay anything until the satellite starts generating revenue. These are the kinds of forward leaning economic incentives that I'm not seeing developed in the US and that again could be a great threat to our company's health and the American industrial base. And all of this in a backdrop where we can't even get the export import bank. I mean, I was so pleased to see the comments by Kudlow yesterday, two days ago that export import is a national security tool because it absolutely is. We're not in a conflict with China but we're in a competition. And right now to quote the untouchables, we're bringing a knife to a gunfight. We should be talking about what beyond export import bank we can do to be competitive with China and frankly the rest of the world. And instead, we don't even have an export import bank. And whether it's the satellite world or other activities in space which always take a lot of financing, you're not going to get it done without at least this fundamental tool. So my plea to all of us in the policy world and those associated with the administration and Congress, can we please at least give American industry a chance with export import. Again, relative to the space transportation, Comstock, I think this is a critical issue for our health. And I know you've all been waiting for me to talk about export control and here's the moment. So I hope everyone had some coffee as you get into the export control conversation. While I'm talking about the challenges, potential threat that China faces, I do want to caution everyone about overreacting. That's what we do here in Washington, right? See a threat. Oh, I know, I know. A skeptic, right? Like we never do that. And again, we talked about the Cox report, right? So to be clear, absolutely justified on taking action against China and protect our technologies from China. They're probably not doing nearly enough in that arena. But what you don't want to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater and start creating this amazing bureaucracy that makes it challenging, if not impossible, for US entities to work with NATO and major non-NATO allies. Because guess what happens when you do that and you take America out of the partnerships that you'd want to do in Europe or Japan or Australia? Guess who fills that void? Everybody, come on audience, China, right? So let's all be cautious in our zeal to protect our technology and our edge from China that we're not doing things that are counterproductive relative to US competition with China. I think it was Norm Augustine who said, if you protect your toothbrushes, the same that you protect your diamonds, you're gonna lose more diamonds than toothbrushes. So I think the solution here is higher walls around a smaller area, right? That we need to be probably more robust when it comes to China. But free up everything else so that we can compete effectively with Chinese overseas. And when it comes to X square controller reform, you know, I would almost describe it right now as driving with one foot on the accelerator and the other foot on the brake. So we've got a couple of NPRMs or ANPRIRMs, if you ask those as opposed to rulemaking out on the street right now. One was for emerging technologies and tightening AI and other emerging tech in terms of export control department of commerce is looking at. Again, driven by concerns about China, totally justified, totally warranted. But again, what we don't wanna do is start throttling American AI so that you can't talk about AI to Britain or to Japan and then we start to become less competitive actually helping China dominate the market. That's my fear there. So we're looking to tighten with emerging technologies. And then on the other hand, we had state and commerce more recently put out advanced notices of proposed rulemaking in terms of how can we streamline the export control process? How can we make it better? And so one comment might be, let's be careful with your previous ANPRM relative to emerging technologies. So it's almost a bit of a jack-o-lan-a-hide going on right now relative to these issues. And again, export control reform and protection against China are not at odds with each other. These two things can travel together if we just pay a little bit of attention to nuance and make sure that we bolster US's competitiveness with broad wall tightening on China. We can easily walk into government at the same time with that. Say a word on the wolf amendment real quick as we talk about how we might engage with China. A lot of people think the wolf amendment is a prohibition on working with Chinese. It's not. How many people have actually bothered to read the wolf amendment, right? What does it say? It says that you can work with China but you need certification from the FBI. You can't totally warrant it, right? And notification of Congress. Is that a prohibition? To me, those are two common sense steps right now. So NASA can engage with China, has engaged with China, under the auspices of the wolf amendment. So I just wanna try and put sure that myth a little bit that's out there that there's just absolute prohibition on doing anything with China because it's not true. And then when it comes to the commercial sector, again, we can have commodity sales to China. I think number one is soybeans that we sell to China but also airplanes, chicken feet, and also bandwidth, satellite community. Again, you know, Barton Defense and our industrial base said there's certain products that we can sell if it's available in the international market that helps with the trade deficit and again helps American companies to be competitive. So we don't wanna do anything to hurt that either. So I'll just end with, you know, everyone knows I'm a Star Trek fan, right? So I believe in the future of going to space together of all of us leaving our problems behind and creating a better world in space. And that means interacting and bringing China with. But while I believe in that better future, I think protection of human rights and a good faith relationship have to be a part of it as well and can't be ignored. So with that, I'll stop and look forward to Brian's comments. Well, thank you, everybody. So I wanted to use my role and sort of the clean up hitter spot to highlight and connect a few things, mentioned the speaker. So I'm gonna bounce around a little bit here as I try and find a way to weave together some of the things that have been talked about. I wanna emphasize, you know, as Audrey mentioned, we're late on the national defense strategy. You know, for better or for worse, the US is engaged with China in a long-term strategic competition. And that competition, as you've seen from this discussion, is happening across diplomatic, information, military and economic sectors. And that was part of our motivation in having the panel we have today is that you have people from the academic world, from civil space, from national security space, from industry and NGOs all talking about this because that's where the competition is. And if the US is going to look at and engage human China, it's gonna think across all of those different areas and not just focus on one or the other. I also thought it was useful that, I wanna point out that none of us use the word race, which has been used by some people to talk about this. You know, we're now engaged in a new space race. I think that's such a facile description of the current situation that it probably does more harm than good because it talks about it in terms of a single event or a single capability or a single goal when it really is this much broader, long-term competition as we've been talking about. There's been recent articles by both Bled and Bowen in the Space Watch Global and John Loggs in the Air Force of America talking about why it's not a race, why it is more complicated and harder thing to get a handle on than that sort of thing. Also wanna point out, we deliberately chose the word engagement to title this because of what that implies. It doesn't imply let's be best friends. It's about a set of interactions between two countries. And that is exactly what we're looking for here is what should the US's engagement strategy be with China across diplomatic information, economic, military sectors and how do all those bits and pieces fit together? Right now, at least in space, unfortunately, our only real engagement with China is in the national security world and it happens to have the context of a military sort of a threat environment. Audrey mentioned the country supports. We have our own report that we're coming out with a new addition with next week. And in there, we talk quite detailed about all the stuff that Chinese and the Russians are doing and the stuff that we're doing in space. And for every example of something, let's say a rendezvous in proxops that Russia or China are doing in space, the US finds concerning a threatening. Well, we can probably find one the US has done about the same time period that looks a whole lot like what they're doing. And that is concerning because all three of those countries value or increasingly value national security benefits of space. And so those types of interactions without the level of transparency or communication or even a basic level of trust understanding could go to a very bad place. And the two big areas, one is rendezvous and proximity operations, RPOs, and the other is testing hit to kill technologies for anti-satellite weapons and ballistic missile defense. That's something's happening all the time. And as we saw two days ago in the case of India, stuff you do for hit to kill missile defense could easily be translated into hit to kill anti-satellite weapons. Those two kind of go hand in hand. So part of our concern and my concern is that a future relationship with China that is built only on these mill to mill interactions in space is more likely not to end up in a bad place. And by bad place, I mean a direct military conflict. And pretty much everyone's saying, including the highest level of leadership in the DoD has said we don't want to end up in that place, that we don't want to end up in a conflict with China in space, could be a really bad situation for everyone, including industry, right? The war zone is not a great place to have an investment and low insurance premiums. Well, military sales, but it's a temporary thing. So that's sort of what we're trying to get here is what can we do in the engagement to really meet that stated goal of reducing the chances that we end up in a hostile conflict in space or more broadly that could extend into space. So Lincoln and Audrey both mentioned the Apollo Soyuz and Mike talked a little bit about Soviet leadership as well. We talk about the US-Soviet space relationship because that's the only example we have, even though it's not really a great example, because the context around which today's US-China barred leadership is happening is so much different than it was back then. That's what, today it's much more complicated what engineers would call a multivariate problem, what diplomats would probably call a reality, right? We have to think not just in this bipolar capitalism versus communism kind of struggle for dominance, but across all these different sectors of activities, and there's more players. As we saw with the end, back to the NDASAD test, that was prompted in large part because of what China did 12 years ago. Not really anything to do with the US directly, but there's other players in the game that we have to think about in this relationship. It's not just thinking about the US and China. So I want to touch on what Audrey mentioned a little bit about kind of norms of behavior in space. Very much agree that we, you know, that there's some low level stuff that needs to happen first, but I don't think we should then, that means put off thinking about or even talking about the more difficult things, the middle interactions and arms around those, because it's already happened. I said, you know, US and Chinese satellites are interacting with each other in space. And so we can't just hold off until we spend several years figuring out the lower level stuff. We kind of got to do it at the same time. We have been able to do this with other countries, other places at times. I think back, we just, you know, as part of the Syria conflict, we set up a series of norms of behavior, rules of engagement with the Russians that, you know, we were engaged in an active war zone with them on the other side and we managed to have those discussions. I think we should probably manage to have those discussions with China. We're not engaged in an active conflict. So talking more about what kind of the engagement might look like. I wrote an article with the Stimpsons that are published several years ago, kind of just thinking through what engagement might look like. And I'm going to recap a little bit of it here, but I'm happy to provide that anyone that wants more of the details. There was also a really good report done by CRS six or seven years ago, kind of outlining different categories of engagement. I crib some of it from there. But there's information and data sharing, there's space policy dialogue, and there's joint activities. And each of those three categories is useful in different areas. The information data sharing is good to establish common operating picture in such facts. The space policy dialogue, as Audrey mentioned, helps understand each other's views, concerns, and intentions, reduce miscommunications or standing. And the joint activities are there to achieve objectives that neither could achieve individually or to develop experience in working together. All this stuff could be done top down or it could be done bottom up. The top down is going to require a lot more buy-in and interest from top political leaders, which could be hard to do. Bottom up can be easier to do, but probably not on the really big politically charged topics. That probably requires a top down sort of things. To quote a former professor of mine, we should probably be cooperating as part of a broader strategy of engagement, not just cooperating for the sake of cooperating. And a one off approach that's, hey, let's go through this cooperationous area or this engagement area, probably unlikely to succeed or really have any real benefits outside of that little piece of it. US is gonna have to put together strategy on how it's going to engage with China in space and why across diplomatic military information and economic industry. It's gonna have to think about industry, it's gonna have to think about the military and everything else. So I just wanna close by touching on two things that Mike mentioned. One is the export controls piece. For a while it seemed like there was some sanity coming to that world and the recognition that the Wolf, sorry, the Cox commissioner board and the whole ITAR, space and ITAR push actually did far more harm to American industry than it did to protecting it and kind of rolling that back. But now there seems to be beginnings of maybe a counter force that is almost saying we need to put more in place. There's been some recent articles. It was the Wall Street Journal kind of talking about US commercial satellite companies and spectrum sales to companies may involve with China. And they're pitching it as some sort of like really sensitive military technology. Commodity, it's a commercial technology that is pretty freely available in the market. And it's hard to see how that has a real deep connection to the military or to some sensitive technology. I'll point out that even the Trump administration which has had some challenges with China does want to encourage US companies to sell commodities and increase trade with China. So there is that intention to be able to do that because it boosts the American economy. So we should, to read it with Mike said, think about what technologies and capabilities truly are sensitive and protect with the knowledge that in doing so, we're probably gonna make it harder and live it harder to innovate in those areas because you're gonna cut off data sharing and collaboration and then everything else, we should be competing, right? We should be competing with them for market share, competing them for customers because if we're not there as we've seen China probably is. And then finally, I was talking just a minute on the Wolf Amendment, absolutely agree the Wolf Amendment does not prohibit it but the effect of it has been to prohibit it. I think that's partly because any country or child for those of your parents who is told you have to come ask permission first that sort of has a deadening effect on it. I don't know what you must ask for permission particularly the US government or the executive ramp sees itself as a separate actor, independent and unequal status with Congress. That has a challenge and the rhetoric from at least the last decade or so from any of Congress on this has been extremely critical of any US agencies that have tried to do engagement. So I think that combined with the information has had the stifling effect. I do think, well I probably think it's a bridge too far to completely get rid of the Wolf Amendment and as Mike said, there's probably real reasons to have some limits in place. It's probably time to think about how to relax it or at least prescribe areas where we might wanna think about having cooperation with China in space. That could lead to benefits for this whole engagement process. And I'll stop there. Thank you all. I think that our panelists give us a lot to think about. I'd like to use the power of the chair just to point out when talking about you was trying to engagement. There are definitely, as has been mentioned, there are complications and difficulties between our two countries. That does not mean we do not share common principles at a certain level in terms of what a responsible space actor does. I'm just highlighting that both of our countries are a member of the IADC for the Debris Mitigation Guidelines that we're created upon. And Audrey, I'm sure, can speak a lot about her experience at the United Nations Committee on Peaceful Use of Outer Space where last June, the COPA was wrapped up eight years of discussions and came up with 21 guidelines that were agreed upon for consensus throughout the 84 member nations. So it is possible. We just need to figure out ways in which we can do it again in acting our own national interest but making sure that we can find a way to make sure that space is usable and secure and sustainable over the long term. So with that, I can open up for questions from the audience if anyone has any. And Theresa, please hold on and wait for the microphone which is going to slowly make its way toward you. This is being recorded and so we need the microphone to be able to capture your comments and Josh to the rescue. So if you wouldn't mind, please, when you have the microphone, say your name and affiliation, please. It's our Theresa. Hi, I'm Theresa Hitchens with the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland until March 31st at which time on April 1st, I will be starting a new position at Breaking Defense but here today I am a scholar. And I want to thank the panel for their presentations because they were all very good. I have a question for you as you might expect. Under the Obama administration, we started two sets of dialogues with China. One on civil space led, as I understand it, by the State Department and one on military space dialogue at the Pentagon. Are those two sets of dialogues still ongoing? Because it seems to me that they were a very first step in being able to establish some of these low level discussions that we know that we need in order to build some kind of confidence in our relationship. We also very much still do that with the Russians despite everyone, I guess. Those are being curtailed now too, but we have been doing with the Russians the same kind of thing over a very long period of time. Thanks, Theresa, and I'll actually let Patrick talk about the civil dialogue if that's all right. I mean, yes, I know it's ongoing, but you can probably say more about that. Just from a national security perspective, yes, space is still part of our national security dialogues with China, but I haven't seen a lot of fruit come out of those dialogues in the last couple of years. And so, I mean, I don't really have a great answer for you, Theresa. I mean, yes, it's still on the agenda. Yes, it is still something that we want to talk about, but from my perspective, there hasn't really been a meaningful engagement on space security in the last couple of years. Yeah, the civil space dialogue is led by the State Department. And surprisingly, I would pretty much agree. It's very similar to what Audrey described, the ongoing making progress, but probably not quickly or as significantly as you might have thought. Thoughts on the panel about what you've recommended they would take up on these discussions if you were able to give input on this. I did do, I give input, right? I meant something about Nardi, spoke a bit. Okay, no, no. I think, in order to correct me, I think what I'm wrong, one of the original impetus for this was on the SSA data sharing front, right? And coming up with a better mechanism to share a little bit of SSA data, more importantly, close approach warnings with China. From what I hear, that has gone fairly well and there's now a better process for that in the past. But given that we're talking about what countries are doing in space and all these new military activities and commercial stuff and arse constellations, I would think that would probably be an area that we could think about expanding or doing more on because having that shared awareness of what's going on is probably a pretty big part of the transparency. Expect for intellectual property would be nice. And also we talked about the copious. I think there is, even if it's not explicit all the time, certainly implicit and helpful dialogue between us and China. For many of the ideas and policies and regulations that the U.S. has been working on, I'm on the Hague International Space Resources Working Group and when it's come to asteroid mining and those kinds of policies. And I think even with the sustainability guidelines, China's played a relatively helpful role in that. So again, I would say I'd love for someone to have a conversation about IP with China. I'd love to have a conversation about unfair non-market forces in terms of international competition but also recognizing that there's been constructive dialogue if not implicit cooperation on space policy of copious. I just wanna add a couple of comments. Just to kind of bring it back to the Chinese perspective which is I'm trying to kind of get across the idea that it's important to still think of China to recognize kind of the complexity of the bureaucratic actors involved. And so when we talk about things like intellectual property, we need to talk about who are we talking about? How much capacity does the government have to enforce its decisions? And I think just even knowing what the landscape of who the appropriate actors are is an important even first step. And I think that these ongoing dialogues would at least reveal that kind of information. We had it right there. Thank you, Mr. Chair. My name's Lee. I come from the Chinese Embassy Science Section. In the past 15 months, attended a lot of synced events along this street here. Everybody talked about the elephant in the room but it seems that all organizers who were very reluctant to invite the elephant stay at the on the stage. So I have several observations. I attended several China US civilian space dialogue under such event. It's very familiar with the bilateral collaboration in the past several decades. So first observation is that I agree with Director Whedon that China's never would like to participate or force to participate in any kind of race whether it's space race or arms race or whatever race you define it. However, I also realized that several of the panelists today use the word called dominate or domination. Yeah, English is not my native language. So I'm not sure what is the word dominate means monopoly or monopolize or the similar means. What I would like to say is that in a field of science and technology, from my experience or from the experience in history, no country could dominate in a specific area for a very long time. Actually, this kind of word of dominates is very poisonous. To some extent it's unethical. Yeah, unethical I like to say because we just want to dominate and we just want to over-computing everybody else. So what I like to say is that we don't want to dominate in any area whether it's AI or space or robots. What I learned from all these strategies or our policy document is always say that China would like to keep parallel with other advanced countries or we would like to join the first tier category of advanced countries by our efforts, something like that. But what I learned from White House papers or the papers from CDOD, you use the word dominate. It's not China want to use the word dominate. That's what I'd like to clarify. And about the Wolf Amendment or Wolf Cross, yeah. Mr. Gold, don't you find some self-contradiction in your comments just now? You mentioned that the pouring bureaucracy about the export control regime in the United States. And you said that, see some of the Congress approval or FBI approval is kind of prerequisite for NASA to initiate some dialogue or exchange with Chinese side. In my opinion, this just added the administrative burden to the NASA or STP. It has nothing to do with us. We are okay because every time the NASA or STP just ask us to provide some more delegate list, it's just add their administrative burden, not ours. And actually I wonder whether the Congress maybe not trust China. But I'm not sure whether Congress also had confidence in all administrative agencies because they asked these, because they asked NASA or STP to report to them before they could contact us, which means that in my understanding that they don't trust our administrative agencies. There's no Chinese side. All right, couple of very interesting questions. Thank you, hang on. I'm a lawyer and a lobbyist. Hypocrisy is my business. I'm not a goddamn lawyer. Thanks for one of us. Just two more, sorry, just two more observations. The first one is that you mentioned the UN co-pills, yeah. Well, just last year, the Chinese side made a statement saying that in the future, the new Chinese space station were open to international collaboration with foreign countries. So we welcome you to send some proposals with the Chinese side about any future potential collaboration, whether it's manned space flight or the scientific experiment in the new Chinese space station in the future. The second issue is about the commerce space market, yeah. I just learned from my Chinese colleagues at the China National Space Agency. We open our commercial launching business in China, not only to domestic, private enterprises, but also to foreign companies. You can now provide a launching service or the satellite in China, a manufactured hold on the foreign companies in China. There's no obstacle, yeah. And last but not least, I would like to say a few words about the visa issue. We know that later this year, the United States will host international astronomical congress, IAC, yeah, in the United States. In the past two decades, many Chinese delegations faced this dilemma that we could not get the visa from the State Department. Actually, when you just say some words to the visa office at the US Embassy in China, you will certainly face the, how to say it now, yeah. It's a very interesting, funny story I'd like to share with you because I don't think that any guy from State Department would be here, yeah. One of my colleagues, his academic background in the university is remote sensing, yeah. So when the visa office at the US Embassy in China asks what it means for remote sensing, yeah. Explain very excitedly, you know, the science background guys. They always like to explain what he learned or what he's doing. It's a remote sensing, you'll satellite or airplane, you'll use a visible obstacle, an instrument or the infrared something to see what happened at the US. And it got denied very quickly, yeah. So this visa guys may not understand that remote sensing is not for espionage. It could be used for city planning, urban planning, for estimation of agricultural products or for other many civilian uses. So I'd like to say, I would like to see whether the United States will continue to adopt this. I would like to see ridiculous visa policy to turn down all these Chinese scientists who would like to attend international events. And thank you very much. Thank you, Silly. We'll have to get your car and have you come back and speak another time on the dais. All right, so a lot of stuff unpacking there. I guess we're gonna start with Brian and go down the road. I'll take two of those. So I'll take the dominance of the visa stuff. You know, I agree with you that words do matter and I think there has been two careless use of words like dominance when it comes to some, you know, space policy or some recent activities. I wholeheartedly agree. It's not, probably not possible to stay on top for very long or even to have such a major advantage that you're never gonna be touched again unless a perfect set of conditions happens, which may have happened after World War II for a little bit of time. But that is very not ideal at all. The military, as all militaries do, sometimes talk about the word dominance in a more limited sense, such that dominance over a certain battlefield, a certain point, a certain time, which I think is very appropriate. But it's expanding that to talk about, you know, complete dominance over an entire domain for an extended period is probably as much of a unicorn as anything else, you know, that the hippies would wanna put out there. I just add to say that, you know, the other word I thought you cared for careful about is the word leadership. Sometimes people use the word leadership when they really mean dominance and leadership should be used in a different context. If you talk about leadership of a quarterback on a football team or something on those lines, it's not about that person dominating or that individual dominating everybody else that they work with, it's about them actually helping the group work better together. And so I just wanna make that point to be covered in language. On the visa thing, I agree with you, it is a huge challenge. Even we as an NGO, we often try to have workshops and discussions and involve individuals from Russia and from China and those discussions exceedingly difficult to do so if you're located here in the US. There's been times where we've had to move stuff outside the US to be able to have a discussion that had any sort of participation outside of the NATO countries and Japan. And that really makes it difficult to have engagement that can address some of the challenges we've listened to today. So I don't know anybody at the visa office that can solve this, but I agree that it is a big concern. Other thoughts? So I would echo all of Brian's comments except as a Patriots fan, Tom Brady does seek to dominate. I think there's any question there. I guess I'll take on the Wolf Amendment. Again, what I'm trying to point out with Wolf Amendment is I hear far too often it's just a prohibition. And frankly, as a lawyer, you see this all the time with policymakers, many of whom are lawyers. They don't bother to read the actual rule. And we just all operate on perception and innuendo and that this is a prohibition. What I was trying to do with my comments is point out it indeed is not. And that there is the possibility of working with China productively on science with NASA. And I'd have to go back, but I think it's even been done under the auspices of the Wolf Amendment. That being said, I also have children and don't disagree with Brian that when you have to go to mom for permission, there is a chilling effect that occurs there. And certainly that issue can be looked at, but I think even prior to getting to that, I think it would be helpful to begin by having constructive dialogue and activities within the boundaries of the Wolf Amendment as a starting place to see where we might go after that. And I think that process is beginning, but I could be wrong, would have to get my facts there. So I hope none of that is hypocritical, but I would invite you, if part of this is hypocritical, to comment to me now or later. Later, okay. You can pick it up offline. Any other thoughts post the camera? I like it. Hi, I would like to respond to a couple of comments. So I also agree that words and language really matter and we have to be careful with the types of language we use. And even, for instance, my own comments when I was trying to emphasize the state of US-China relations and characterize them as much better and more complicated than in the past, you're still even talking about the same rhetorical framework of a Cold War paradigm, which I don't believe exist. That said, I believe my own comments may have used the word domination and when I used that as my information dominance and I was talking about, I was actually referring to writings from the People's Liberation Army and I don't have the citations, but there's the winning war under informationized local conditions, et cetera. So these aren't completely out of the blue. This language has been used. That said, I recognize that China is, of course, made up of different bureaucratic actors and the People's Liberation Army doesn't speak for China and you have to think about which actors are relevant. So another comment I will talk about and it goes back to my kind of talk about status. We're talking about China being recognized as being part of a group or a league and this goes back to this idea of dominance. A lot of conversations I've had over the past year, one thing that's been interesting has been how I've recognized that a lot of Chinese individuals I've spoken with understand status and a lot of the discussions it's about quality, it's not about domination. Now whether that's true or not is something that needs further investigation, but it is important to think about the assumptions we're bringing into these conversations and kind of the way we tend to categorize the other. And on the last note, I will talk about kind of the idea for UN experiments. I don't know how politically palatable it would be for the United States to do this after denying China access to the space station, but I think this could perhaps be an important window for the United States to kind of informally recognize that China is a member of the international community. I'd be interested in hearing some comments from the rest of the panelists about the viability of this. Thanks. Other questions, let's try this side of the room. Actually, is it Marsha in the blue for you? Thank you, marsha smithspacepolicyonline.com. I wanted to ask Patrick about the current cooperation between NASA and China on the lunar far side, not dark side, but far side lander. There is no dark side of the moon. Except when there's a full moon facing one way or the other, but anyway. So I'm just curious, was that a new agreement that went through some process with Congress or was that under this existing agreement that you said gets renewed every three to five years? And how far does it extend? Is it like forever for future landers, for us and them, or just how extensive is it? Yeah, thanks Marsha. Yeah, so what you're referring to is during the Chang'e 4 mission, there was an opportunity to use the NASA asset, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is currently orbiting the moon to image the landing of the Chinese spacecraft. So we wanted to coordinate with the Chinese government and so Mike's correct that the known as the Wolf Amendment, it's not a total prohibition. There are instances where you can, the process is laid out in the legislation. Who do you talk to? How do you get certification? You have to ask Congress to communicate with Chinese authorities. So that was done. And the types of coordination that were involved, there wasn't a formal agreement. It was more of warrior going to be orbiting. We're on the same time that you'll be landing. Is there something we could do? Could we image the landing site and things like that? It was reasonably successful. It wasn't, there's no pictures of the actual landing, but there are images available at the LRO website, which is hosted in Arizona. And you can take a look at the images that were captured by LRO of the Chinese landing site. So was it narrow just for that one mission? Yep, but it's a start. Other questions, right here. Thank you, Alex Bowie, policy analyst at the U.S. China Commission. I have a question about China's 2016 space white paper. One of the goals it mentions is to establish, I want to believe is a reliable, and stable advanced space infrastructure. Is that right, Mr. Lee, from the paper? So that sort of sounds like what the various space policy directives that the administration is at least are kind of getting at with the streamlining of space traffic management and things like that. So the next question is, are these goals sort of in line with each other? And what is the extent to which we should or can be working together for burden sharing within a course to constrain some of the wealth that we've discussed previously? Thank you, thoughts? That's interesting, you made that connection. So certainly the U.S. the last few years, actually dating back to 2010, the monitoring has been talking about space traffic management at the national level. I don't think the U.S. has thought of that in an infrastructure capacity. It's more of a regulatory capacity, article six oversight kind of capacity. And there also have been some discussions about space traffic management within UNCULT-US, currently within the legal subcommittee. But there, I'm not aware of any really specific Chinese positions on it there. I think most countries within UNCULT-US are trying to figure out what it means and what the intent is. There's been some proposals for data sharing, for example, from the Russians and a couple others, but the U.S. is the only one that I'm really aware of that's kind of pushing or spot this through really, and just kind of talking about things. I will say that what the U.S. is talking about, what's outlined as Baseball Subjective Three, is essentially a process to establish a national space traffic management regime that is a mix of shifting SSA capabilities for civil safety space flight to the Department of Commerce, plus broadening and sort of modernizing the oversight licensing framework, which would be based on industry standards, and then the goal would be to promulgate that internationally. And sort of the, I think the challenge of that national first approach is it would then mean every country would fall off, right? Every country would have to put in place a national regulatory infrastructure and its own national capabilities, and you figure out how to harmonize between them, most countries aren't even there yet, right? They very few even have a full-up national space law registering us in place. So that will be a challenge, and I know China's been working on putting forth a national space law and regulatory regime for a few years now. I think they're very close to bringing it out. I honestly don't know if they've thought about Fish Epic Management, I don't know if Lincoln knows anything about it. I don't know if this is really getting after your question, but just to kind of build on what Brian said, I think Victoria, you brought up multilateral engagement in some of your remarks when you opened up the panel for questions. And that's something that none of us really on the panel talked about, but the fact of the matter is there is quite a bit of multilateral, or engagement between the US and China within a multilateral context is really the right way to say it. And in the particular example of UN, Cope US, where these long-term sustainability guidelines were negotiated, the major space-faring nations are frankly the ones who have kind of the strongest voice in a lot of those discussions because we just frankly speaking have kind of the most advanced practices with regard to space operations. And so, I mean within the US, I mean our objective was very clear to sort of try and promulgate what we believe are best practices. What our, so I'm getting confused, ours, O-U-R-A-R-E, right? Our best practices we believe are some of the best practices internationally for safe and sustainable space flight. And so I would say in a similar regard, if China wanted to try and promulgate its practices, it has opportunities just as the US, Russia in particular was very vocal in the UN, Cope US debate, as well as others, France, Japan. So, again, I don't really know if this is getting into the question, but there are opportunities sort of at the international multilateral level to harmonize across the major space-faring nations to create common standards and frameworks for space activities. Other questions? Thank you very much, Bruce Pearl. Hi, I'm Bruce McDonald. I'm a space consultant adjunct at Johns Hopkins SICE and worked on space issues for quite a while in my federal career. First, a comment that has been made earlier about trying to control technologies that are becoming quite common. I mean, who here remembers the old V-Chip and keeping that, and sometimes people learn something early on and they don't give up what they've learned. And I'm all one for really sensitive technologies. Of course, we have to be careful with them, but when it's released to the larger world or the larger world is passed it by, all it does is cripple our capabilities. So that's my comment. My question is that, and the Indian ASAT test two days ago was very timely and a very significant event. I'm glad to see it get the attention that it deserves, but it highlights for me a couple of areas where in the course of my career I've seen this ongoing hostility in the space world, at least in the military space world of restrictions. And I think that concerns me. I was one who thought certainly like a code of conduct is something that would not be that difficult to agree upon. And yet it's amazing the resistance within the U.S. government circles about that, that was seen as sort of covert arms control and that sort of thing. Yet these issues are gonna be with us. I always thought that the European code of conduct really what was Europe as the space leader knows the United States, but Europe picked up the baton because the United States fumbled it basically. Our allies are looking for leadership and when we don't provide leadership, we see this happening, I'll be careful what I say here. In other contexts, national security contexts within the United States, the way we've been treating our allies. And what can we do to not pick up the idea of arms control, the exclusion of larger security considerations? I mean there are reasons to be at least careful. And by the way, I mean China has not exactly covered itself with glory either. I have no particular brief for what they've been pushing with Russia. But what does the panel think? What do people think about what we can do to at least give some kind of norms and codes of conduct a push so that we can see some progress in this area? Thank you. So I'm sorry because I feel like I get asked this question probably in every panel and I always give the same answer. So it obviously is not a satisfying one if I keep getting your question. I'll get you your shoes before so I can put them on. Well thank you Bruce because you'll just have to be patient if I give you the same answer I gave you last time. You asked me this question, but because look I'm a very strong believer in the role of norms and standards to start to bring some predictability and stability to what happens in space. And I mean that's well recognized actually the U.S.'s Space Traffic Management Policy, SPD3, it talks about the development of norms and standards. Going back to National Space Policy, PPD4 talks about sustainability and space being part of our national interest. So I mean U.S. policy in that regard is actually quite clear. Now in terms of the practical answer to your question of how do we actually get there, my view is that we need to focus on safety and sustainability practices and not focus as much on the security dimension because I think that's where you get tripped up politically. I think with the growth in commercial activities in space both what has already happened and what is projected to happen I think there's a real opportunity to focus norms if you will, less on reducing tensions between states and more on how do we make space a safe and predictable operating environment for anybody who wants to go up there. And I think if those kinds of norms and standards became more routine or more acceptable I suppose that would actually benefit those security relationships as well because those activities that were abnormal would be more visible which of course for us helps our ability to detect potentially hostile activities and just creates a more stable operating environment for the Department of Defense as well who has humongous consolation of satellites upon which we rely as well. I agree with that, just say that's one of the best answers I've heard in that question, so good job. Thanks Bruce, I've practiced it. Five times a term. Mike. I think that the NGOs and some academic entities have a significant role to play here. The challenges we've seen the rise of commercial space if I can call it that is the copious. These were not institutions that were set up to accommodate commercial players. There's no seat at the table for companies of copious. It's done on a country basis yet we have corporations as dramatic players now on the international space stage. So that needs to evolve and to give a shout out to our host here at Secure World Foundation, for example DARPA confers. This is a great example of an effort where we're trying to look at these norms and standards, et cetera. The Hague Space Resources Working Group began to go back to it, which I've been a member. We've got China there, representatives, Russians, Japanese, Mexico, et cetera. All having a very productive dialogue with companies at the table. And that's why I love that hybrid of both corporations and governments talking together because that's ultimately what you have to have to get this done. And we've been looking at the rules again for resources utilization and getting everyone internationally on the same page. So I think that's very important. And then just let me close relative to anti-satellite and there I'm biased given where I'm coming from. But I think that satellite servicing can be very important there as a deterrent to ASAT and active offensive weaponry in space. That if you've got the ability to refuel and repair satellites, that dilutes, if not starts to eliminate the efficacy of offensive capabilities. And I'd really like to see us reach a point where people just say, look, why even bother with ASAT? We can refuel a satellite. You can dump out a bunch of Leo satellites. And I hope that would create a more peaceful environment in space. Yeah, I was going to give them a break. OK. So to kind of indirectly get at this question, I think it's interesting going back to the theme I've been kind of emphasizing about status, some of the language that was used around the Indian ASAT test. And a lot of this was about India has joined an exclusive club. And it's interesting because not just this, I sell this repeated in American newspapers. And it kind of gives it a positive spin or connotation. And as the theme we've been talking about today about the important role of language, codes of conduct, these types of standards and norms, they are very important. And even on things that we usually think of as intractable security issues, we have been able to stigmatize certain behaviors. Nuclear weapons used to be seen as a symbol of what it means to be a great power. Now, while there's a certain community around this now that's established, you know, that's on the UN Security Council, it is now seen as something that is a rogue behavior. It is something, if you acquire a nuclear weapon, you're outside the system of what we consider to be a responsible major power if you develop this kind of systems. Landmines, the banning of landmines, something that is in the intrinsic interest of a security seeking state to have this, we have a ban on landmines. And it was interesting, for this latter case, a lot of these dialogues were led by NGOs and activists and scholars. So it's interesting, perhaps for some of these more politically intractable questions, something like Track 2 diplomacy or Track 1.5 dialogue, maybe that would be a starting point to start these types of discussions. So that's just a thought on this. Sorry. So yeah, you know, I hardly agree with an Audrey on the need to focus on safety and space flight and working out those rules like a particular environment. And a time when Mike said, you know, as this commercial satellite servicing, rendezvous, proxops, industry grows, there's going to be a need for ways to discriminate between that commercial activity and the use of some of those same technologies for military stuff, right? And how do we make that distinction between the two? Because we don't want to stifle the commercial stuff. We also want to keep tabs on the stuff that it may actually be a potential threat. But I don't think we can just focus on those and ignore the military piece, right? If a commercial satellite or a commercial satellite, that is probably not going to possibly trigger a nuclear exchange, right? Or not going to trigger a wider conflict on Earth. That is the risk that comes out of the military-military engagements. And I said, they already are going on in space. People are testing stuff. People are doing close approaches for probably intelligent purposes, the motivations and the intent are probably not always clear. And that can lead to a very dangerous situation. As far as the norms of behavior was interesting in the Waco of the Indian and the satellite test, there were several commercial companies that have come out with some pretty strong statements condemning it as that's not the kind of thing that we should be doing. I have not seen anything from governments doing the same thing. So that, I think that speaks to, perhaps the emerging power of the commercial sector as a player in influencing behaviors in space. Because right now, it appears the norm is, it's okay to test that, as long as you try to minimize space debris. I don't think that's the norm we want to have, but that appears to be what the norm is. All right, then just to, again, use the power of the chair to jump in here. I don't think there's gonna be one way in which you establish norms, right? There's gonna be a whole different types of approaches, commercial, NGO, academic. But again, as maybe the secure perspective, don't forget multilateral. It has been difficult for the past several decades because space has been kind of stymied by other security considerations in the UN context. However, there are a couple of different ways in which things are actually moving ahead. Things are actually a little bit different now. You have the UN Disarmament Commission bringing up space security as part of its two-year mandate in 2018 to 2020. You had the CD just had a working group discuss space security. And going on currently right now in Geneva is a group of governmental experts, which is a very UN thing, 25 countries, the United States, Russia, China, India, and others, talking about how to prevent arms race and outer space for space security. They're finishing up probably right about now. It's about dinner time in Geneva. They're done? Yeah. Perhaps in more than one way. However, having said that, I mean the goal of a GG is to have a consensus-driven document. But in my opinion, the more chances you get to get together and talk about these issues and increase transparency, at least in terms of intentions and ideas and approaches to space security, I think that could only be a good thing and a helpful thing. Whether or not we get a document out of that, we will see. Fingers crossed. There's not one. Yeah, I figured that was my prediction. But I still feel that it was not time, I think it was time we'll spend as well. Other questions? I think we had one in the back. My name is Roger Coachetti. I work with private equity in the technology sector. And one of the striking things about the panel's discussion, and any panel one goes to on this topic, is a pretty much unanimous agreement that there is no possibility of the law being changed or the basic underlying policy being changed. And I find that striking. And each year I keep waiting for somebody to say, no, this may change, but it doesn't happen. I have sort of three quick questions in that context. One is, has anyone ever seen polling data on this topic? In other words, it strikes me that if you were to ask the American public, do you think the United States and China should cooperate in exploring outer space? The answer would be 99% yes or something like that. Secondly, is there any other country that complies with the U.S. approach or takes the U.S. policy? And thirdly, have there been any, I'm not sure the term is unintended consequences, but counterproductive consequences of this policy? For instance, I heard one time that this has caused China to cooperate more with other countries in its space program, such as Israel or Japan or Korea or whatever, which was not only unintended, but is counterproductive to the overall policy. So any polling data, any other countries that do this and any counterproductive consequences, thank you. So I'll start on that. I think it absolutely is possible to change the Wolf Amendment and I think it should be changed. I don't think the politics of it, I don't think we can go just get rid of it, but certainly we're looking to relax it or positively prescribe some areas in which NASA could engage in cooperation with China without having asked permission and maybe a few others where they do have to ask permission. I think it's important to think about the politics of how it came about. And it came about because of one highly motivated individual who was in a position to do it and the way that our Congress and both politics work, the highly motivated people on a certain topic can probably outlast the others who just say, fine, just kind of go along with it. By that measure, if there was one or two highly motivated people in a position to do something about it now, they can probably get it changed or at least get it relaxed or clarified what is possible. I think that's totally within the realm of the possibility. Whether the public cares about it, I don't know, I'm a skeptic when it comes to the value of public opinion and motivating space policy change. It's kind of hard to find that rising to the top of what people care about and they're at least what they're gonna vote about on the top three sorts of things. So I do think it's possible and I think we probably should consider that. I saw a documentary about the Flat Earthers so that's scaring me about public polling right now. I think we're quite China raising the top. Let me say again though, that regardless of where we go with the Wolf Amendment, I think some opportunities of demonstrating that we've been able to successfully interact under those auspices is a great foundation to begin from. If we show that we can operate under Wolf, then I think you've got, again, a foundation to potentially build to other things. So like all relationships, we have to show that we can operate in good faith, operate in trust, operate successfully. And then if you've got a strong foundation, you can build a house on it. Yeah, so I would say as to whether the amendment should be repealed, I have no opinion. It is what it is. It has both benefits and otherwise. What's affected though, we can talk a little bit about. In the late 2000s, there was some data exchange. So we had data exchange on Earth science in a number of different areas and in space science in a number of different areas. The way NASA provides data is free and open. So information from our satellites, it's freely available to researchers anywhere. So we make it available to all US citizens, of course, taxpayers, that universities, wherever. But that same access points are available to foreigners. So our data flow has remained constant. Well, what was turned off was data flow from China. And so China, this is an important norm of the scientific community, free and open access to data. We've tried to encourage this with all countries, all of our partners, then different folks have adopted it during levels. But if data is not being made freely and publicly available, it affects our ability to do scientific work. It affects kind of the global scientific commons because they don't have the data that they could have. That's been one effect. Patrick, can I ask a quick question? Was the far side of the moon work? Was that the first time that anything had been done under the Wolf Amendment before? Were there other examples? Yeah, no, there are some low level discussions. That was not the first example. So as for the question on polling data, I'm actually going to be running a survey, an online survey on this in May. So hopefully I'll have some data on that. I am a bit skeptical about how important the public matters on this kind of issue in the United States. And I get the impression too that on issues such as this that don't seem to strike closely, this is an opinion, but they don't seem to strike closely to people's everyday life, party ID, party identification tends to be a strong cue for the preferences people adopt. So I think this would likely vary by what is if it becomes a politically salient topic who's in power at the time. I also don't think that cooperation with China I'm not expecting to be a particularly popular kind of talking point or something that would become salient. But that said, I think it's completely open, we can make our own laws and it's completely possible that we could change this. But in the current political environment, it doesn't look very good. Thanks, I remember running low on time, we have room for maybe one last question up here on the front here. I'm sorry, could you please wait for the microphone? My name is Robert Weigand from Kailas Partners, which is an investment and financing company for space activities. What encouragement or discouragement should be given to US companies who want to participate in China space activities? Maybe stump the panel, any thoughts? Under the current export controls, I don't even know how you would. I mean, that's where we talk about a constructive prohibition, right? That I think it would be near impossible for the private sector to do so under the current export control regime. I mean, that's why you don't have a flat-out prohibition necessarily, it's just constructively impractical or impossible under export controls and probably sypheus. Brian, any other questions? Just to add to that, my understanding is that, you know, anything space related, the Obama administration made a big push to kind of unwind some of the export forces on space and they moved a whole bunch of space categories to the commerce control list from the state munitions list. But in the congressional language that allowed them to do that, it said, oh, by the way, the prohibitions are still in place for Russia, China, North Korea and a couple others. So any kind of commercial engagement or commercial space sales or technologies done in China is gonna still have to go through that much more rigorous process. And the bar has already been set very, very high for getting permission. That gets to the effective prohibition that Mike was saying. If that were to change, I would probably say, go in eyes open and learn from the other industries that are already active in China about what the challenges are, both from an ultra-poverty standpoint also from a cultural standpoint, like the companies that have gone to the China thinking they can just apply the same business techniques and practices there that they have elsewhere and it hasn't worked because it's a very different environment. If you're looking to make space investments, I've got many ideas I can talk to you about. Sorry, one point nothing has been said for so far is China does have a growing commercial space sector of its own. They're very interested in fostering their own commercial space sector. They realize it's an area of innovation that could, like most countries realize, that could help boost it. So China has a whole set of initiatives and they've got companies working on space launch, I mentioned earlier, on large constellations, on data, on manufacturing, pretty much the whole gamut of stuff. They're working on fostering their own commercial enterprise. Any last thoughts from the panel? Yeah, I was just about to. Secure World Employees were contractually obligated to discuss our upcoming conference. The Summit for Space Sustainability will be a two-day event here in DC at the end of June. Looking at all the various as you raise it affects space sustainability, commercial sector, security sector, international organizations, looking at space for human environmental benefit. So you can go to our website at SWFsummit.org and learn more about this event. But we encourage you to check it out if you can. So please join me in thanking this panel for what has been a very spirited discussion. Thank you.