 Good morning everyone. My name is Brian Whedon. I'm glad to be back here for day two of our summit. This morning we are kicking things off with a topic that has become something that's extremely salient in the policy world these days and that is destructive anti-satellite testing and the impact that has on the space environment. Since 1959, four countries have conducted tests that have destroyed satellites and created thousands of pieces of orbital debris that persisted for years and even decades afterwards. This behavior threatens our current and long-term ability to access and derive benefits from space and it's prompted calls in some areas for a ban or restraint on testing. For those who haven't yet seen it, we have on the side table printed up poster sizes of our anti-satellite testing infographic released a few weeks ago and for those who are really nice to me, I think I might have a few hard copies of our global counter space report still available. This panel is going to talk about why an anti-satellite test ban is important, how it might take shape, and why something like that is possible now and how it fits into other discussions on responsible behavior. To set the stage for our discussion, I'm pleased to welcome Dan Ultrogi. He's director of the Comspot Corporation and is going to give us a short overview of the space debris impacts from anti-satellite testing. So Dan, Laura George. It turns out that ice is slippery if you're wondering. And so it's a pleasure to be here. This is something we've spent a bit of time analyzing the Russian ASAT test specifically but you'll see we'll do at the end a comparison with some of the other ASAT tests that Brian just mentioned. See, there's my mouse. So I want to just say before we get into the ASAT stuff, this is the backdrop of Leo conjunction assessment already. Apart from ASAT activities in just the last five years, our research has shown that conjunctions have increased five-fold just in five years and that's because we track more objects now and because there's a lot more active satellites. So ASATs are just another element to this. ASAT test itself happened on 15 November last year. You can take on the right here, you can take this plot. Each of these lines represents a debris fragment that was actually tracked. Well, you can propagate those backwards and you can find out when they come together. That tells you when the actual fragmentation event happened and that's this red triangle here. Some people tend to think that you can do a shoot down, you can kind of control where the debris goes but I can tell you and based on our research on the left plot that shows the velocity directions of the fragments and you can kind of see it looks like a stocking cap little fuzzball. It's going in all directions. So the point there is that as was mentioned yesterday in yesterday's panel debris goes in all directions and affects other orbit regimes. It doesn't stay where that event happened. We've also been tracking the number of released state vectors and orbit TLEs for each of the fragments and this plot shows as a function of time with the red star being where the fragmentation happened. The black line shows how many fragments were ever tracked from this event and the red line shows how many are there today and this was updated last week. So you can see that objects are reentering. That's why the red line is dropping but there are still 750 ish fragments on orbit. Now this is a simulation of the engagement scenario. You can see the interceptor coming up here. This is a notional representation. It's not perfect but I think it gets to the heart of where fragments can go and you'll see here a cloud of fragments from the interceptor and another cloud from the Cosmos 1408 satellite. The colors of these volumes denotes where fragments could go and the scale here shows the likelihood that they will go there. So you can see this color went from red to yellow. Now it's going to start going to green out over here as the volume of space occupied by these fragments expands. And just to point out satellites are flying through this volume so they have some non-zero likelihood of collision. Okay so you can take this volume and kind of aggregate it over a day or a week or a month and this is an aggregation over 24 hours. You can see the volume of space that the fragments could occupy. You can see that where the interceptor happened, intercept happened, it's red. That means it's likely the fragments are coming together there. And 180 degrees away there's a what's called a pinch line where things have to come back together because the orbit planes have to come back. You can then take that volume and you can fly the satellites through it and you can kind of integrate the likelihood that that satellite would have a collision. And this is a rank ordering of the top 50 satellites that were put at risk. And you probably can't read all this text down here but note that the ISS was number 14. And it is such a huge object in space that helps it be put at risk. But there are satellites from every country down in this list here. And there's basically two conditions for why you are put at risk. You're either flying through a lot of the volume or you happen to be intersecting like this orbit plane shown here. You happen to be flying through right at where the intercept happened or 180 degrees away. Now let's talk about the relevance to operators. This plot here is expanded on the left so let's just start there. But it shows as a function of altitude the collision probability for three categories. The orange is active satellites against the debris. And this is not ASAT debris. This is just the population of debris. Blue is active on active satellites. But the new category is this gray here. This is active satellites on cosmos 1408 debris. And you can see that it affects all orbits well up into the 650 altitude even though the test was down much lower. And you can also see that some in some of our regimes the increase in conjunction risk or collision risk is 20% or more. The sobering part is that this gray stuff is going to decay. So as it gets lower and lower it's going to then be affecting the ISS more and more. Now we found a quite a sobering condition in early January from this whereby the orange debris plane is intersecting with some of the Earth observing satellite systems. They tend to use a sun synchronous orbit. And what we realize then is that the inclination of the target 82.3 degrees is exactly the complement of the inclination of a sun synchronous orbit of 97.7 ish degrees. What that means is that these orbit planes are going to process or regress and twice a year they will be co-planar and counter-rotating. So it's basically like driving down the freeway in the opposite direction of traffic. And because of that geometry you end up having a lot of collision risk. This is what we call it now a conjunction squall. And looking over the year you can see a hundred fold increase in conjunction rates at certain points of year when these planes overlap. You can do this analysis for all the satellites and we looked in particular, if you look on the left this is a mis-distance criterion we're using. And you can see that a lot of the CubeSat constellations are getting hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of conjunctions per day. And this breaks down the various constellations in how much they're getting in terms of conjunction risk. The gray down here that is our backdrop. So that's the conjunction or collision risk against non-ASAT debris. So you can see that this ASAT event is making it maybe five times higher than the normal background in terms of collision risk in this April spike. The black is all of the non-CubeSat stuff. It's tends to be more the military or the civil expensive programs, very expensive programs. Now that is from a mis-distance perspective but you can also look at collision rates. When you look at the object sizes of what's coming together CubeSats are very small so they have less risk. Now you can see this is dominated more by Starlink which is in green here and the black which is again the military and expensive civil like NASA programs. So now who has been affected by this test? Well I just said it's CubeSats and it's larger earth observing systems but it's also other operators in non-sunsynchronous orbits. ISS itself has seen a 33% increase in conjunctions and now let's go through the news. What events have been kind of highlighted? Well they had to go into their safe haven mode for the ISS right after the collision and then here's a bunch of things. This is a China experience to conjunction with the debris. Here's a commercial operator of a very expensive earth observing system saying that they are seeing quite a few a tenfold increase actually in conjunctions and then there are many others. A lot of ISS conjunctions and maneuvers they've had to do. Imagine maneuvering this this huge space station and the cost involved. Likewise Starlink has seen some some plus ups in not just their collision risk but also because they have an automated maneuvering system a high increase there. Now let's kind of generalize this. We've talked about the Russian ASAT but this is not our first fragmentation event right so you can see in this plot the Chinese ASAT test. There's also a Redium Cosmos event and this is showing you in a spatial density perspective how things have changed over time. This table is looking at the kind of the four major more recent ASAT tests and you can see the altitudes that they happen. The Chinese ASAT was was at 856 kilometers so quite high and it's also at a high relative velocity as shown here and you have thousands of fragments coming from that and a thousand still on orbit. There's a USA 193 shootdown event. There's an Indian ASAT. These are much lower altitudes and again people talk about shooting from above and how that changes the debris field and where it goes. It does slightly but really it's more about if these tests being at a lower altitude tends to self cleanse much faster. Then this most recent ASAT test is over here. It's a lower velocity but it's at a higher altitude again. I also compared this against Redium Cosmos and Redium Cosmos was quite a serious test. It's not an ASAT test sorry it's not a test but is an accidental collision but it had a lot of fragments that that came from it. And then lastly I just wanted to show this video. This is spatial density starting right before the ASAT test. This band of debris is the Russian ASAT the Cosmos 1408 debris and you might have noticed it took some weeks before the public catalog even reflected that those fragments existed because they had not been either tracked or publicly released yet. Okay so what are the next steps? It was already mentioned that the ASAT tests are a pressing threat to our safety and security and sustainability. US government has taken a lead in unilaterally saying that they're not going to conduct such kinetic ASAT tests. So that's all great. Canada has now joined this band. I'm sure the global community would love to see more and more countries take this step. And last thing I'll tell you is that some of the analyses that I've shown in here are based on a tool called NEET. It's a number Encounters Analysis tool. It allows you to assess how frequently objects come together. It's freely available. Anybody can go use it on this website here. So thank you very much. And I don't know if there's time for questions but I assume not. Okay thank you. All right thank you. We're going to see you at our panel and we're going to get on with the discussion please. So thank you Dan for that excellent technical overview of some of the complications and implications from NS satellite testing. I'm now going to use my panelists who are going to take the discussion further about what do we do about this. First I'm going to introduce on the far right Clive Hughes. He's the head of space security and advanced threats at the UK foreign commonwealth and development office. Prior to this he was the international ocean strategy manager covering a range of environmental security and science policies related to the oceans. Next to him is Amundira Azcarate Ortega. She's the associate researcher in the space security and weapons of mass destruction programs at the United Nations Institute for disarmament research. Her research focuses on space security and missiles and she's currently leading UNIDIR's participation in the open-ended working group on space threats which we're going to talk about here in more detail. Next to her is Jessica Tuck. She's a civilian space policy analyst in the office of the secretary of defense which develops policy guidance provides advice and oversees planning, development, and operational implementation across the US Department of Defense. Her portfolio includes international affairs and multilateral governance which includes serving as a US delegate to the United Nations. On my other side is Nivedita Raju. She's a researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute where she conducts research on space security and gender issues. She also conducts research and outreach for disarmament education. And finally on the end we have Sabrina Alam. She's currently working at SES satellites developing, implementing, and driving the environmental, social, and governance ESG strategy. She has a background in physics and previously worked at NASA Goddard and the European Space Agency before specializing in sustainability. As we did yesterday, please use the HUVA app to submit questions and please make sure you're on this panel so I can go ahead and see them. Nive, I wonder if you can get us started by summarizing where the multilateral discussion on space security stands today. What has changed from what has happened in the past or has not changed? Thank you, Brian. And thank you to Secure World and to the UK Space Agency for the invitation. Very grateful to be here. Maybe I'll provide a bit of background first as to how we got to this stage at the multilateral level. Space security discussions are not new. They've been conducted for decades now, can be traced all the way back to the formation of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which resulted in the adoption of the Outer Space Treaty in 1967. And as many of you here know, the treaty imposes certain conditions and restrictions on activities and how to explore and use outer space. And this includes Article 4, which prohibits the placement of WMD in orbit and also imposes certain conditions on activities on the moon and other celestial bodies. But, and this is what I argue is a major flaw with the Outer Space Treaty, is that there were no follow-up mechanisms after this. And as a result, our following its adoption, national policies began to shift, priorities began to change, military competition increased and the potential for escalation and conflict started to become very real. So there was a need to prevent an arms race in outer space. This was adopted, Paros, as an agenda item at the, sorry, at the, at the conference on disarmament. And the UN General Assembly has adopted annual resolutions on Paros since. But progress at the multilateral level on space security has been extremely challenging. And that is largely owed to two emerging views, which we've heard a little bit, a little about yesterday as well on one of the panels. The first believing that legally binding treaties, which focus on banning weapons in space, that that should be the need of the hour. And the other view, which considers that existing frameworks can suffice, that we can build new measures, which can start with voluntary measures based on these frameworks, and that the focus on weapons in space is rather misguided. So while multilateral discussions were essentially stuck, the space sector has continued to evolve. Actors and stakeholders are diversified, technology is rapidly advancing. And among these, these developments are, of course, the developments of counter space capabilities and weapons testing, including destructive ASAP tests. And so I would say what's been changing is that there's a very urgent need for intervention at the multilateral level now. We've been stuck for about 40 decades, the 40, 40 years. Well, let's hope it doesn't go to decades for about 40 years now. And there's a very urgent need to overcome this. And so to spur discussions at the multilateral level, the UK introduced an initiative through the General Assembly, that is Resolution 7536, which has resulted in the creation of an open-ended working group on reducing space threats through norms, rules, and principles of responsible behaviors. And notably, the resolutions and the open-ended working group, they do not adopt a divisive either or approach. These focus on norm-building, on voluntary measures, and do not rule out a legally binding treaty. And there is a focus on regulating behaviors rather than capabilities. So I would say what has been, what has been changing, and this is what makes me a little optimistic, is that states and stakeholders are all slowly recognizing that these are not contradictory approaches, that voluntary measures and norm-building and legally binding treaties are actually compatible with each other. And given that we are at a stage where the trust deficit is so low, where confidence has deteriorated, we can start with voluntary measures and perhaps we can finally reach a place where we can adopt a legally binding treaty. So we're stuck, but the discussions are still quite challenging. But let's hope that there's a way to overcome these changing attitudes. We're stuck, but at least we're talking, right? Yes. Exactly. So, Jessica, I'm going to turn to you now. The United States recently announced that it would no longer conduct direct, direct dissent, NSI, NSS satellite missile tests. I think that was a pretty big deal. Can you talk about how the United States government arrived at that decision? And was there anything that changed that made that possible now, as opposed to in the past? Yeah, absolutely. Again, Brian, thanks so much for the introduction and ability to be on the panel today with such great colleagues. I was joking earlier that this is like a mini-OEWG that is occurring up here. All of these folks for the most part were at the OEWG and will continue being there in rather, you know, participants, capacity, et cetera. Yes, thanks so much. So on behalf of the United States government, you know, we've been tracking this for a long time. And Dan, as Dan said earlier in his speech, there are so many things that are happening in the space environment, right? And as you've heard over and over, over the last couple days, there's new technologies. There's novel uses. There's the commercialization of space that has never been seen before. The barriers are lowering. We have more space actors. The United States military actually has an interesting view on that, which is because we actually track all of these things. And as many of you know, we provide the US space catalog, all of these track objects on spacetrack.org. So we've been seeing this, you know, we've seen the collisions. We've seen iridium cosmos. We've seen the increase, the rapid, rapid increase over the last 20 years of new actors, promising new technologies. And we're helping people with collision avoidance. But when you see the rise of anti-satellite, destructive, direct ascent anti-satellite missile tests, things like the Chinese Feng Yun-1C, things like last year's or 2021's Russian ASAT test. These are, for us, it was, you see it as a deliberate choice to create destruction, right? This is a deliberate choice on the behalf of governments to essentially pollute this as a space environment. And so while we've been talking about responsible behaviors for the last two years, really this, the Russian 2021 ASAT test showed us it has to, it has to end, right? At some point, you cannot pollute the space environment for so long. We're endangering explorers. We're endangering commerce. We're endangering long-term exploration, trying to get to Mars. How can you do space exploration if you can't even get out of low Earth orbit, right? So in the US government, there was a recognition of this, and it really was a catalyst to say, okay, instead of banning the technology, where are we going to go? What is the behavior that we want to stop? And that behavior in this case, one of the easiest behaviors we could come out with, you know, right before the OEWG was essentially, well, we, the United States, and we hope others join us, can commit to not conduct destructive direct ascent anti-satellite missile testing. That is a deliberate choice. You do not need to create that level of debris to destroy the environment. It's about long-term sustainability. It's about responsible behavior. And so that is really what has changed in the last few years. Thanks. Great. Thank you. Clive, obviously, and thankfully the United Kingdom has not done anti-satellite tests before, but you've been involved in this issue, as we talked about earlier, right? The UK sponsored the resolution that led to this opening of the working group. How does, how is the UK approaching this issue of anti-satellite testing specifically, but space security more generally? Yeah. So thank you, Brian. Yeah. I think if the UK didn't have a position on this today, this seat would vent to you, because after seeing Dan's presentation, I would have rushed back to the office to urgently, urgently create one. But we definitely sort of welcome the US commitment. And for all the reasons Jessica has stated, and we've seen clearly presented by Dan. And so I think for us, it's got to be a forefront of the kind of responsible behaviors that we're trying to persuade countries to sign up to through the UN Open-Ended Working Group process. I think this kind of space debris issue is just one facet of a deeper issue in which kind of humanity's amazing and beneficial technological progress is actually now a point where it could be harmful to the future progress. And so there is a real need, and I think an increasing recognition that we need to come together, you know, on, on whether it's space debris or climate change or biodiversity or pollution. These are all facets of the same fundamental issue. And we, and, you know, I think, you know, we need to, as a sort of international community, understand that and sort of grab this transitional moment in human history to kind of address these issues. It's got to be doable, we think. Yeah, well, I hope so. Amu, could you, we talked with this Open-Ended Working Group a couple of times. Could you summarize what happened at the first meeting last month and did this notion of an anti-satellite test ban or moratorium come up and what kind of support do you think there was for it? Okay, absolutely. Thank you, Brian. And also, thank you to the Secure World Foundation and the UK Space Agency for organizing this event and for having me here. To provide a bit of context, this OWG has a specific mandate and it's divided into four items, so to say. The first is to take stock of the legal and normative frameworks that currently exist in order also to be able to identify the gaps that also exist. The second thing that's mandated to do is think about the threats to space systems. The third thing is to make recommendations on possible norms, rules and principles of responsible behaviors. And the fourth thing is to draft a report to provide to the General Assembly during next year's session. So during this first session which happened last month, we discussed the first item of this mandate, which was the taking stock of the legal and normative frameworks. And as Navey already rightly said, we do have space laws and space regulations, but they don't really say anything explicit about testing or debris creation. And this was a major gap that was identified by states in the OWG and it's also been something that's been talked about in the past in several instances. So this is, in fact, one of the major concerns that states have been raising over the years. And so it was definitely discussed. The US commitment in fact was noted by many states and it was welcomed by many states as well. And also another thing that was noted is that commitments are great, but the fact that the law does not establish any sort of prohibition or that we don't have any source of idea in the law of how these sorts of acts have to be tackled is, you know, it's an important gap. I think the closest thing, and I think some states are lucid to this during the session of the OWG, the closest thing that we have in the law that could hint at the fact that deliberate debris creation is kind of a bad thing is the Article 9 of the Outer Space Treaty, which establishes the GCD of states to conduct space activities with due regard for the activities of other state parties. But as was noted by several states, we don't really have a lot of clarity of what this concept of due regard actually means. It's such a broad concept and so that's partly why states haven't really made the link of like an ASAP test is a violation of this due regard principle because we don't really know what due regard means. So some states called for the need to clarify these, to bring more clarity to this issue. And so going back to the US commitment, yes, this was definitely a welcome development, I think, and so did many, many states at this meeting. And in fact, Canada also, during the session of this OWG, they actually made their own commitment to not conduct these types of ASAP testings. And they also, as the US also did, they expressed their hope that other countries would follow suit. I do have to point out, though, that some concerns were also raised. First, there was the concern of, you know, commitments are great. And I think personally that any initiative that reduces or seeks to mitigate debris creation is a step forward. But there is, you know, some concern that maybe a commitment is not enough that there is some desire by many states to have a binding ban on these types of tests. Also, some non-state actors have actually expressed this as well in several instances. And there was also the concern that if we seek to ban these activities, what is this going to mean for the development of technologies, especially of emerging space-faring states? Is this going to somehow limit their development? And so I think now it's important to find a way to ensure that such commitments or such initiatives to mitigate debris creation or activities that lead to debris creation, I think it's more accurate. We have to find a way to ensure that this is done in a way that doesn't limit those, you know, really good initiatives or those really good technological developments that advance space exploration, that advance sustainability initiatives, etc. So this is a bit of a summary of what happened during that first session of the UAWG. Thank you. Sabrina, I'm going to talk to you, return to you now. You work for a commercial satellite operator who do business in space. How does the commercial industry view this issue? Do they think the anti-satellite testing is a big deal? Do they see it as a big threat to their business? Can I give you some perspective on that? Yeah, sure. I mean debris is bad, intentional debris is even worse. So from a commercial perspective, it puts our business in danger. It puts our, I would say our livelihood in danger as well. It really is quite negative and so we do think it's a huge problem. We've advocated, we've taken a stance, we've communicated to the world that we don't agree with this. We don't think that this is good for any reason when you talk about astronaut safety, when you talk about satellites, when you talk about space in general, this puts everything at risk. For SCS, we operate in MEO and GEO and so from Dan's presentation, you saw that there's a huge effect on the LEO satellites. But actually, you also saw that debris can go anywhere and so that cloud of debris also poses a threat to satellites in MEO and GEO and it poses a threat to the satellite industry, whether it be military or whether it be private, whether it be whatever it might be, there is a huge threat there. Both from a financial perspective, if we're talking about investors, if we're talking about insurers, if ASAT testing is to happen, you increase the risk of your satellite operating in orbit. That impacts a company heavily from a financial perspective because you're less likely to or you're going to have to pay more essentially because the risk is greater. So there's that. From a non-financial perspective, you increase the workload of your employees. Every spacecraft operator is going to have to work and you saw Dan saying almost 100 fold. So there are real problems with ASAT testing and debris in general. And where we're all trying to mitigate debris, ASAT testing is just a threat to space sustainability in general. And so SES, the commercial sector, all satellite operators and actually I think anyone who operates within the space environment is worried about what's to happen because the technological capabilities aren't good enough to also track every bit of debris, whether it be really big, whether it be really small. And so adding that to the risk just creates a bigger problem there. And so it's all in all, not a great thing. And so we don't support ASAT testing. SES itself and the CEO, Steve, have openly said we don't support it and we want to work and collaborate with the industry to actually put a ban to this, to put a stop to this, and to control it in some way or another. And following up on that, there's a question here from the audiences to the consequence of the collision between two satellites and Leo, which Dan talked about, are about the same as an anti-satellite test. Both create a lot of debris. And should we not be as concerned about the collision risk in general as we are about anti-satellite testing? I think I would answer that by saying I can think of far more conferences and workshops and papers and discussions focused at collisions, like just accidental collisions than I can about specifically what we do about deliberate choices to destroy satellites. So I absolutely agree there are, they are both very concerning. I think what we're trying to do here is say we should think about this, as mentioned earlier, these are choices, right? The anti-satellite testing is a choice made by government. It's not an accident. It's not something just randomly happened. I think that is, makes it a little bit different. And I think that's why we're talking about that in addition to sort of the accidental collisions, which are absolutely important to deal with. So, Nivi, I want to turn back to you. You've been working on this issue for quite a while. You mentioned this a little bit, but can you expand it? Are you optimistic or pessimistic that we're actually going to, this time, make some progress on the space security issue and more specifically on the anti-satellite testing issue? And what gives you the greatest sense of hope or caution? I'm cautiously optimistic. So a bit of both, I guess. Well, and I think that that view is informed by the, again, by the urgency that I mentioned earlier, by the fact that these tests are increasing and that debris impacts everyone. I think, as Amu mentioned earlier, both states and non-state actors have been quite vocal about this issue, even at the OEWG. If you look at many of the submissions, destructive ASAP tests has been highlighted in several of them. And even states which have been hesitant and didn't want to explicitly name them, you still see debris being named as a very real security concern. So there's obviously awareness of this issue. And I think, again, there is slowly, hopefully, I think there's some growing recognition that there is no such thing as a responsible, destructive ASAP test. It's not possible. When we say that the effects of debris are indiscriminate, it's because if you as a state choose to conduct this test, there's nothing to say that the debris from your test is not going to interfere with your own space activities. Maybe it could even hamper your economic growth. It could interfere with your military space activities. And it's affecting your private sector, as we heard from Sabrina earlier. So I think that there is an appetite for this. However, and here's the need for caution, there are states, again, as I mentioned earlier, states from the global south who feel that such a ban, there should be a way to introduce this in a manner that does not impede their right to develop these technologies. And learning from the past, I think that our objective, our intent, there are some who have questioned the US statement. So we need to be very clear about the intent and the scope of such a ban and also the process, making sure that it is extremely transparent and extremely inclusive, that all of these states are equitably invited to participate and help shape these discussions. And if we keep all of these factors in mind, then maybe. Maybe. And for those who work in this field, I mean, that is a ray of sunshine compared to where this discussion has been for the last 30 years, which is kind of depressing. Jessica, I want to go back to you. How does this discussion and a satellite testing fit into the larger discussion in terms of behavior, which the US government has been a leader on sort of pushing in the international community the last several years? Is this the main issue to focus on asset testing or are there other really high significant issues, security issues, where you think there also needs to be a focus and discussion on? Thanks. Yeah, as you guys heard, during the OEWG, the ASAT, the anti-satellite missile ban was a big question. You know, for the United States, this is an initial step, right? We have been talking about the need for responsible behaviors, the needs for norms of behaviors for actually, it's been a really consistent drumbeat in US based policy for successive presidential administrations. So it's not as if we are changing our policy over time. What this is is showing that where can we go? We're looking for, you know, so as the other, as our other panelists said, there's kind of two trends of thought. One wants to, one set of countries wants to say, hey, let's go straight to legally binding. Let's go straight to treaties. Let's talk about these things that we can ban. Meanwhile, while we lack confidence in other states, what we're looking at from the United States side and some other like-minded countries is essentially what brought about the OEWG, as Clive mentioned earlier, was that realization that there are other methods to go about, right? There are other ways. It's not to say that you have to have one or the other, but it is really a continuum. You start with norms and eventually you start with non-legally binding transparency and confidence-building measures. And then eventually, yeah, maybe we do get to treaties, but we've got to take that first step. And so for us, the ASAT testing missile testing ban is essentially that first step to say here's a behavior. It's not about technology necessarily, but it is about behaviors. It is about a country saying, you know what, we're not going to do this anymore. We think it's really important. And so I'm going to diverge just a minute here, but even though I'm in the Department of Defense, right, I get to go to, I'm looking at Nicholas here who was one of our speakers yesterday. We don't only work with on the security side, right? The U.S. Department of Defense really works across the board for space sustainability, responsible behaviors. So we're actually a huge player in the long-term sustainability guidelines, right? We were talking about, you know, because you look at things like basic things like communication. And the interesting thing is, yeah, it comes up in UN COPLOS. It comes up as an LTS guideline, but when it doesn't exist on the security side, when you don't have risk reduction measures, you don't have risk mitigation, there's also the security aspect of the two. So there are a lot of complementary efforts between the two that we think we're trying to suss out now, right? And there's been a lot of work in COPLOS, and there's been a lot of work in the security areas, but we think that this is the time to start looking at, again, the behaviors. So we're really, really glad that the U.K. took the initiative, really spearheaded the effort to do this OEWG because we think, as Almedina indicated, it'll be great to talk about those threats. It's incumbent on us to build shared understandings between nations about what threats actually are, what are the risks, and then how do we reduce those risks through things like communication, through things like telling other people, look, we're going to stop this behavior, and this is just the first step. If others join us, then eventually maybe we can get to the point where there's enough widespread support that we can say, this is an international norm. This is something that we can take forward along the path to those legally binding measures. Thanks. And so, Clia, following up on that, I mean, U.K. was the original sponsor of this resolution, has been pushing for this. What is your assessment of how the OEWG is going so far? Is it sort of, we've talked about how it is the first ray of sunshine in quite a while, so that's great. So where do you think it's going? Do you think this might come, might be something that emerges from those discussions, is this focus on satellite testing, or might there are other issues that you think are going to emerge from there? So I think we had a gentle start with the first OEWG meeting, because I think all we were doing for that first meeting was examining what is the existing legal and normative framework that applies to space. And so it was a kind of a warm-up, really, for what's to come. And I think what was positive from that meeting was, maybe we shouldn't think of it as positive, but if it's a difficult issue. But almost all present believe that international law should apply to space, as well as the space treaties, including international humanitarian law. Although I did note that Russia and China sort of declined to kind of go as far as that, accepting that. But in general, there's a large body of opinion that kind of supports the sort of rules-based order in space. I think other positive things that I noted were, I think, a bit of an outbreak of pragmatism in some of the countries. So as Jessica alluded to, it's been a somewhat polarised debate over the years, kind of legally binding arms, concurrence, treaty, versus kind of voluntary rules. And I think now a number of countries, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, I noted in their statements, were kind of accepting that the responsible behaviours approach is actually has potential to deliver some of the results that we want to see in terms of reducing space threats. And it doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility of concluding legally binding rules in the future. And the other thing I think I noticed is that a lot of countries are saying that any legally binding rules that do come in the future do need to be verifiable and kind of practically implementable. So I feel like the sort of conversation has improved in that sense. But it's going to be more difficult going forward. We're going to the next meeting discuss current and future threats to space systems. That is obviously a controversial topic. And then we will, at the next one, actually try to get into developing specific norms of behaviour. So countries are going to be ready to put forward what's important to them. And there's a big diversity of opinion that we will need to sort of talk through. I think in terms of how it relates to the sort of potential ban on destructive ASAT testing, I mean, that is a clear, making such a commitment is a clear responsible behaviour. We'd like it to be included in the OEWG report if that was possible. But there are other ways we could do that. I think it's important to show other countries that we're not just focused on that. We want to be addressing a range of threats to space systems. There are other threats to space systems that are also important to us to address. And I think we need to sort of show that good faith that we're looking to address the full range of threats or to the extent that we can and have that conversation. And the final point I would make is that whatever we come out with at the end of this process, whether it's a list of norms or nothing, the process itself is the product. So just having the conversation, help starting to build understanding of what we regard as threatening and sort of planting those seeds in the minds of other countries that that then might help inform future conversations, future processes. So we've got to have keep a long term view as well on this. So that phrase is the process is the product. I understand that, but I just want to unpack that a little bit for the audience. It means that just having all these countries go through this process and thinking these issues through and developing positions leads to a better end state than we were when we began the process. Even if we can't quite get them all on this to agree to all the things that we wanted to have in the process, right? So it's that process of thinking through that is actually changing things and making these more positive. Yeah. And I think obviously some countries have more space and more invested in space than others. So I think part of the process is increasing the overall IQ of the international community on what the threats are, what's the nature of the threats and the consequences of that. And this can help with that. And so I think a lot of countries will come out of this knowing more than they did, you know, prior to the process. So that's all got to be sort of useful. So I want to pick up on one of the things you said about verification. And I want to tie that together with a question from the audience about holding nations accountable and open that to whoever wants to respond. How important is it that these commitments, whether they are voluntary, whether they're actually legally binding, are coupled with a way to verify that countries are abiding by them. And there's a way to hold countries accountable. I know that happens in other arms control regimes. How important is that as part of this process? Anybody want to touch on that? Well, I think if again, making it a little bit narrower, when does verification come into play? That's when you have a very clear legal obligation. And if we manage to move forward with any within with a measure that prohibits destructive ASAP tests, we do already have SSA technologies that can be used to verify whether these tests occurred or not. And I think if we communicate clearly, what is the purpose of verification then for such a regime? It's not to deny the state that is conducting the test the benefit of having conducted this successful test. It's to inform the international community that a violation has then occurred. And after the Indian test, after the Russian test, we saw that this happened. Many states were already aware instantly. It's impossible to conceal such a visible activity. So I think that verification, we do have the means to do so. It's more, I suppose, a question of timing, inviting the states first, following the process. And we do have the means for verification for this particular measure. Well, go ahead and take this. Yeah, absolutely. From the United States perspective, this is the reason why we went with the anti-satellite, the destructive direct descent anti-satellite missile testing, right? Because we said we want something that the international community is able to verify itself. We don't want necessarily, you know, the United States provides a lot of information, the US military provides a lot of information, but we don't, we recognize that we may not be seen as an honest broker, right? We recognize that there are other, other views out there and that people say, okay, I don't necessarily want to rely on the United States information, but there's other information out there. There's, there's the rise of SSA providers now. You've heard from some of them. You've heard from Dan, who obviously took a lot of information together that wasn't necessarily all from the United States, right? It was not all based off US information. And so we said verification through other means is important for other countries that they can figure it out through their own sovereign means or through other methods that they trust. And so we said, look, when you see it, when you, it's, it's easier to see a missile on a tail. You see the missile go up. You see the cloud of debris occur. And I mean, it's, it's a lot easier to verify, right? That a violation has occurred other than, you know, versus, well, you know, was there cyber activity? We're not entirely sure where did these things come from? Are they doing, you know, are there non-kinetic actions occurring? And these are things that you can't necessarily, you know, even if the US knows it, do others, can others see it? And so that was a really important part for us. And I will make one more comment, which is it's a longstanding US policy that the United States will consider arms control proposals. So we're not completely close to it. We will consider them, but they have to be effectively verifiable, equitable, and they also have to enhance the US national security interests. And so these are things that we evaluate every time that we're brought essentially in a proposal. And these are one of those things that we would look at again, if this, if this initiative were to go further. And I think something else that you mentioned is having the ability to see and identify this, even from multiple sources, that has really changed quite a bit in the last five, 10 years with the rise of commercial SSA providers, other countries developing their own national capabilities. I think that is one of the things that has very much changed this. And I'll just add that if you look at the history of nuclear arms control, the appearance of space-based verification for that as an imagery satellite was, I think, an important precursor to the willingness of countries to sign up to things that they could then, they could then verify. So you can almost do a little parallel with some SSA things that are going on, don't you? Yeah, no, I just wanted to add to that because the keyword you mentioned was accountability. And from a commercial kind of point of view, accountability is really actually vital because what happens if a piece of debris actually knocks out a satellite? What happens if our whole business model then gets completely interrupted? We can't provide services to our customers, we can't provide services to whoever it may be. That has a knock-on effect because then we are held liable for not providing that service. And so accountability is really important because then firstly where does that flow of accountability come from? Who determines that? And then what are the repercussions of it? So those are really important factors that need to be considered when we talk about ASAT tests, when we talk about verification, when we talk about, in general, like intentional debris. And so from the commercial space environment is very, very harmful to our business, to the industry itself. Because that puts other organizations off. New space will be harmed, they would be reluctant to then step into that environment if they know that that risk is so large and then no one will be held accountable. So yeah, I just wanted to throw that in there. So I want to pick up on that a little bit and I'll ask you to start, but I want to get everyone else's opinions. And it's going to tie together a couple of questions here that are difficult questions, but I think they're important to bring in the discussion. And that gets to, you know, the issue of collective action holding countries accountable. There have been some countries that have spoken up. There have been some companies that have spoken up, but not all. And I kind of want to get to a discussion about why do we think that not all that many countries or companies, for example, have publicly called out these tests or have endorsed what the moratorium that the U.S. announced. Do you have a sense of why you think that might be? Yeah, well I mean we should be calling it out. Does more need to be done 100%. But I want to come back to the reason ASAC tests even exist. It's politically motivated. With commercial companies we have limited kind of power over what countries want to do. We have limited power over kind of those key decisions that they make. What we can do is advocate best practice. We can, within our agreements, mention that we don't support this and we expect that our customers, whether it be the U.S. government or other governments, that they uphold what we believe is best practice, which is no ASAC testing, but how much power do we actually hold? And I think that's been the deterrent of commercial organizations. They have spoken out and they realize actually it's not making a ton of difference at this point. However, when we see that the U.S. has taken banned ASAC testing, when we see that Canada then followed, you actually empower these organizations to do more and more and more. And so from our perspective, we want to partner with organizations. We want to collaborate with the industry to put forward not a proposal, but advocate for what we believe should be banned, which is the ASAC testing. We recently created an ESG strategy, so an environmental social governance strategy, and within that one of our key pillars is space sustainability. And so what we're doing right now, and this is in particular to SES, and this is kind of the general trend within commercial organizations that operate within the space industry. We are fleshing out what space sustainability really means to us. There are so many different aspects and layers of it. Do we need to prioritize? Because of course, that focus also means a huge amount of resources, both financially, also from a human point of view. And then in addition to that, who then monitors it, who then leads it, is there a framework? And that's why we need to collaborate, not just commercial space players, but actually we need to work with governmental organizations. We need to work with those big players that can make the key decisions about what should happen, what should be set. And that's what we do. We do play a role. We do, like I said, advocate for best practice. We do say what we need from our perspective. And what we want to see is a quicker, faster, more effective way of working. And that's not to criticize anyone. I think from our point of view, we really want to see change. We don't just want to talk about it, we want to see it. And like I said, commercial players are so open to doing this. They are so open to providing their inputs, their opinions. They want more opportunity to do that and get involved in these decisions. So anyone else input? Why haven't companies or governments been more, I was talking on this, I don't know. You mentioned Article 9 is sort of a hook out there. I don't think I've heard any countries explicitly calling on that. Yes. Why maybe? That's right. Well, I alluded to one reason before, which is the lack of clarity of what this concept means. And the OWG, in fact, one of its missions in a way is to help create consensus, create common understanding on these issues. So hopefully, after this process, we will have more clarity on a lot of issues, but this one specifically. But another reason why states haven't really been vocal, haven't really expressed whether kinesiocase testing is an illegal action is because, and Sabrina, you mentioned this, it's because of political interest. States have had a lot of freedom of action in space for a very long time, and this has been really advantageous for them, in a way, right? I think it's become more evident now with the increase of actors in space, both state and non-state actors, that such freedom of action, it does have advantages, but it also has disadvantages and perhaps more regulation and clarity is needed, more explicit regulations to kind of know how we can act in space are needed. So I think that was the reason, but I do see a certain shift. And as for non-state actors, I completely agree with what you say, Sabrina, but I do think that non-state actors have a huge role to play in these discussions. And this is an open-ended working group, keyword open, so that means that everybody can participate. It is a state-led process, of course, but non-state actors can come, can speak and share their views, and I think it's key that they do so during this past session. We didn't really have that many non-state actors that took the floor, and I would encourage them to do so more in the upcoming sessions, because they have the technical know-how that sometimes states lack, and also civil society, for example. They also play a huge role, because they have this ability to connect industry with governments in a way that few other actors can. So I would encourage to reach out to civil society as well, or to reach out to organizations and shameless self-promotion here, to organizations like Unity, who really work hard to be that next point between the different actors, because the end goal is to create that common understanding that will eventually lead to a more secure and sustainable space domain. So Jessica, tying into it, there's a question here, whether or not private sector statements calling out these issues impact governments. Do you want to hear from the private sector what they feel about these issues? Do you think that has an impact on how governments approach it? Oh, absolutely. This is outside of ASAP, but what I will point back at, and Dan referenced this in his discussion earlier, which was the iridium-cosmos collision. Prior to the iridium-cosmos collision, the United States had the U.S. military kept all of our information. We have radars all over the world. We're watching what's going on in space, and we weren't really compelled to share that information with everybody. When iridium-cosmos happened, and you saw, it was this turning point where industry said, whoa, we thought this was the big sky theory. We were just flying, but oh my gosh, we're going to lose billion-dollar satellites. We can't handle this on our own. We don't have the space track information. We don't have the tracking ability right now. This was many years ago. And they actually went to the government, and they went to Congress, and they wrote letters to the military, and they said, help us. Give us information. And the government said, essentially, okay, let's figure out how we can do it. And so we had the rise of the space situational awareness sharing program, which is still going today. You have spacetrack.org, where the U.S. shares its military catalog. And so yeah, we absolutely want people. We want commercial industries coming online and saying, this is great. You guys are looking at sustainability. You're taking sustainability seriously, even if you're the military. Even if you're any part of the government. We need Congress. We need our politicals. We need everybody all working together towards this, because it's bigger than us, right? It's about sustainability long-term. Thanks. So Clive, also saying, do you think the U.K. government cares about what its industry thinks on this issue? And secondly, there's a question here. Given the current geopolitical tensions, how do you engage with, you know, I'll use the phrase and the question, non-like-minded countries in trying to have these discussions multilaterally? Really easy question. Just refer to the minister's statements. I think, yes, absolutely, the sort of voice of industry's influence, and that some of the announcements you make is obviously speaking to that. But I think that the problem we've got is we need to break out of the limited commercial and civil society interest in space. If you go to these U.N. meetings, it's the same organizations every time, saying the same things over and over again. That's all valuable and good. But I'd like to see some of the big human rights organizations, environmental organizations who have a dependency on space data or other companies, but who are not necessarily part of the space community, kind of be engaged by the space community to say, look, you've got an interest in this. You need to speak up on this. And that's how you get the people involved, I think. And you need that kind of public pressure to ultimately get moved forward. So. And any thoughts on how to work multilaterally with countries that may not be on the same pages as the U.S. and the U.K.? Well, I think, you know, we have to use the traditional tools of diplomacy of multilateral kind of discussions through the U.N., but we need to supplement that with strong bilateral engagement, discussing these. I mean, I think we need to mainstream kind of space security issues into our conversations with countries, because I think that has been, you know, something that we haven't done so much, but we now need to increasingly do. So when we're having our kind of, you know, bilateral security dialogue with whichever country it is, space should be one of the agenda items, I think, you know, increasingly. So I think that's the sort of thing we should be doing. So I'm going to close by asking each of you for sort of what you think the highest priority thing is that we can do as a community to advance this issue. Is it making those connections outside of the little space bubble? Is it coming up with more specific proposals? Kind of interested in any kind of ideas you might have, and I'll start on this end. Sabrina, anything you can come up with or leave us on? Oh gosh, you put me on the spot there. No, I would say, you know, collaboration with all stakeholders within the industry. I think that needs to be improved a lot more in different mechanisms. Also transparency. I think there's a lot of great stuff happening, but one thing is, we don't know it. You know, how do we get involved? You know, and I think it's who then is kind of managing that? Is it us who need to go and reach out? Is it the organizations or the UN that need to then come to us? And so that's one thing I think greater collaboration with all stakeholders. Secondly, I think the industry, and especially the commercial industry, and I'm being biased here because I'm talking from a commercial perspective, we need to come together and we really do need to find a way to tackle this issue head on and have a stance on it together as an industry. And I just want to touch on something you said. You know, countries that might not have the same mentality, that's where the commercial world can really play a role. You know, whether it be Russian or Chinese organizations, they don't want their satellites blown up. They don't want their business models to be harmed. And I think internationally the commercial world can come together and put forward a case and that is probably the way in which we see good root into actually giving the perspective of the dangers of space with governments that again have different thinking actually might listen to. So those would be my two main takeaways there. Well, multi-stakeholder engagement, absolutely. But I also think that maybe a way to move forward is to approach the states that have not been as vocal. Trying to fully understand why and maybe conducting more awareness raising on a bilateral level and on a regional level. Again, I think that it's about convincing states that everyone has a lot to lose here and that this is an issue that we actually can achieve agreement on. There's a reason why it was described as low-hanging fruit by many at this OEWG session. It's because we can possibly achieve consensus on this issue. But again, I think that's going to be with targeted effort and trying to be as inclusive as possible. It being a very political issue trying to involve all of the actors. I think that's the way we have to go forward. Yeah, I think from our perspective, and I've been saying this the entire time, it's not about the technology capability development. We hear from states all the time and they go, where are we going to make that? We don't have missile defense capabilities. We're not going to invest in those kinds of capabilities. Why do we even care about this? And Navi said this, one of the things that is really important, which is, but you benefit from space, but all of these people, as Clive indicated, we have to indicate to them what the benefits of space are and then show them that effectively those are threatened by debris. And so we said, you know, and it's not necessarily that you're going to create this capability or develop this capability. It is about using your voice as one of the United Nations member as part of the international community to essentially say, we've identified this as a norm. We've identified this is something that is so important to us that you eventually create the groundswell of support that people go, no, this is a thing. This is a norm. This is something that we could take forward like the limited test ban treaties, right? The treaties that say, hey, we don't test nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in the air, in the water, in space, right? And so is this one of those things that can move along, right? Is this one of those things that can move along that continuum? But we need more than just the United States and Canada. So as we're going out and doing our bilaterals, and hopefully as others go out and talk about these same commitments, you would say, look, it's really important if this commitment makes sense to you, if it, if you read the words and go, this does make sense. It is low hanging fruit. We, my country, my community, my organization, my, you know, wants to raise, wants to raise our voice in support of this. That is how you get to a norm. That is how you get to something that is eventually, potentially legally binding. I would say, may, first of all, participate in this process, this OWG or any places like it. You have a voice, use it. And even if you didn't, if there are countries who didn't vote in favour of the resolution, they should still engage to make sure that their voices are heard. Why didn't you agree with that view? Because the objective is to reach that consensus. And I think that's been something really positive in that first session of the OWG, that we had a loss of engagement. So that's, that's really encouraging. And also, I think Neve was, was talking about this as well. Even if participation has to be diverse, so even if you don't think you have a stake in the game, you do. Even if you don't have any satellites out there, you do profit from space services. So it is in your best interest to, to, to participate and to make your views known. And although you might not have a satellite now, you might in the future. So you want to ensure that the regulations that are created also benefits your interests in a way. And also, I think we sometimes focus on how can we create the next big thing, which is great. But I think we don't always need to reinvent the wheel. I think it's also important to focus on the laws, the regulations, the practices that already exist and to see how these can assist us to achieve those goals. We can build, there is a big foundation already that exists that we should profit from. So I guess just one practical suggestion, which is that the UN is hosting a summit of the future in 2023 to address the grand challenges facing humanity. Space dialogue is part of that, recognizing the importance of space. I'd encourage all kind of civil society and commercial actors with an interest here to engage with that process, to make sure their voice is heard, you know, through that process and see if we can come up with some, you know, practical things to help sustainability in space. Great. Okay. Well, please join me in thanking our panelists for the discussion.