 My name is Daniel Rothenberg. I'm professor of practice in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. And they also co-direct the Center on the Future of War and our larger Future Security Initiative that links ASU with New America, where I'm a senior fellow. In addition, I co-direct the online MA in Global Security. We're now in our fifth year with the program. It's a professional program that allows students from all around the world to take our classes. We have about 175 students now. About half are currently in the military or our veterans, about 40% are minorities, about a third are women. We'll have a little video about that program. And I'm really proud to welcome all of you here today and to introduce General John J. Raymond, who's the Chief of Space Operations for the United States Space Force. And he'll be joined in conversation by Dr. Warren Singer, strategist and senior fellow at New America as well as a professor of practice with us at Arizona State University. And he'll be moderating a conversation, what is the future of conflict in space? To better understand future international security challenges, Arizona State University, one of the largest and most innovative public research universities in the country, joined forces with New America, a creative and dynamic civic institution in think tank. Our work together led to the creation four years ago of the online master's degree in global security. The interdisciplinary degree links serious ideas with practical policy oriented applications to aid professional advancement in the military, government, non-governmental organizations and the private sector. Students can pursue the security studies degree from anywhere in the world, study while working and finish in a calendar year. What makes the master of arts in global security so valuable is our commitment to working closely with each of our students to help realize their goals as well as our faculty who bring a wealth of intellectual and practical expertise to the program's diverse course offerings. To learn more about ASU's online global security degree, visit asunline.asu.edu. So I'm Peter Singer and it is my pleasure to welcome you back to this conference and lead a discussion on the future of conflict in space. And we could not have a better leader and expert to take us through this topic than General John W. J. Raymond who is Chief of Space Operations with the United States Space Force. General Raymond was commissioned through the ROTC program at Clemson University, Go Tigers. And since then he has commanded at every level, squadron, group, wing, numbered Air Force, major combatant command, including deploying to Southwest Asia as Director of Space Forces in support of operations, enduring freedom and Iraqi freedom. And so General, thank you very much for joining us today for this conversation. Well, Peter, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity here and I'm really looking forward to the conversation. So obviously a important anniversary animates this event 9-11. Can you take us back to what you were doing on that day and how has that experience informed the way that you see the world now? I sure will. First of all, again, let me just say thanks and thanks to everybody that's joining in with us this afternoon. I did go to Clemson. I called at the Harbor to the South. So I had been in the Air Force since 1984 is when I graduated from Clemson University. As I reflect back on 9-11, I was a Lieutenant Colonel. I had just given up squadron command and I had moved to Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. I was what we call a deputy officer commander. It was interesting. We were in the middle of an Inspector General investigation or inspection and had as an exercise been in higher states of readiness when the first plane hit the tower. And then when the second plane hit the tower, the second tower, basically what we did was we took exercise off the board and put real world on and we just kept going without missing a beat. Like all of us at something that I'll never forget. What it did though for me, if you look back, as I think back on it, you know, the first, as a space officer on and we consider Desert Storm back in 1991 to be kind of the first space war. I actually believe the Cold War was actually the first space war, but it was probably the first war where we took space capabilities and we integrated. So back in 1991, the very first use of GPS that helped navigate. We used big strategic satellites to detect small-scale missiles and we saw the benefits of that integration. And largely from then, but specifically after 9-11 as we continued operating in the Central Command AOR, we get really matured net focus to be able to take space capabilities and integrate those capabilities and everything that we do is a joint and combined force. And there's nothing that we do that isn't enabled by space. I saw that firsthand when I deployed and when I came home from that deployment, a lot of my friends asked me, well, what's the one thing that warfighters need from space and what I walked away from was there's not one thing. Space is enabled, every part of space is enabling operations. Just like space enables our way of life for our nation and for our allies and partners, the average American uses space multiple times before they have the first cup of coffee. And so space is both absolutely critical. Access to space and freedom to maneuver in space is absolutely critical to our way of life and it's absolutely critical to our way of war that's largely been developed and matured since 9-11. So the theme of this conference is looking back 20 years but also looking forward 20 years. And so I'd love to hear- Just like space enables our way of life for our nation and for our allies and partners, the average American, I can't hear you, Peter. All right, do you hear me again? What I was saying is that the theme of this conference is looking back 20 years but also looking forward 20 years. Could you tell me about what you believe the chief of space operations will look like in the year 2041? Let's break this up into a couple of parts. How were they trained and developed? What was the flow of their careers? What would it be similar to your background and maybe what would be different? Yeah, I sure will. That relates a little bit to the question that you first asked me. So when I think about where I was 20 years ago today for 9-11, I had just graduated from squadron command. And so the chief of space operations in 2041 will have grown up for the vast majority of her or his career in the Air Force at that point. I mean, they've done probably 15 to 17 years of being a space operator in the United States Air Force. And here over the last 20-something months has been a member of the new United States Space Force. And so as I reflected on this, I look at Hap Arnold. And if you look at Hap Arnold at 20 years before he became the chief of staff of an independent Air Force, he was a squadron commander doing air observation. It was an air observation squadron. And if you look at where I was 20 years ago, I was a squadron commander doing space observation. It was a space surveillance squadron. And largely as I just talked about in our first question, we have largely been focused on integrating space into everything that we do as a joint in coalition force. And it's largely been done facing an adversary that doesn't have any space capabilities. I mean, there was not a big space threat, if you will, for our operations that we've been undertaking, again, going back to your first question since 9-11. What has happened though is potential adversaries or competitors have watched how we've integrated space in this benign domain. And they have seen the advantage that that provides us. And they're rapidly doing two things. One, they're building capabilities for their own use to have that same advantage. And two, building capabilities to deny us our access to space. And so that's why we stood up an independent space force to take an opportunity while we're still the best in the world in space to have a service that comes to work every day dedicated on this warfighter. So going back to the question then, this space force chief of 2041, well, they've been in their force, we'll have the foundational part of their career will have been spent integrating space into operations. And here over the last couple of years, really beginning to mature the thought of space as a warfighting domain and an independent view of space power co-equal with all the other services. And so just as the Air Force went from largely being a supporting service to the ground forces and maritime forces, space, which is still largely a supporting service will also develop independent options to be able to compete to turn when with great power competitors that we see today and into the future. Can you tell me about the decisions that they might be making in this future? I'm thinking about everything from the grand strategy all the way down to the way that they apportion out their day, the day-to-day decisions. What will be similar to your day-to-day and your strategic thinking? And what might be different, say, 20 years out and how they spend their day and also the larger challenges that they face? Yeah, so one of the things that, going back a little bit to one of the aspects of the question that you asked last time, how will their career look like? In the 20 years from now until when they become a service chief, we hope to instill again, a better and deeper understanding of this new war fighting domain. I think we wanna instill in them a deeper understanding of deterrence because I really believe that space plays, will play a significant role in ability to deter conflict from either beginning or extending into space or, and if we can do that, well, spilling over into other domains. I think that the space force chief will also be a global, somebody with a global view. Our domain requires that. It's not, you can't split that domain up into little pieces. It requires, and it's one of the strengths that a space professional brings to the fight. The other thing that I think this professional will have to have is we'll have to have a broader and deeper understanding of all the different sectors of space, whether it be national security space, international space, commercial space, and civil space. We all operate in the same domain and the challenges that we see going forward with space becoming way more congested than what it is today with significant numbers of capabilities being launched, way more competitive with pretty much every aspect of space having a commercially viable path now as technology, it's gotten smaller and technology's become more relevant. And I see it becoming even more contested as well as we go forward. So what are the decisions then? With that kind of as a setting the stage for what those folks are gonna have to develop here over the next 20 years? I think, first of all, they're gonna have to, they're gonna have to continue the dialogue. What is, what's the role of national security spaces and independent service operating in a domain that can provide independent options for our decision makers? I think some of the decisions that the Space Force Chief of 2041 is gonna have to figure out is what is, how do you, how best to deter? Our goal is not to, not to repeat, not to get into a conflict that begins or extends in the space. It is to deter that. And so I think there's gonna have to be a level of understanding of deterrence. And I think there's gonna have to be decisions on escalation control. What's hostile intent? What are rules of engagement? As we mature this warfighting domain, all of those things are gonna be part of the calculus that they're gonna have to face. The other thing I get asked all the time when people hear about the Space Force, they think we're up fighting aliens in the domain, which clearly is not our mission. But I do sense as space is our humans, and we begin to go beyond earth into what some call a kind of a multi-planet species. And as we see, just here in about three days, we're gonna, NASA's gonna launch three, or launch a rocket that has four commercial astronauts on it with no NASA astronauts, no military astronauts on there. Just four civilians are gonna go orbit around the earth astronauts on it with no military astronauts for three days before coming back. And I do see there's gonna be more of a human presence in space, which then brings into mind what is the role of the military in securing that domain to allow economic development, to allow exploration and to allow stability, very similar, very analogous to what the Navy does today in the maritime domain with maintaining security. So the sea lines of communication are free and able to be exploited. And so I believe all those things will be decisions or things that will be on the plate of a service chief in 2041. And as I had thought about that question, what I realized was 2041 is not that far away. And as I reflected back, I was disquieting. I mean, that's a relatively senior officer in the military. And so it's not as far as it seems when you just hear 2041. I wanna take your answer and flip it. You asked, what is the role of the military in security and space in this future? But you also talked about the growing civilian commercial role in space, both independently, but also increasingly as a partner to the military. What is the responsibility of these new civilian commercial partners, providers in space when it comes to the security side? I'm thinking for example, do they have to meet the same cyber resilient standards that we've seen in the traditional defense economy? What is their role and responsibility when it comes to the security side? Yeah, so first of all, one of the things that we're thinking through today and I'm very hopeful by 2041 that this will have got some rules in place, but what are the norms and behavior? No matter if you're a civil agency or a commercial agency or a national security agency, operating in space, we all operate in the same domain. That domain is gonna become more congested, more competitive, more contested. And we have to figure out what are safe and professional, what are safe and professional as it relates to the space. And like we have in the air domain and in the maritime domain, what are the norms of behavior? What do we say is appropriate on how to fix the space? Like it is gonna be even more so critical as this domain continues to change. And so I think there has to be a level of, we're all gonna operate in a safe and professional manner to keep the domain safe for all. And I think all segments of space have a role in that. I think if you look at how we work very closely with the commercial industry, there are clearly things that we've partnered with. For example, commercial satellite communications, we were live very heavily on commercial sat-com. Do I think that those capabilities need to be able to operate in a contested domain? I would say yes, that's the way that the domain is going. So I do think there are things that commercial industry and civil space are gonna have to do. But I think if I were to bring it all down to one thing I would say, we have to develop some norms of paper and rules of the road and how to operate. Let's talk strategy. You have in other forums laid out a vision of quote, defend, shift, punch. What does that mean? So the capabilities that we have on orbit today are largely built. We've been involved in space business for 50 years since the beginning of fact when space was really great power competition between us and the Soviet Union. And the capabilities that we have today are the world's best, world's best. But they're really designed for a different domain. They weren't designed for a domain that we see today, which again is congested and contested and competitive. And so we need to make, so first of all, we need to make sure that because we are so reliant on capabilities, both as a nation and as a joint and coalition force, we need to be able to protect the capabilities that we have today. And we need to train operators to be able to operate those capabilities through in a contested environment. We need to develop tactics, techniques and procedures, we need to develop partnerships. There's all kinds of things that we need to do to be able to defend those capabilities that we have. And then we need to shift to a more defendable architecture. I think we've got great opportunities here. If you look at what's going on in the space domain today with commercial industry, I mean, we have all seen whether what historically has been commercially viable in space are large communication satellites and launch vehicles. So we've seen that. We've seen Blue Origin launch Jeff Bezos and orbit. We've seen Virgin orbit launch Richard Branson at the space. And we've seen the Virgin Galactic, Virgin orbit launch payloads into space. We've seen SpaceX and the success that they've had in launching satellites and returning first stage boosters. I mean, we have all seen that taking place. And I believe that we have an opportunity to capitalize on that. What is not quite as visible is the shift towards what's being called a proliferated low earth orbit architecture. And that's what space provides from geosynchronous orbit is persistence because the earth rotates the same speed that the satellite is orbiting in low earth orbit. You don't get that persistence. So you get that persistence by adding numbers. And so you'll see SpaceX, for example, with their Starlink constellation providing global internet from space as I think upwards now over 1700 satellites we're just two years ago, a year and a half ago they had zero. And so you're seeing a significant increase in the number of capabilities that are smaller that are more responsive, they're cheaper, they're being innovative. We wanna be able to capitalize on that. And I think there's opportunities there. And I think there's also opportunities. Space provides an opportunity to continue to build global partnerships. And we're working really hard to develop those partnerships with our international partners. In fact, I just hosted a chief's meeting of service chiefs from around the world that are responsible for their space capabilities and had 22 different chiefs come to this conference. In every continent with exception of Antarctica. And so we're really developing these global partnerships that will be so important to us. And we think there's a huge opportunity there as well. So I wanna remind our audience that you can submit questions and we'll wrestle with those as well. The protocol for it is there should be a box towards the right of your video where you can submit it. If that doesn't work for you, you can also email them to events at newamerica.org. Again, that is events at newamerica.org. So general, it's arguable no other service has such a explicit connection to technology as the space force. It probably would have previously been said Air Force, but now definitely the space force. When you gather with those other space leaders, what technology is the one that is most exciting? That people believe is the most potentially game changing for the next 20 years as we look out at the future. And then I wanna layer a second question onto that. What technology do you think we get most wrong about? It may be the same or maybe a different one. So what's the most exciting, most game changing? What do we get most wrong? Yeah, from a technology side, and this is J. Raymond's personal opinion from a technology side. I think there's a couple of things that are really exciting to me in it. And it leads into something that isn't a technology benefit but I'll highlight that as well. I think there's two things that really are exciting. One is the advances in technology that has allowed for payloads to be much smaller, micro-electronic types of things that used to be, payloads that used to be the size of dishwashers that are now can be accomplished in the size of a softball. And that allows more capabilities to be put into space. It allows it to be done more cheaply. It allows it to be done more innovatively and more responsible. And so I think that that is a significant, a significant maturing of technology that's gonna continue. I think the other big piece of this then is compute power and the ability to make sense of all that data and all that information that's gonna come from space. Today, we get vast amounts of data and it's gonna be dwarfed by the data that we're gonna be able to get in the future now that we're gonna have many, many more sensing capabilities that will be up there and that if we can harness the computing power then to extract answers to really tough problems from that data, I think those are two things that I'm really excited about. The reason, the other piece of this, which isn't a technology advantage but it enables a new business model. It enables, today our satellites are very exquisite and they're the world's best. They're not cheap and they're not something that we can procure overnight. They take time to acquire. And because of that, you really wanna put a lot of mission assurance on it which then drives more increased costs and increased timelines because you can't take the risk of failure. You can't, you don't get a do-over. If you'll launch something into space and it doesn't work, you can't go up there and bring it back down and say, let's try again. And so if you change the business model to allow for an assembly line approach, you then can make different risk captains and have different risk calculus and make different decisions. And so I think it also enables more partners, more commercial partners and more international partners to participate with you. And so I think the advances made in electronics that allows payloads to be smaller, the ability to reap and extract data with computing power will be beneficial but it will help, it will really help us adopt a new business model. And it's probably not a one-size-fits-all business model. I think it's more of a hybrid. I think we're gonna have exquisite capabilities but I think there's also gonna be a robust set of capabilities that aren't exquisite but that are operational good enough. On the, what do I think we have wrong? I don't, I wouldn't say it's wrong. I would say, like I said, our capabilities are the best in the world but they're built for a different domain. And the challenge is I can't go into the nation and say, hey, I'm gonna turn off GPS. I'm gonna turn off communication satellites. I'm gonna turn off missile warning satellites and I'm gonna turn off ISR satellites and I'll come back to you in five or 10 years with new capabilities. You gotta have a bridging strategy to develop those capabilities that are built for the domain. And I, that's where we're headed is building strategies to move to a different architecture, if you will, that is purpose-built for the domain that we find ourselves in today. It's interesting, both your last answer and as you connect it to the question of compute power, everybody wants to focus on the scenario of AI, super intelligence, lethal weapon systems and the like and arguably a much more important application, kind of more game-changing is helping to solve the so-called salesman problem, letting you know exactly what to pack and where exactly to stop on your route. So you get this entire new market and efficiency. It's not as sexy, but it's actually maybe more important to both business and then its application to war fighting. Let's take that a little bit further. One of the other things that you've continually stressed is speed. You constantly talk about speed and your speeches. Tell me, what do you want to go faster? What do you mean when you're continually stressing speed? As I look back to General Bernard Schrieber back, who's the kind of father of DOD space, that's back in the 50s really developed the Intercontinental Blistic Missile Program and some of our strategic satellite programs. If you look at the timelines that they were able to develop these capabilities on, they were very, very fast. I think the entire ICBM fleet was designed and implemented in less than five years. Today, if I wanted to buy or procure a clone of a GPS satellite, exactly like a satellite that we have on orbit today, that itself takes about five years. And so I think the reason why is we've had the luxury of time. And today we don't have that luxury. Our competitors are moving very fast. And so when I say we need to go fast, we need to, we built in the Space Force a new capability development construct. And it's everything from what's the appropriate force design to requirements and how do you do requirements quicker? And then how do you acquire those capabilities at the speed of relevance? And then how do you test those capabilities to make sure that you have, you're delivering what you need and then do that cycle over again. And so that capability development cycle is something that we're working hard on to address all aspects of getting a capability from an idea to an on orbit capability in a timeframe that we need based on what we're seeing our competitors do in the domain. If you look at commercial industry, and I'll use one example, but there's multiple examples out there, but I saw this for saying that I went to SpaceX back in, not this past January, but January before and I visited their satellite factory, their Starlink factory and it was an empty room. And they told me, you know, we got to design our satellites and we're going to build this factory. I went and have an assembly line and then we're going to build satellites and then we're going to integrate them on a launch vehicle launch. Four months later, they launched 60 satellites. So they designed the satellites, they built the factory, they built the satellites, integrated them on launch vehicle launch. We want to, again, the business model that they have allows them to do that. And as I talked about in the answer to the earlier question, if we can change the design of our force structure to enable that business model to be successful for national security space, we would like to be able to take advantage of that. I think that's when I talk about going fast, that's what I'm really talking about. So before we turn it over to the audience for Q and A, I want to ask one last question and it's to actually take us back to when we were talking about the difference between and the similarities between your role and training and background today and that CSO of 2041, what is something that you spend too much of your time on right now, something that is occupying your time or is incredibly challenging, that you hope is solved by 2041? And how is that solved? So that's a nice softball question that answered that, then the conversation went, but there's a couple of things that come to mind. First thing is, and this will be solved by 2041, I hope this is solved here in the next couple of years, but we're building a service. And so when the National Defense Authorization Act was signed back in December of 19, it says, and I'm paraphrasing here, but it said, effective immediately or bouncing the journey, now the space force is up. And so what the Air Force had thought about was when this law was signed, we were gonna spend about 18 months planning and then we were gonna really kick off. If that was the case, I'd be sitting here with you today saying, just a month ago, we started. And if you look now what we've done over the last course of the last 18 or 19 months, we've built all the personnel processes to bring people into the service. And if you look at the people that we're attracting, it's they're incredibly talented folks. And we have way more people knocking on our door wanting to come in than we have slots for. We've completely reorganized national security space. We have written our first doctrine. We've done two budgets. We have started doing things like seals and flags and mottos and uniforms and all those things that hopefully will songs and all the things that go with being an independent service. Hopefully all of those which designing a service. And when we went back to the app Arnold days in 1947 and so let's get his checklist on how we build a service that didn't exist. And so we've been driving the car operating national security space and building a space force at the same time all under a global pandemic. And I couldn't be more proud of the team. If you look at the advances that we have made. So that's one, I think that just the building of the space force and we're already seeing that we've got all the major muscle movements now all the major building blocks in place. And that's really, really important. The other big piece. So one of the reasons why Congress wanted to establish an independent service was that there was, they identified there were 60 different organizations and DOD that had their hands in space. And now that we have established a space force we were able to bring a little unity of effort across the department. And I think that that is well solved by 2041 as well. And as I tell our team and I tell the team in the department of defense, we want to be bold. We want to go fast and we need to all be rolling in the same direction. We're already seeing the benefits of that by establishing a space force. And those two things, the bureaucracy piece and then building a light lean agile space force purpose built for space to be able to move at speed to stay ahead of this threat to compete, to turn largely to deter and when if deterrence were to fail is something that we're focused on a lot. And I think over the next couple of years those pieces are, they'll always be work to do but the big major muscle movements of that will be done. So we've got some fantastic questions from the online audience. One of the first of them was a reference to how you talked about the need to build norms of behavior in this space. And the questioner asks, given that what are, I'm going to paraphrase, but what space based behavior is aggressive but benign and what crosses into that act of war? We need to go back to your questions, Peter. These are some really hard balls. The challenge with that is it's hard to tell. So historically, for example, if you had a capability that you were going to launch that was going to do satellite servicing. Let's say you wanted to go up and refuel satellite on orbit, the ability to refuel a satellite on orbit could be very benign. At the same time, if you have the ability to refuel a satellite, there's probably an aggressive tactic that could be taken as well. And that's one of the challenges that we see in the domain is that as the domain is dual use, a lot of the things that might to some be benign, taken another way could be aggressive. And I think that's, you've really hit on one of the key things that needs to be addressed as we talk about norms of behavior. Is that something that comes up in the, you talked about this important meeting of the different space leaders? Is that something that is being discussed right now or is it something that we need to put on the agenda moving forward? We're talking a lot about norms of behavior. In fact, our secretary of defense has recently written a memo that outlined five. I think it was five different standards of norms of behavior that we're going to follow. We are working very closely with our international partners to develop the same building on those, adopt those and building on those with our international partners to have a stronger voice together. US is leading in this business. The UK is doing a lot of work as well with the United Nations on norms of behavior. It's a topic of significant conversation. And it's a topic, not just a conversation, but when we exercise together and working together with our international partners, we're focusing a lot on these exact issues. So one of the next questions is about a proposal, not yet arguably a real technology that got a lot of attention. It's the idea of Rocket Delivered Cargo. And the questioner asked, given the Air Force's newest Vanguard program, how realistic is it for DoD to use space capabilities to deliver material? That's what the Vanguard is looking at. We think there's an opportunity there. The Vanguard will help explore that, will help tease out some of the challenges and opportunities that are faced with that. But we think there's opportunities. And that's why we stood up the Vanguard. I'm not here to tell you, we think it's going to be easy. But we're hoping that this Vanguard program can help us inform us on how viable this might be going forward. How do you avoid the problem of potential miscalculation by the target, so to speak, the adversary and that it's a little bit of a parallel of how do I know the difference of, the debates around hypersonics of something that's conventional nuclear coming at me. How do I, if I'm on the adversary side, know whether they're delivering a widget into the theater of operation versus a munition? I think all those things are things that we're going to explore. I agree with you. Those are things that would have to be worked out. Those are things that can make it challenging. I think attribution is going to be something that we'll look at technology-wise. Do we think it's technology? It's achievable from a technology perspective and a cost that makes it relevant. And then all the other policy issues that are associated with that, as you highlighted, will be things that we'll have to tease out. So another questioner asks, quote, with the importance of being able to fight SATCOM, how are you working with industry to build out a multi-band, multi-orbit enterprise architecture? In fact, when we say fight SATCOM, what we mean by that is being able to operate satellite communications through a contested environment. Our adversaries have jamming capability to be able to jam our communication satellites, a significant amount of our communication satellites. And so when we say fight SATCOM, that's what I mean. How do we operate through that contested nature? We actually published a vision a year or so ago that we put out talking about the need to be able to do just as your questioner, the question answered. Or as we work that vision with commercial industry, we've brought industry together. In my mind, when I fly to another country and I turn on my iPhone, it automatically syncs up to whatever the network is in that country. And I remember, I flew to a country and it landed and actually, as soon as it comes on, it says welcome to whatever network it is. I left that country and went to another country and landed in that country. And immediately I turned my phone on and it says, welcome to this network. What we're trying to do is figure out how to have a mesh, if you will, of communications that allows you to sync up to whatever is most viable based on the environment that you're facing. And to link up with whatever works the best. And so that hybrid mesh network is something that I think is important. We've published the vision again. We helped industry helped us inform that vision. And now as we continue to develop our communication programs, we'll continue to look to that vision as a guiding mechanism to build the capabilities we need to be able to achieve that. So now we have a question about the, not just the opportunity, but the challenge that comes from so much being put into orbit. And the question is, do you have interference concerns with the thousands of satellites like SpaceX's Starlink satellites being inserted into low earth orbit? Yeah, so we, you know, we act, the Space Force today acts as the space traffic control for the world. We, we, and it's interesting, we track about 30,000 objects that are orbiting today. Of those, you know, back, I use COVID, started COVID as a kind of a time hack. Back when we first started wearing masks, there was about 1500 or so active satellites on orbit, something like that. It was a little over 1500 satellites. The rest of all that was debris today. The numbers of satellites that we're tracking are well over 4,000. And so we see a significant growth and Starlink is, it's kind of the first out of the shoot, maybe, but there's more coming. And there's a, they might have even been the first, there's others that are up there, but, but they're the biggest so far, but there's more coming. And so we take about 400,000 observations a day of everything that's in space. We do all the analysis to determine if two things are going to potentially collide. We warn the world if we see potential collisions and we've helped somebody, but we want to consider moving because we don't want to create more debris. In fact, I think it was 2008 or two satellites collided that caused about 3000 pieces of debris. And so that is becoming, it's a full-time job to keep that domain safe. And I think it's going to, it's going to continue to increase. And I think, I think that really also then talks about the needs for, for norms of behavior. I think it talks about debris mitigation steps and people ask me all the time, how do you, how do you solve the debris problem? The way you solve the debris problem, at least initially is don't create the debris in the first place and, and, you know, don't litter space when you launch a satellite with debris, don't have two things collide, have engineering standards that, that don't cause satellites to break up at the end of their life and cause debris. And so all of those things on responsible use of space and responsible behaviors in space are important. In fact, one of the, one of the tenants that in the memo that Secretary Austin signed out on responsible behavior in space talks about limiting the generation of long-lived debris. And so it's something that we're going to have to focus on. It's going to become even more of a challenge as we, as we progress. So we have time for one last meaty question. And it's this, quote, strategist believe air power is inherently offensive, manifestly strategic and should be organized independently. Does the United States space force need a similar doctrine? We actually took a stab at writing a doctrine. And so, you know, when this, when the Air Force stood up back in 1947, it had, it had come out of World War II and there was some air power theorists, if you will, that were at what was called the air core tactical school in Montgomery, Alabama, that were developing doctrine. And the doctrine at the time was daylight strategic. And so a group of, of guardians got together on their own and in about, I think it was about 25 of them got together and wrote a doctrine called space power. You can, you can get it online. And it was our attempt, our first attempt at putting out doctrine towards that end. It's actually really good. We've gotten really good reviews on it. We know it's not perfect, but we wanted to generate the debate and the dialogue and I'd encourage people to read it and provide us their thoughts and inject, inject your thoughts into the conversation. So general, I want to thank you both for joining us and helping us to launch this conference in a fantastic manner, but also want to thank you for your leadership and all that you're doing to take space force into the future. Appreciate it. Peter, thank you. I really enjoyed the dialogue. I hope, I hope we can meet up again. As I was thinking through the answers to the question, as I mentioned to you, questions they were, they were really thought provoking and I'd love to continue a dialogue with you and whoever would like to be part of that. I really appreciated it. I thank you for the opportunity.