 I was excited to be the last talk today because I know we always talk about moonshots in the Web3 community, so I'm actually going to be talking about the moon today. In particular I'm going to talk about space as a commons, I'm going to talk about lunar internet, and I'm going to talk about the importance of time. So first I just wanted to pause and say what do we mean when we say that space is a commons? We've talked a lot here about the ways in which commons are not legally defined, but commons in space have many of the same qualities that we talk about. We talk about public goods on earth and we talk about common pool resources. So in 1967, something called the Outer Space Treaty was signed. The Outer Space Treaty was a Cold War artifact that came out of the United States and the USSR who were both worried that each other would claim the moon as territory when they got there first. And so this treaty has a really important tenet in it. Article two of the Outer Space Treaty says that there shall be no national appropriation in outer space by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation or by any other means. So I think this is really interesting because it basically means that the entire universe minus the earth, which is not covered by the Outer Space Treaty, is essentially an area that is called in international law an area beyond national jurisdiction. And this means that the normal rules and regulations and coordination mechanisms that we tend to use here on earth don't apply. So we have this sort of like this vast expanse, literally, of a commons and we need to figure out how we're going to govern that. And it's not just a general challenge. The moon and exploration in general is an area that is receiving a lot more attention recently. The NASA has something called the Artemis program and it has been putting billions of dollars into lunar exploration. The moon is the closest celestial body to us and so it kind of makes sense that even, you know, whether we go into Mars or other planets, that we're going to be looking at the moon first. We also have, as David was also just talking about, we're seeing, not just reducing launch costs, but we're seeing many aspects of technology, miniaturization, standards and new approaches that are letting us accelerate and grow space activity. And that's happening not just with governments, but it's also happening with commercial companies. So not only do we have not just the big space players, we have small countries getting involved in space exploration, but we also have the private sector as well. So this is just a slide from NASA showing a lot of the activities that are planned for the next 10 years or so to give you a sense of the fact that it's not just sort of like one mission every once in a while, but we're really talking about roughly 10 missions a year that are planning to go to the moon over the next decade. So this is kind of a sea change. It's like a categorical change in the amount of activity that we're seeing in space exploration. Even though it doesn't seem like a lot, each of these missions, especially the commercial ones, are actually kind of like nested Russian dolls of activity, because when they're commercially run, what you often have is you've got a launch vehicle from one country and then you've got a spacecraft built by another country, maybe a commercial company. Then you've got payloads on that spacecraft that are themselves from different operators and actors. And so you have this whole ecosystem within the spacecraft itself, and that raises all kinds of questions about governance. So for me, when I talk about space as a commons and in the context of this conference, the reason why I think it's so interesting is kind of a double whammy, if you will. One is that I think there's this opportunity to ensure that space itself stays as a commons, just because we have a treaty, treaties as we know, treaties fall apart sometimes. People walk away from these treaties. And so even though we have this lovely framing, we need to figure out how we're going to implement it if we want it to stay true. The second is that we can use space, and of course the moon in particular is what I'm talking about today. We can use space to prototype approaches to commons governance that we don't have an opportunity to, or we're not in a position to do right now here on Earth. So I work with an organization that's called the Open Lunar Foundation, and we are the only organization in the world that's dedicated to good governance and setting positive precedents in the lunar domain. We do this primarily through looking at public utilities for the lunar environment. And we've been talking about public goods here, public utilities tend to be a little bit more applied and operational. But I think it's the same basic motivation for why we're talking about public goods here and why we're also excited about it. Public utilities, they provide value and they help to level the playing field for all actors so that we can see a wider ecosystem of activity. It also helps to address the risk of monopoly and ease international cooperation. But it's also a chance to bootstrap governance in the lunar environment. Of course, since we don't have a government, we need to figure out how we're going to make decisions who gets to participate in those decisions, how people get in, how people get out, what the brain is, what the institutions are. And then finally, as I just mentioned, there's lessons for global commons here on earth. We have, of course, big international commons governance challenges around the internet, around climate, around pandemics that we haven't exactly figured out how to govern well. So one of the big areas that we have worked on, I'm going to go through this slide quickly because I don't have that much time, but is resource management and property rights. And this, as we all know, the state is typically the way that property rights regimes are managed here on earth. And given that the moon and beyond our areas beyond national jurisdiction, we can't just rely on state enforced property rights regimes. And so again, just like in web three, we need to figure out how we're going to like what is the basis for property rights regimes. But the area that I'm going to go into in more detail is lunar communications. And you know, the backdrop is, as we've all been talking about, that we are seeing more and more of the failure modes of the internet here on earth today. We need innovation around protocols and around the architecture itself of the internet. Yesterday, Divya was talking about positive some public goods. And the internet, of course, around the moon could also be an opportunity to set up a positive some dynamic. That will be offering services for data relay, but also for something called positioning, navigation and timing or PNT. PNT is what will allow us to operationalize coordination, transparency, and something that's called situational awareness. So just to give a little bit more context for the introduction of lunar communication services that are being discussed right now in the lunar community. Back in the day, we had big and expensive missions. They were on what's called the near side of the moon. So they had direct line of sight to the earth and could just communicate directly back to ground stations here on earth. They were maybe going every few years, that's probably even generous. We haven't had missions to the moon in the last couple of decades leading up to just a few years ago. There's this sort of like chasm of interactivity, if you will. But now what we're seeing is that NASA has something called the CLIPS program, the commercial lunar payload services program. And this is NASA funding for commercial missions that is giving roughly $100 million to two missions a year to go to the moon and take commercial payloads with them. And so it has this nested Russian dolls effect that I was talking about before. And we're also seeing that missions are planning to go to the far side of the moon, which means that they won't have direct line of sight back to the earth and so they need to have communication realized to get their data back to us. So as you could expect, one off communications infrastructure is quite expensive. And it's also going to provide limited coverage. You can only provide coverage to where your beam width is going to reach to from the orbit that you're in. And so you're not going to get the entire celestial body all at once. So obviously with more users coming into play, you're starting to see the benefits of networking be discussed. Right now there's a few different programs going going on. NASA has a program called LunarNet that is looking at standards and architecture for lunar networking. ESA also has a similar one called Moon Light. And China is also starting to demonstrate really capabilities in something called L2 Lagrange point near the moon. So governments are starting to work on this and there's a question about how the kind of community is going to respond. So some of the considerations and the conditions for LunarNet, one is that we've got small n. It's not a big ecosystem right now. It's going to be a small and slowly growing number of nodes in this network. The second is that it's going to be dynamic coverage. All of your nodes are moving. You're going to have likely, especially at the beginning, coverage gaps. There's no equivalent of geostationary orbit around the moon. So there are what are called frozen orbits. There are stable orbits, but they're always going to be moving relative to the surface of the moon. So this means that there are many considerations for constellation design and orbit selection and trade studies that need to be done. Some of the interesting, like more technical challenges that I just wanted to highlight. There's lots, but I wanted to pull out a couple. One is routing. In an environment that is inherently wireless, the routing protocols that we use, there's an opportunity for them to look very different. As I mentioned, nodes are mobile. So are we going to use distributed hash tables? Are we going to create mesh networks? Maybe we can use IPFS. I know that Filecoin has an experiment that they're going to be running with Lockheed Martin in the next few years. The other is something called delay tolerant networking. This is a set of standards that have been developed to support networks that have disconnections at various points. So you need to hold your data at intermediate nodes and be able to forward them opportunistically. The lunar environment is a hybrid because it's only about a second and a half away. You're not going to break TCP to do, if you wanted to use IP around the moon, if you have continuous coverage. There's just a bunch of design considerations that will influence how these things play out. That has implications for naming identity and trust, which I think is something that this community is very interested in. Again, it's just an opportunity for us to say, what are we learning in this environment, and how might we want to set up different ways of doing these things in the lunar case? I just wanted to make the point that it's not that this isn't mysterious, this isn't unsolvable. It's just a lot of work. The point is that those who show up are going to be the ones who draw on both the values and the technologies that they know, and they're going to be the ones that are setting the precedence. This is all happening against the backdrop of geopolitics. We have major national rivalries right now between the United States and China, defense interests, and commercial competitors, which mean that the basic concept of relaying traffic for each other isn't a foregone conclusion. The concern is that we see a transformation of legacy systems into the lunar environment, and that we end up with a tragedy of the commons. Given this, what OpenLunar has been working on is a service that underpins all of these communication services and the missions that are operating, which is positioning, navigation, and timing. This is important for what's called transparency and confidence building measures. Giving the international community shared history, a shared version of truth of who did what, where, and when. That has follow-on implications for liability, due regard, and who eventually will be entitled to certain claims as and if we create property systems. So as most of us probably know, position is inherently a function of time. When we use GPS here on Earth, we need at least four satellites that are in view. Those satellites need to know where they are. The GPS satellites get their time from terrestrial standards, from terrestrial clocks that are very advanced atomic clocks that are averaged across many different sources. In the lunar environment, there are no clocks. We don't have clocks yet. So we don't have a lunar time standard. We don't have a common reference for satellites in lunar orbit to get the time in order to be able to tell their clients, if you will, where they are. Telling time is a function of several different things. It's the hardware that you choose, and that has implications for the tick rate and the drift of your clock. Your clock has to synchronize with another more authoritative time reference. Then you have to figure out how you're going to distribute time. So what protocols you're going to use to give time to other spacecraft in that environment, and then how they're going to give it to their clients. Finally, you need a reference frame in order to make sure that when your clients are calculating a position that they're using the same reference frame that you are using to know what position you are in. Finally, I think one of the most exciting things about clocks is that it's an opportunity for an A political time standard. On Earth, I mentioned that GPS satellites get their time reference from assets on the ground. GPS is the American navigation and positioning system. There are what are called GNSS, Global Navigation and Satellite Services, from other countries. All of them use their own time reference. Those time references and all of the major systems are provided by the military because the military needs to know what time it is in order to know where its weapons and major assets are in the event of conflict. On Earth, our time standards all go back to military systems. But on the moon, there's an opportunity that if we were to put a clock into orbit, that is an independent time standard, that we could have the first A political time standard for the solar system. I think that's really exciting.