 All right, everybody, this is the session that I have most been looking forward to today personally. When we designed this pitch session, we wanted to give a nod to our New York location. So don't worry, this isn't actually a pitch session. No one's trying to convince you to buy anything. However, what we wanna do is take a look at some of the possible answers to the question is, what are the solutions? At Secure World, we constantly get asked, how do you actually solve space sustainability problems? And most people don't like it when I tell them, well, there isn't one answer. There are a lot of answers. Regulation, international best practice, what companies are doing, these all things are relevant. But today, what we're going to hear is from five different pitches, talking about things that aren't from a government and aren't necessarily from space satellite operators. These are some of the key concepts out there that might be able to contribute to space sustainability. On stage with me are our three judges who are gonna offer their insights, commentary and feedback on our five presentations. So I would go ahead, I would like to go ahead and invite to the stage our first speaker, which is Chris Kuhnstadter from AXAXL to talk to us about everybody's favorite insurance. Insurance. Thank you, Crystal. Yeah, no, insurance is a great way to come right back from the break and start talking about insurance. That's good. No, but I hope you'll come away from this from my chat with you with an appreciation for the role that insurance can play in space sustainability. So I'll start with a question. Raise your hand if you enjoy paying your car insurance or homeowner's insurance bill. There was one over there, wow, that's a first. But yeah, that's the response I usually get. That's okay. And undoubtedly some of you in the audience have filed insurance claims for your car, your home, whatever. I have with my daughter, when my daughter got her driver's license, she had three accidents in four months. And she's fine, just a bruised ego and she's grown out of it now. But my insurance premiums went up and that was definitely an incentive for her to drive more safely. So space insurance is a critical enabler of innovation and investment. It allows organizations and enterprises to take risks and it facilitates investors to support them. But the risk landscape is changing. I gotta keep an eye on the clock here. With new technologies and applications, innovative launch vehicles and satellites, human space flight and commercial space stations. And along with those comes a more congested space environment and new threats from cyber and international conflict in space. As insurers, our product, we cover all the technical risk throughout the life cycle of our clients' satellites, launch vehicles, space platforms and deep space exploration. So we take all the technical risk. We exclude war, terrorism and cyber, but we cover everything else, whether it's collision risk, space weather, internal breakdown, what have you. So to mitigate risks, we support safe and responsible space activity. That should go without saying. And we incentivize good behavior, in short, we support space sustainability. But we need to do three things to make sure we're on the right track. We need to define our terms precisely. We need to state our assumptions explicitly and we need to make sure we understand the limitations of the tools and models we use. Sustainability has many definitions. For us in the risk business, it means being able to characterize, manage and mitigate our risks. And we need to make sure that our clients and the whole space industry in fact, can do likewise with their risks. To accomplish this, we promote the development and use of technologies that reduce uncertainty in space situational awareness. And we support on-orbit servicing and in particular, active debris removal. ADR is expensive and is time consuming and frankly, it's not here yet, it's years away. That's okay. That's why we're developing an innovative insurance product to enhance space safety and help kickstart the ADR industry. More on that as time goes on. Insurance companies are concerned, insurance companies writ large, are concerned about risks, existential risks, like geopolitical instability, climate change, cyber threats and more. Our job is to get as smart as we can while helping the industry to be sustainable. We need to characterize risk better, assess the probability and consequence of collision risk and space war risk among many others. That's why we've worked with Leolabs and others in the SSA world to develop collision risk tools and with governments and academia to calculate the risk and consequence of war in space. At AXAXL, we embrace risk. We make space for new ideas and we develop new ideas for space. Thank you and I will cede the remainder of my time. All right, well, Chris, thank you. I sat in the bar really high for making your pitch and being clear and concise. I'm gonna turn it over. If you wanna come back up on stage, you get to ask, our judges are gonna ask a few clarifying questions. Wasn't ready for this. Yes, Nick Milburn, how are you? Just, I love the presentation, by the way, a quick question. I mean, with the changing technology so rapid these days, I mean, how do you remain profitable and how do you, how much analysis is there of the technical products to make sure that you are assessing the risk accurately? Yeah, very good question. Assessing technical risk is really the foundation of what we do. We wanna make sure that we understand what can go wrong and what happens if it does go wrong. So we spend a lot of time, I have a great team. I have two people here in New York and two in Paris who do a lot of the analytical work to figure out what can go wrong with a satellite, what can go wrong with a launch vehicle. My team has extensive experience in the industry, so they and I, I've been in the business for 40 years, we've seen a lot of technologies come and go, we've seen a lot of failures, and every time there's a failure, we delve deep into it to make sure we understand what went wrong and what's being done to fix it. So the technical is really, it's probably the biggest gate we have to go through. Thank you. You can go ahead. Hi, thanks a lot for this perfect presentation and such a quick time. So my quick question here is that how can the space and satellite insurance sector incentivize commercial space activities to be confined with space sustainability and do you see the limitations and challenges from your perspective? That's one we think about a lot. So everyone wants a good driver discount, right? Because everyone thinks they're a good driver. My daughter not withstanding. But really the way we look at it is we want people to recognize that being responsible in space, doing the right thing doesn't get you a gold star. It gets you in the door. It's the least you can do is be responsible. If you go above and beyond, that's when you will get rewarded. Now, because everyone wants a discount, we might have to say, okay, if you do these things, if you use this technology, if you use these tools, you will get a discount maybe for a year or something. But once the industry understands that whatever our solution is that we're suggesting is ubiquitous, then it's more that those who don't use it will get a surcharge. So of course we can't afford to dig too deeply into our profitability such as it is, which is not sometimes. But ours is a very volatile business. So we need to make sure we manage the volatility. So we can't just be giving good driver discounts. We really do try to stress that responsible behavior is the baseline. It's not what you aspire to. So Chris, in a nutshell, your proposal is to, that insurer should incentivize good behavior. Is that, that's it? I have been doing insurance, space insurance for 40 years. I don't really know much else. I can play guitar, I can write a song, but in terms of trying to get the industry to be responsible and to support sustainability and to be sustainable, yeah okay. We work with policymakers, legislators, space agencies, other parts of governments to try and discuss how we approach risk and how we would like to make sure that risk is recognized. I think it's, one of the points I made was that, and I'm gonna have to go back to my notes here and I'll be quick cause I know we're almost running out of time, is that we need to not just define the, not just define the problems, but we need to recognize the assumptions we're making. So for example, if we use a model for SSA, as Rich Dalbello was saying very eloquently this morning, he sees it as the atomization of the SSA industry where a lot of people are coming up with a lot of different solutions and it's hard to know, to derive from that, what's truth, right? What's the truth solution for that particular satellite up in orbit? So we're trying to incentivize by being vocal. I've never met a microphone I didn't like and just trying to make sure that people understand that insurance will support and it'll support innovation and investment, but we expect in return that people will learn to be responsible. Thank you. Thank you. So I know for me, one of the takeaways is something that we at Secure World cannot agree more with, which is responsible behavior is a baseline, right? That this is, that is where we're starting ideally and we want to grow from there. So thank you, Chris, for being our guinea pig, being our first one up on stage. We really appreciate that. I want to give a thank you to our judges. For those of you who haven't met them yet, we have Brian Berger from Space News, we have Sun Judy Malik from Comspot Corporation, and we have Nicholas Milburn from Milbank offering a variety of different perspectives as you've just seen. I would now like to go ahead and welcome to the stage our next speaker. That is going to be Brian Lagana from Confirrs, who'll be talking about the role that industry standards can potentially play in supporting space sustainability. Brian? Thanks, Crystal. Before I go into my actual pitch, I just wanted to kind of provide a level set for the rest of my comments later on. For those of you who don't know, Confirrs, the consortium for the execution of rendezvous and servicing operations was founded about six years ago in 2017 as a public-private partnership between DARPA under the Department of Defense and the satellite servicing industry. Their main remit at the time was developing cooperatively standards for OOS and RPO in low Earth orbit and geosynchronous Earth orbit. Fast forward to the end of last year, Confirrs becomes a standalone 501C6 global trade association. Our main focus is still developing standards for the industry, but we've taken on more of a global view. We're also expanding a bit into some other areas outside of simply RPO and OOS. We're looking at, and we're not limiting to these areas, but they include ISAM, maintenance and repair, and inspection. As with other traditional trade associations, we're also into advocacy education through our global satellite servicing forum and news and information through our digital newsletter. So I think Confirrs is somewhat uniquely qualified to speak to the benefits of a voluntary industry standard setting. Uncomfortable pause. Space is a risky business. Space operations are inherently risky, expensive, complex operations involving multiple domestic and international collaborators and have been traditionally limited to more developed national economies. With the introduction of the private sector into this, it kind of showed a lack of clear, widely accepted technical and safety standards for responsible performance of OOS and RPO operations involving commercial satellites. And it's an obstacle to satellite servicing becoming a major industry. And could lead to incidents that put long-term sustainability of the space economy at risk by casting doubt on its commercial viability or even worse, inviting greater governmental scrutiny and uninformed regulations. So why are voluntary industry standards important? Voluntary industry standards work to achieve substantially within the respective industries or professions by ensuring safety, security, access, quality and equality. Most importantly, they can help either advise agencies or, in worst case scenarios, help to preempt unnecessary regulations or, if necessary, serve as guidance to government agencies around the world when promulgating regulations becomes unavoidable. Industry standards have been around for centuries. One graphic there, the stained glass window is from the cathedral at Charte in France and it is a representation of the spice guild and a few of its members conducting trade. Europe's medieval merchant and craft skills are one of the earliest examples of organizational standard setting. There are also some early examples of anti-competitive activity as well, but that's another story. Today, industries and their associations have been increasingly taking the lead in voluntary standards, development as a way to self-regulate and hopefully mitigate government intervention into their affairs. Industry standards make processes and facilities safer. They help prove compliance with regulations. When there are regulations, I'm thinking healthcare transportation off the top of my head and they make it easier to train and cross-train people who are in technical jobs. And finally, they encourage innovation. Before joining CONFER, there's a couple of examples that I can share with you is I was with the Pedorthic Foot Care Association for 11 years and for anyone who's interested in what a pedorthist is, as opposed to a podiatrist, I have a 30-second elevator speech that I'd be happy to share later. But essentially, we were faced with the challenge of having the ability to be a regulated profession, but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Secretary, whom had the authority to implement certification guidelines for people who would bill a certain benefit that my members would seek reimbursement from it shows not to until 2017. So you're looking at a 40-plus year gap of a regulatory void. We took it upon ourselves to instead start to implement state regulation. We were successful in advancing licensure laws in 11 states when I left in 2014 and that was on top of the voluntary certification that already existed within the profession but wasn't recognized by Medicare. And my time with American Trucking Associations saw the development of some standards related to equipment specification, drug testing, fatigue tolerance, and one that I had a big role and that we're very proud of was standards to determine the preventability of commercial motor vehicle accidents. Confirms, as many of you probably know because there are a lot of our members here too, which I'm happy to see. Has worked to develop industry-led recommendations for standards that contribute to a sustainable, safe, and diverse in-space economy and has contributed to multiple standards related to satellite servicing. A few of them right off the top of my head is one that has been published by ISO about RPO and OOS programmatic principles and practices. We have three that are going through the AIAA review process now on spacecraft fiducial markers, in-space durable fluid transfer interfaces, and the newest one is on free flyer capture. Two folks on our technical working group, Ron Burke from the Aerospace Corporation and Steve Leet from Northrop Grumman have led a very dedicated, very engaged group of professionals on that working group to start to promulgate all of these industry standards. So all of these standards, at the end of the day, help. They're all voluntary, of course, but they all go to a few different points. One, they help foster unmanned and manned exploration of Earth and beyond. They maintain national security. They encourage the effective and peaceful use of outer space to create opportunity and prosperity, hopefully for all at different levels. And finally, they promote, to Chris's point, innovation by de-risking investment and accelerating the adoption of new technologies through confidence and performance. And in conclusion, we need to remember that well-conceived standards minimize the need for and risk of regulations being developed by government agencies. However, when it's felt that government agencies need to promulgate regulations, these voluntary standards serve as excellent foundations for the development of regulations. And they also to help inform the regulatory agencies who may not have the knowledge, the background that you have in the industry to really put together regulations that everyone can live with. There are always going to be some one-offs that everyone hates, but for the most part, solid industry-derived standards can drive a significant positive regulatory regime. And that's why CONFERS has such a role in the development of these voluntary industry standards. And we work with AIAA, ISO, and ANSI as the standard developing organizations. CONFERS is the birthplace for the concepts for industry standards, and then we take it to the SDOs to socialize it with the public, take internal and external comment, and eventually deliver the final result. So standards are good, better than regulation, but at the end of the day, if regulation's necessary, you've got a good solid foundation to build those from. Brian, where does CONFERS anticipate seeing the most industry clash? Would it be in something like reentry guidelines, maneuverability guidelines, spacecraft having to identify themselves? Where do you expect to see industry clash in trying to set voluntary regulations here? You know, to be completely frank with you, I could not tell you at this moment. We have three splinter groups right now that are working. They're at the very beginning of starting to develop recommendations for standards that speak to those three areas that you just mentioned. And I've been sitting in on all of their calls. We haven't had anything contentious come up per se unless there are some offline conversations that I'm not listening to, but the general consensus is the components that they're putting into them right now are agreeable within the industry players, the industry stakeholders that are part of those splinter groups. And again, that's not to say that as those proposed standards make their way through the process, public comment from other industry stakeholders might throw a monkey wrench into that. But right now, I'm not seeing that. Hi Brian, thanks a lot for the presentation. So I was wondering how does CONFERS effectively promote industry standards for space sustainability? And also, we have been here today since morning. We've talked about how industry standards are not just the law strategy. You are unable to implement them. So what more can industry organizations such as yours do more than just persuasion? So I'm sorry, the question is what more can we be doing to advance industry standards? Either our own or others out there? Yes, how do you effectively promote them and what more can you do more than just persuading and effectiveness? The standards that we're developing, that CONFERS is developing, are those that are specifically identified to the satellite servicing industry and beyond within low earth orbit, geosynchronous orbit and beyond to cislunar end and beyond that. So the standards are, I wouldn't say they're bespoke to CONFERS, I like to think that we represent the voice of the entire satellite servicing industry. So beyond that, I guess getting our message out is one, letting the industry know what we've been doing and we had a really good start with that last month with our state of the association webinar. We had close to 200 individuals registered for it, we had 145 on and that was a great opportunity for the technical working group especially and there are three splinter groups to kind of go over what they're working on. They did receive some feedback from the members and non-members that were on that webinar and they're taking all of that back into consideration but that's going to be one of our vehicles to get the word out there not only about our standards but also that are relevant to the industry that are being developed elsewhere. Appreciate it, thank you. Thank you. Well thank you, Brian. I have to say as a space industry professional I'm actually really pleased to know that we are learning from other industries and bringing in experts from the outside when it comes to trucking or I didn't quite, I'm not even gonna try to pronounce the other one but we often think of ourselves as special and it's great to see when we're incorporating and thinking about what best practice from across many industries can look like. Our next speaker is gonna be Claire Fairfield from the Venture Capital Institute and he's gonna be talking to us today about the role of investment, Claire. Thank you and thank you to the Secure World Foundation for having me here today. I'm gonna steal a little bit of time from Chris that he gave up because I need a group therapy session now because he mentioned paying for car insurance for children. I happen to marry a slightly deranged Greek woman which is kind of par for the course and she decided we should have a huge family so I got to pay for car insurance for seven children and I'm just shaking right here thinking of that. Now the punchline to that the follow up is what Chris's industry prepared me for were four of the daughters getting married in a 10 month period. So I'm happy to be here and I hope somebody wants to pass the hat for me at some point. I wanna talk about venture capital and private equity and how that impacts what everybody is trying to do here and that has created a responsible sustainable space industry and I'm here to tell you that well everybody gets excited about raising capital, venture capital and private equity to a certain extent can be very dangerous actually and the history of venture capital and how venture capital is managed and how people conduct themselves can be problematic in the space environment and I wanna just take you through this very, very quickly and so very briefly what are the characteristics of venture capital investing and I'm skipping some trying to get to the really important ones. It is a high risk, high return endeavor. It is rocket fuel and the people who give venture capitalists their money want those very high returns and that's something to keep in mind. The early venture capitalists and I would argue the most successful venture capitalists in history were in the 70s and through the 80s but the original venture capitalists were not financial managers. They were entrepreneurs, they were engineers, they were CEOs, they were people who had built companies before and as the industry has evolved there is a core of really good VCs, they're all actually pretty good VCs. The problem is the mindset now is how much can I make, how fast can I make it and when can I move on to the next one and there's a constant optimization that goes on that I wanna talk about. The job of venture capitalists and any investor is really to identify risk, quantify that risk and manage that risk but more importantly to determine if that risk is manageable and space has some inherently risky factors to it that we'll talk about. Also keep in mind that historically it's a very low funding rate for venture capital. Oftentimes one to 2% of business plans actually get funded, of those plans 80 to 90% will probably fail and the reason I mentioned that is space depending on how we define space and I'll get into that in just a second really it impacts what the costs of failure are much more so than most other types of investing. Also understand that nobody talks about this particularly in our industry but relatively few venture capitalists actually make money. The top 10 to 15% of funds garner almost all of the returns and that's something to think about because it's not just the companies that are failing then, that flows backwards up into the venture funds and also how a venture fund is structured is really important for people to understand because a typical venture fund lasts for 10 years and that really means they invest their money for about five years because the last half of the fund is meant for the active, more active management of the investments, harvesting those investments, selling them, merging them, doing IPOs if that's possible and so that really means when you're talking to a venture fund it's much better if you have a space investment if you're talking to them in year one than year five because their outlook changes very dramatically in terms of the type of companies they won't invest in based on timing. The whole idea of venture capital in many ways that's talked about is fail fast and move on. How that failure is accomplished is really important in the context of space and I'll touch on that again also. Milestone investing is a great aspect of venture capital. Basically says look, you think you need $20 million, let's break that up into five $4 million chunks and as you achieve milestones we'll put that additional money in for that next milestone. That's great for the entrepreneur because it usually gives you a better valuation over time and it's great for the investor because you're not putting all your eggs in that one basket. Again, this could be problematic for space investing. Also, it's all about time and opportunity optimization. What does that mean? Historically, you might have a portfolio of say 10 companies and there are two or three that you think might be okay but there are another two that clearly seem to be the winners. The idea there may be we're just gonna stop with the two to three that are okay and really focus on the two that appear to be great and again in the context of space what does it mean to stop an investment along those lines? And then venture capital and private equity have an interesting relationship because when times are good and markets are good venture capitalists kind of pass their companies off to the private equity folks who pay a much larger valuation and then it's their problem. Great example would be Uber. As soon as the Saudis put money at a $60 billion valuation my thought was, well, that is gonna be the end of Uber, right? That's gonna be a really rough ride for them and it has been for them in many ways. So let's talk about space investing. I think the Carmen line which some people say it's a good delineator others don't but it kind of defines the risk line for investors in the sense that any space investment you can make that you're basically doing on the ground it could be software, it could be hardware things you can do there where you don't have to launch them into the great beyond that's a fundamentally different investment than once you get it up in space. Investment timeline versus operational timeline. I talked about this, right? It's difficult to fund a lot of space projects if you're gonna use traditional venture capital because the fund wants to be wound up in 10 years and some of these funds are simply not going to be wound up that fast. Also exit strategy and end of life is really important. That's one of the greatest responsibilities I think we have as space investors and as entrepreneurs what happens when things go wrong what happens when a space asset is at the end of its useful life most investors aren't typically in the business of paying for the proper disposal of assets that no longer have value and so there are questions about how do we deal with that in the space context and I should have punched the button shouldn't I? And then also do we really understand the market the customers and the economics of space? We're already seeing the commoditization of telecommunication services and data services, right? It reminds me of the early days of the PC industry there are 110 companies there are 112 that were founded to build hard drives we're gonna have lots of constellations are gonna be created there will be a few winners and there'll be lots of losers and again what does losing mean in that context? What do we do with constellations that are no longer economically viable? How are they taken care of? And I think one of the problems with that is this ultimate failure how do we deal with failure is at the end of the day who bears the ultimate burden of that risk, right? And I believe unfortunately that risk will have to be borne by governments at the end of the day it's no different than the markets figured out in 2008 when the world was crashing that what happened was what the markets had bet on is the government would step in to clean that up and that's what'll probably have to happen in space at times because companies that really don't have the money to clean up a failure are gonna have a difficult time actually finding that money to do that and then one of the things to think about then do we throw milestone investing out the window? Do we say enough money has to be put in place to actually deal with potential end of life issues whether it's success or a failure? Again, just something to think about in that context. So regulatory and jurisdictional investors who will get me to space? That's one of the big issues because that's one of the challenges here one of the great risks is there are lots of governments lots of countries who wanna be into space not all will act as responsibly as others and that is a huge risk. Space is a resource for all where is the ultimate accountability and responsibility? Investors have to play an important role in that because if we provide the money people will take it typically and then I think one of the greatest risks and understand as I said early on venture capital is about identifying, quantifying and then seeing if you can manage risk. The geopolitical risk surrounding space is massive and it's getting worse every day. The 800 pound grill in the room is always the relationship between China and the United States and it's not getting better at this point and all bets are off. We've talked about the effect of space junk cascading through orbit. Well, if there is a real clash between the United States and China one of the first things to go will be satellites and what does that really mean for the rest of space? So can we manage that risk? And also at the end of the day it's been touched on here it's a big beautiful wonderful place it's a fragile place in many ways based on what we can do to do it. And then also what are the reality based business models? What does it really mean to do mining in space to do mining in asteroids, to do lunar mining? Will there really be markets that will support that other than so much of this is driven by satellites right now. It's a fantastic market. Refueling, maintenance, disposal at end of life all of those things. What are the other economics that people are getting excited about? Well, we'll build some space stations. What do the economics really look like in the long term there? That's a difficult thing to say. It is a bit of a if you build it they will come kind of approach but we just have to be very, very careful in that context and understand that investors at the end of the day wanna make money for their investors and for themselves which means they have a very different perspective than doing necessarily what is right from an environmental standpoint and it will be important to try to get voluntary standards and some mandatory standards put in place to at least lower the risk of the danger of having assets abandoned in space. So last thing I will say because I'm sure I'm running out of time the, you do that very well by the way Chris. I've touched on all these things. I'm not gonna read through them but understand one of the things that's really important in sustainability is we have to get this right as investors because if capital cannot be made available that'll shut the door to space as much as space debris circling the planet and never forget that when it comes to anything in life, particularly investing, luck and timing matter and you just have to go along for the ride on that. So thank you very much. I don't have any questions, I don't know. Thank you, that was great. I just wanted to touch on kind of the last thing you talked about which is the, obviously you have to be hyper focused on returns for your investors and where have you seen kind of the convergence between the ability to have a business plan that is profitable as well as a benefit to the environment and to sustainability? Well I think we may go back to the future so to speak because one of the great untold stories of Silicon Valley is there is a single family that provided over half the financing into Silicon Valley through the 1970s up to the mid 1980s and what that really represented was patient capital. They were not driven by this, it was their money as a private family office. It was, they were driven by doing neat things. And they didn't need immediate returns. They were one of the five wealthiest families in the country. They wanted to see what interesting things they could do and preserve capital and if it took 15 years they were fine with that. I think private families and private individuals could be the key to some of this. I mean I don't think it's a coincidence that you have Branson and Bezos and Musk, right? They took a ton of money they made on other things and then went into the space business and I think that may be part of the solution there because they'll have the patients, they have no choice once you do it, right? You're kind of forced into being patient but they also have the ability to withstand that and they have that entrepreneurial spirit. Thank you. So thanks a lot for the presentation and I was especially very impressed with the one or 2% get funded, the numbers that you get there. I was curious to know that what criterias or metrics do you or should you use as venture capitalists to assess the sustainability impact for space ventures investments that you're making space ventures? At least as I would look at sustainability, to me the most concerning factor is what happens if something doesn't work or when it's at end of life, those types of things. So if a team walks in and they're talking about that, they have a plan for that, that's a metric I would use to look at that particular organization but I think independent of that it has to be something you're proactive about because there are two ways to look at this. You could say I'm gonna make money while I can and that's what happens, right? Because one of the problems with the venture industry like all financial industries, they're a big herd of people. Like that's what's happened now in space. A few years ago, here comes the herd because it was the cool thing to do and nobody got in trouble for investing in space. All of a sudden they're finding out it's a bit harder and everybody thought it was. There's a pullback that has happened. You'll see that cycle again and again. We've seen it over several different cycles in the venture industry and so yes, you could say I made a bunch of money because I got $200 million because I sold the URL for dogfood.com during the internet years, right? But what did you do to actually create a sustainable industry there? And so part of it is the attitude and that's, I mean, it's a very nebulous thing but it's, you know, and again, for some, you could say if we can stay the course we will make a ton of money in this one, right? So, okay, that's it. All right, thank you very much. Well, we asked our speakers to pull no punches and I think Claire took us very seriously without lining what's some of the possibilities and also the concerns when it comes to this kind of investment art. So thank you very much, Claire. Next, I would like to welcome Caroline Bell, who is here representing Astroscale and is going to be talking about some of the research and things that they've been looking at when it comes to circular economy and the role that that can play in space sustainability. Claire, Caroline, my apologies. It all flows together in the end. All right, so space debris, it's a problem. Look at all that, that's why we're all here today, right? What if we're not? What if we're wrong? What if space debris is an opportunity? What if it is the opportunity that we as an industry need to transform our future in space and turn it into that potential future that we're really capable of, that a lot of us dreamed of as kids and why we got into this industry? I think that the looming risk that's created by satellite launch rates really gives us an opportunity to transform not only how we operate in space and to enable space sustainability, but to change more than that, to change how we conduct business in space, how we research and understand new scientific principles by our actions in space, how we achieve national security via space. So let's explore how a circular economy will help us achieve this, will help us achieve this space sustainability. So here we have the history of the space industry to date. So this is cumulative objects that have been launched and we see steadily increasing launch rates over time. Pretty manageable end of life timelines, pretty steady growth in the number of objects that are on orbit, moving in a positive direction. And by some estimates, this is one potential future that is in front of us in space if we continue on as we are. A rapid increase in launch rates and a significant amount of growth in the number of objects that are on orbit, whether those are alive and operational or whether they're derelict. Now we all wanna see this growth, right? I certainly wanna see huge amounts of economic activity, of scientific activity, of benefits to humanity that come from space. We've talked about that today, but we wanna do it sustainably. So can we do that by doing things the way that we always have done where we launch a new satellite anytime that we want to replace an old one or expand coverage or provide a new capability? All right, this is our model for space today, how we operate in space. It's linear, it's directional, and it moves from one step to the next to the next to the next until you reach the end, and then we start all the way back over at the beginning. Do the whole thing again. So we extract resources and spend them when we build satellites. We spend resources when we build launch vehicles and then we burn propellant to put those satellites into orbit. And when we reach the nominal end of life of whatever the mission was designed to do, we throw away those resources, either by leaving them in space to become space debris in a responsible orbit or not, or we burn them up on reentry. We are throwing away those resources before they really reach their full potential and their full utilization rates. The other thing that's at play here, which we heard some of the earlier speakers talk about is that there are externalities along this entire value chain. Not only is it the resource extraction itself, but many other factors that are at play, many of which we don't even realize today. This is why it's so important to do these life cycle assessments that were talked about in the ESG talk earlier this afternoon to really understand the impact of our actions across this whole value chain. But even if we do that, and even if we really understand this value chain, and even if we add innovation, if we sprinkle in new capabilities and new ways of doing things that add efficiency and reduce the impact on the economy, a linear economy is never really sustainable. It's not truly a sustainable solution in the long term. We're not constrained though to this way of operating in space just because it's what we're used to doing and what we're good at. We have the ability to replace this last link in the chain, this end of life box that I have here with a step into a circular process for these resources that we have so intently put into space. Instead of abandoning them or throwing them away, we can take those resources and use them again and again to deliver value multiple times in multiple ways to multiple different users. That is a circular economy in space. So circular economies are something that we are pretty familiar with terrestrially even if we don't think about it. When was the last time, and I'm thinking it was about an hour ago or two hours go after lunch, that you used the recycling bins out there or you used a compostable product, something that after it had addressed its first use case and provided value to you, can be used again in something else rather than just put into the landfill side of that waste bin. We can do the same thing in space. So when we implement a circular economy in space, once we have things out there, we still have to address that. We can do things like repair satellites, repair components. We have a solar array that doesn't deploy when we get on orbit. Let's repair the mechanism. I'd rather do that than spend 100, 150 million dollars and wait a couple years to get a new satellite up there. And I'm pretty sure that Chris doesn't want to pay out the full size of the claim. He'd rather pay for fixing it. We can recycle components. And that's not just the thousands of satellites that are yet to launch, because we need to be thinking about what happens to those at end of life. We still want them to launch. We still want them to provide value. And then let's recycle them into something new. The other thing that's up there that we can recycle, all the debris that we're so worried about. We can take something that today provides a risk and a problem to how we operate in space, and we can turn it into an asset that injects value into this circular economy, into this cycle. We can bring something and take those materials, recycle them into something new. And in that way, we can see that objects that we see today as being worthless and risky and dangerous, can actually have inherent value in them that we can turn into something else. So this is beneficial to us too. After we've done that repair, we can regenerate those materials. We can use 3D printing in space. We can use assembly in space. Maybe we haven't fully recycled things. We can do regeneration without that too. And build new capabilities. We can build new structures. We can build new satellites. Instead of launching everything fresh from the ground, the other benefit that we get here is that we can build things that would be either impossible or cost-prohibitive to launch from the ground. James Webb, really cool. I want the next generation of space telescopes to have an even larger mirror, probably one that doesn't have to unfold in a really complicated manner, but one that we can build in space. Energy is a limitation here on Earth. What if we can? Yes, I know this is a holy grail that's been talked about for decades. Space solar power. Is it more effective to build that in space? Maybe is that a possibility? How do we build space stations in space? There are a lot of opportunities for when you have the ability to construct structures on orbit. And because I did come from a biology background, I'm aware that very few systems do not are fully closed loop. So no, it's not gonna be a closed loop cycle. We are going to have to remove things. We are going to create waste. We are going to have things that cannot be reused in this circular economy, but that's okay because when we create it, we'll be responsible. We will remove it and make sure that that waste does not become a risk for the vibrant economy that we've created in space. We will leverage life extension to use satellites for longer. This is another thing that we've heard talked about today. If you can use a satellite for longer than perhaps its original design life to continue getting more value out of that object that you place in a space, you can reduce the number of things you launch. Instead of launching ever 15 years, you'll launch ever 20. Over time, you're launching fewer things to space, which means you're having less of an impact on the earth when you build those spacecraft, when you launch those spacecraft, and overall putting fewer things in space, which helps with the space sustainability side as well. So it really helps with the entire value chain. And finally, at least finally as far as the circle goes, I am very happy if any of you have other ideas for what we should put into here. Has to start with an R though, that's the rule. We can reuse capabilities in space. We can reuse structures and components that can be reused and replace just those things that need to be replaced. Structure of a satellite still works. Most of the functions of the bus still work. Let's replace the payload with something that is more appropriate to whatever customer base you're going after at that point in time. Have an upper stage left in orbit. There are ideas out there to turn those into space station modules. Let's be creative and find ways to reuse some of what we put in space without even necessarily needing to put it through the recycling cycle. We have the capability to change how we design spacecraft, to design for modularity, to design for reuse and repair. And I also think that would be cool for the space industry and I think would help us bring some of those young engineers who are looking for something interesting and vibrant and inspiring to do, give them the opportunity to change how things have been done to invent new ways of operating in space and thereby helping us grow our industry as well. All right, so who can be involved with this? I keep saying we, who's the we? Well, it's all of us in this room. As you anticipated, everyone has a role in this. Regulators have a role in this. People like Office of Commerce is here today, CAA from the UK is here today. Manufacturers like Maxar, our sponsor is here today and they have a role in this. Launch and space access providers have a role to play in this. Space S, not in the room, that's a bit awkward, but they have a role to play in this as well. Operators like Viasat, like Iridium, like OneWeb, they have a role to play in this. In our servicing providers, like ClearSpace, like Starfish, yes, like Astroscale, we have a role to play in this. And as the space economy grows, as it becomes more diverse, more vibrant, there are new requirements, there are new opportunities and new companies will come out, they're gonna look to Claire for investment and they will have a role to play in this as well. So when we create a sustainable space economy by implementing circularity, we will be able to change and grow what we do in space in ways that we haven't imagined. It will be dynamic. It will be a web of connections, of capabilities, of products, of services that can make our space economy stronger and more resilient. The circular economy in space is our sustainable solution. When we change how we operate in space and design sustainability in from the beginning, it's not a tact on afterthought. It doesn't have the risk of becoming greenwashing. It is an integral part to how we will succeed in space. And the challenge is broader than what any of us can do alone. So I look forward to working with you on all of it and all of you telling me what you will do to bring the circular economy to reality. Please do it over a drink. I've had this guy on my wrist, I'll do it. Thank you. Okay, one question. Does that game have a burn one? Karen, I think that's a great graphic. It describes a lot of things that are in the pipeline. We've seen some of the stuff demonstrated like service life extension. I guess my question for you, and you're with a company that wants to do ADR, how do you make the business case close for something like ADR, apps in a government mandate? We heard from Claire that VCs will fund a lot of companies that are gonna fail and then it's up to the government to clean up the mess. The government could contract an after-scale, but how does this happen, apps in some sort of mandate? I think it's a question of which sort of ADR you're talking about. If we're talking about debris that's already up there that was put in space by governments, it's a different answer than if we're talking about moving forward in the future. And that's why I think it's important that we're here today to make sure we're not creating an ADR problem for 10 years from now with new debris that's created. That being said, one of the things that we've looked at at after-scale is making sure that we have a diversified capability set where our business is something that has a technology to address ADR type applications, the ability to approach, to capture an unprepared non-controlled object and remove it. That same technology can be applied to other things that have different revenue-generating sides to them. So I think that balancing piece is a helpful part of looking for ADR, but I don't think it's fair for us to completely let governments off the hook, especially those governments that have been involved in creating that debris from the get-go, some of what we've seen launched since the late 50s. Thank you, thank you. Well, thank you, Carolyn. I'm definitely gonna take away the idea of the idea of how understanding better that a linear economy is not sustainable and thinking critically about what a circular economy in space might be and that it doesn't just apply to satellites, it applies to exploration, it applies to telescopes and research and all sorts of things. So thank you for that great overview. Our last speaker in this pitch session today is going to be Masa Ishida from the Spacetide Foundation, who's gonna be giving us some insights into the role that terrestrial companies might play in space sustainability. Masa? So hello, everyone. I'm Masa Ishida, CEO of the Spacetide Foundation. So thank you for our second world foundation for having me such a great event today. So I'm from Japan. So actually, I arrived in New York yesterday, so I still feature trucks. So now Japan is very early morning, so but I'll do my best. So most of you are not familiar with my activities, so let me briefly my foundation. So Spacetide Foundation is a Tokyo-based non-profit organization with a mission to create and orchestrate an ecosystem for Japan's commercial space industry. We hold one of the largest commercial space conference in Asia and also provide the database for analyzing their space startup ecosystem. And also, we are operating Japan's first acceleration program to space entrepreneurs. So through these various activities, so we have been contributing to their development of commercial space ecosystem in Japan. So let me move on to my presentation. The key word of my presentation is the new two space industries. So I think Japan has seen 50 years of space development right by a national space agency. So it's mainly driven by the science and the technical perspective. However, interesting commercial space is increasing in both the public and the private sectors. So Japan's government see commercial space as an area of future growth, has been implementing a variety of measures to encourage the space activities in the private sectors. So as a result, we can see some new space ecosystem. You know, industry ecosystem for government right space development looks like a pyramid structure with a space agency at the top. On the other hand, industry ecosystem for commercial space is becoming more diversified. So with the number of stakeholders increasing as well. I believe this wide variety of stakeholders should have to act harmoniously to achieve the progress of the industry as a whole. But our investors profile in Japan is a bit unique when compared to that of the U.S. You know, U.S. main investors are financial professional financial institution such as venture capitalists or angel investors. On the other hand, Japan's main investors are large corporations. Various stressor industry players we call new to space industry including telecommunication, electronics, machinery, automobile, trading, airlines have begun to invest in the space industry. So such a widespread of diverse sector participating in the space industry has not seen in any other country but I would say it's a feature of Japan's space ecosystem. Let me show you a more specific case. For example, our Japanese automobile giant Honda has generated a lot of attention when it announced a strategic plan to develop micro-anchors and also a renewable energy recycling system for the future exploration. And also a soft bank, a major mobile network operators are invested in one web with a mobile providing high-speed low-latency service from space. Toyota is also partnering with JAXR to develop a crude pressurized rover for the future exploration. Various new to space companies see space as a future growth areas where they can utilize our technological and business asset. And collaboration with the new to space company can expand the price of the space industry. They are achieved for investing in the space industry can be roughly divided into three categories. First is the front-end spirits. They see space as an iconic display of our front-end spirits. And the second is our advanced investment in the emerging space business. And the third one is the major factors or enhancement of their current business. So through the investment, they can bring in a variety of technologies or infrastructure risk money. And more importantly, they can bring in their demand and end user for the space industry. I would say the collaboration with the new to space company can expand the horizon of the space industry. However, the global space industry remain a closed niche community with a higher technical and regulatory barriers to entry. And also as we discussed today, so this industry face a variety of challenges. Various factors such as increase in the number of players, conflict of interest among various stakeholders and also a rising sense of crisis about space sustainability have come into play at the same time. So it's clear we need to evolve space ecosystem. I think it's important to build a common understanding about current state affairs, build a larger ecosystem and achieve long-term progress for the industry as a whole. As we discussed today, private sector participation will be extremely important for the continued growth of the space industry. Not only aerospace industry, but also various new to space industry should be evolved in the future. To achieve that goal, I'd like to propose to define a comprehensive set of industrial architectures. An open, reliable and collaborative industrial architecture should be designed so that our various industry can participate more in the space industry and provide with each users. This industry architecture should encompass our various elements, including formation of international framework norms, coordination of business activities and also conflict of interest and incentives for responsible behavior, technical interoperability of a related system and also market rules for data and various applications. And such an industry architecture should be built in each space domain, such as Rio, Mio, Geo and also the moon. So I'd like to show our specific case in Japan. I think, you know, the iSpace is one of the most major Luna exploration company globally. However, various research cooperation are participating in Luna development exploration. And the discussion on industry architecture have begun. You know, to sustain human presence and conduct a various economic activity on the moon, it's important to build a variety of infrastructures, including telecommunication, positioning and navigation, energy, crossing and housing, as well as transportation. And these infrastructure cannot be built by space agency alone, nor any one industry alone. So it's likely we will work with various industries to build these infrastructure. However, these commercial activity have a wide range of potential issues, such as ownership of land and resources of human rights, resolution of conflict and also the debris on the moon. So as we discussed this morning, our Artemis Accord will be playing a critical role to deal such kind of an issue. However, I would say a comprehensive set of industry architecture should be designed to provide positive business environment to access a collaboration with among various industries in the future. So as I've been saying, space industry is full of many possibilities and is expected to grow at a high pace in the future. However, you know, there's a limit what the space industry can do and so on. However, by collaborating with the new two space industries, this industry can make a larger impact on civilization. Again, so let's evolve our space ecosystem. So together with the new two space industry, so continue to grow as of the space industry. Thank you for being attention. Thank you so much for the presentation. I especially love the last slide that you had about the collaboration. Thank you so much. I was just wondering in the same length that how and what is it that you're also doing with the industry associations or the collaborations in also promoting space sustainability? Like how is the industry working towards space sustainability through these collaborations as well? Yeah, thank you for the great question. I think that today I'm talking about sustainability of the continued growth of the space industry. I think that space sustainability includes a variety of meanings, right? So I think one of the key elements is the sustainability of the industry growth. So from this perspective, our new two space industry will be a key role to expand the market prize of the space industry. So as I mentioned, the space is still considered to be niche market. I think the size of the space or industry is less than 400 billion US dollar. Yeah, I think so. But the ICT industry is about 10 times larger. Automobile industry is about 20 times larger. So space industry is still niche market. So we need more demand users. We need to expand the size of the market. That's the key to continue growth of the space industry. So from this perspective, our new two space industry will be playing a key role. So we need to collaborate more. Appreciate it, thank you. Thank you. All right, thank you, Masa. So we have listened to five excellent pitches on various ideas for how we can address space sustainability. I wanna show a graphic. Many of you participated in our pre-poll to get a sense of what you thought was the most likely or most, you know, where we're already making progress in some areas. And so this gives you a sense of where that's at. It looks like voluntary standards, kite marks and certifications is in the lead. What I wanna do now is actually turn it over to our judges for some closing remarks. And I wanna remind you that while our judges are giving closing remarks, the second poll, which is the same poll, is actually open. We want this to be an interactive session. I wanna see, did any of our pitches change your mind? Let's see if we end up with the same answers. Let's see if we end up with different answers. So if you have the same app that we've been using for Q&A, please go ahead and open that for the poll. In the meantime, I'm gonna go ahead and ask each of our judges to take a minute or two, three, to go ahead and offer us some closing observations. We'll start with Brian. Okay, thanks. So I think the voluntary standards, there's a lot of merit there, right? Because we're still in an environment where we're not really set up in the United States elsewhere to start regulating some of these new space activities. So it's good, I think, for the industry to get a head start by developing some voluntary standards and being responsible and adhering to them. I think that also makes sense for insurers to incentivize or to disincentivize bad behavior in space. I mean, first and foremost, insurers are kind of worried about launch failures, they're worried about equipment failures, but obviously, if you have collisions in space, that's bad for everybody. Responsible venture capital investment practices, that sounds highly theoretical to me. I think that the industry will probably continue to take flyers on some long shot ventures and not really have to look down the road to what happens if somebody happens to put up tens or hundreds or thousands of satellites and then goes out of business. Nobody buys those assets. Whose responsibility is it to make sure that they're disposed of properly? Beyond that, I think that we're seeing a lot of companies starting to take, household name companies, let's say companies like Toyota and Sony, taking an interest in space. Sometimes I wonder how much of that is really, do they really see a tangible business opportunity or does aligning themselves with these projects create kind of a technology halo that reflects well on the companies? So I don't really have a firm grasp at how much money they're putting into this, if they actually see a business opportunity, but just to bring it full circle with Carolyn's circular economy concepts, I think she's described everything we're seeing, right? I think she's described all these pieces that are coming into existence to more or less of a degree, how that circle's gonna close, I don't know. I guess that's the point of conferences like this are. But overall, I appreciate all the conversation we had here about these. Excellent, Ryan, thank you for that. So Judy, what are your thoughts? Yeah, well, thank you so much. First of all, I'd like to extend my gratitude to obviously Secure World Foundation for putting this together and to all the pitchers who had some really thought provoking pitches here. To start off, just considering a few facts and figures that we already had, like the space economy is obviously worth at least $469 billion that are more than 5,000 satellites that are actively operating in Leo. There's an average of 42 new satellites being launched into orbit weekly and more than 1,800 defunct satellites that are left in Leo. And lastly, there are more than 27,000 trackable orbital debris objects that exist alongside thousands more that we're obviously not tracking. There are five international treaties and several other rules, regulations, policies that are in place and are obviously being developed. In light of this and the insightful pitches that were already discussed here, the space sustainability that developed and emerges for me is the ability of all humankind to continue to use outer space for peaceful purposes and socioeconomic benefit for the long term, while safeguarding it from becoming a tragedy of the commons and obviously preserving it both for the present and for the future generations. Today we do see organizations such as Secure World Foundations, Space Safety Coalition, the Center for Space Standards and Innovation, which is the research arm for COMPSPOC and several others that are providing comprehensive overviews of challenges and opportunities and how to actually bring about space sustainability. We obviously also saw throughout the day that UN, USA and several other international NGOs are also in the forefront of promoting space sustainability. Putting all of that together in the perspective of the five pitches that we had, they succinctly highlighted, I'll talk about three because I do want to keep it in the interest of time, the importance of long term planning and responsible practices to ensure the sustainable use of outer space, cautioning us against the potential negative consequences of short term thinking and unsustainable exploitation and thirdly and lastly, reminding us to critically evaluate the proposed solutions and consider their long term implications for the overall sustainability of space activities. So just in conclusion and finally, I just want to say that the pitchers were not only bringing up ideas but also being transparent about use, misuse and also accountability which is obviously very important at these platforms. By addressing the shortcomings and pushing for stronger measures, we can forge a path like all of us here towards a truly sustainable and inclusive future in space. So thank you all for your insightful presentations and let us all remain like really steadfast towards a commitment towards advancing sustainability through rigorous examinations and collective approaches at ASTRO. Thank you. Thank you. All right, Nicholas, you get the last word. What are your thoughts on today's pitches? Thank you and I see I have a minute or so so I'll keep it brief but as a lawyer who does a lot of work in the finance and fundraising space, I was very drawn to how that flows through all the five pitches and really sustainability generally is, obviously I think everybody agrees it's a good thing and we all want it but who pays for it and how do you have companies that can produce at this early stage a business model that can show the declares of the world that they're worthy of an investment early on and you look at a company like Astroscale that is obviously a leader in the field and has raised a lot of money but how many others are there at this stage that can have the money to afford the insurance that we heard about from Chris and to kind of pull all that together to sort of put these great business plans to practice. I think that's the big challenge and the thing that I look for and then the other thing that really caught my attention was the reference to the circular economy that Carolyn talked about. Again, I mean a fascinating concept and couldn't agree more, the trend seeming to be from the business side that it's cheaper, the satellites are smaller, they're cheaper, they're shorter live. And Carolyn touched on this, how do you get the business folks to think about the reusability and the circular economy kind of at the business plan stage so that it makes sense from an economic perspective as well as from kind of an environmentally sustainability perspective but really all great stuff and likewise I think we all just need to remain vigilant and figure out how we can keep these good ideas going and get them the funding they need to come to fruition. I like that, let's keep the good eyes going because the good idea is going because that's part of what we're trying to do here. We want to tee up new concepts, we want to look through these and now I want to hear from you, our audience is the actual last last word, we're going to pull up our current poll to see if we changed any minds, let's see how our pitches went. So the answer is we actually kind of did change your minds and Carolyn, your presentation on circular economy I think really introduced some new concepts to our audience who is really showing that this idea of something a little bit beyond recycle but a much more complex idea of circular economy definitely hit the mark in a few cases. So moving on from there, I want to thank my judges, I want to thank our presenters and invite you all to chat with them as we move forward today. We are going to move into our last session for the day. I couldn't be more thrilled. So thank you guys, wonderful, wonderful.