 We're going live. Five, four, three, two, one. Ignition, lift off. Yes, I'm leaving. Okay, so my name is Skip Smith. I'm a partner here at Sherman and Howard. So welcome to Sherman and Howard, and thank you to our marketing people that are around here for putting all this together, including a nice hot breakfast for us. I'm the chair of the Sherman and Howard Space Law Practice Group, and so Sherman and Howard is very happy to host you here, but I'm thrilled that we have as a co-host the Secure World Foundation and a couple of people I want to recognize. One is Cinda. Cinda, could you just put your hand up a second there? Thank you for the support that you give to the Secure World Foundation and for supporting this program here today. And Mike, my co-host over here, we'll be doing a dog and pony show here in a moment on the Outer Space Treaty, and I'll be introducing Mike, but raise your hand if you've ever read the Outer Space Treaty. Really? Okay, that's a lot. Okay, I was thinking people were just here for a birthday party. You've really actually read it. Okay, that's good. So we're going to talk today about the Outer Space Treaty and really what it's done for space business and Colorado space business, and I'm also thrilled that we had Mark Sarangelo with us from Sierra Nevada to talk about the Dream Chaser and other things they're doing there. So it's going to be a really good program, and as you see in the agenda, we're going to talk for about an hour and then discuss Q&A session and kick things around. The other speaker we have with us is Mike Golder over there. Mike, raise your hand, and I'll introduce our speakers as we get to them. But there's also one other person I have to introduce, and that's my fiance, Dr. Pam Burges, over there. And in four weeks from today, we get married, so we're thinking he's pretty smart. Yeah, thanks for coming, Pam. So to kick it off, let me introduce Michael. Michael Simpson is the executive director of the Secure World Foundation, and he's been there for how many years? Since 2011? Yeah, 2011. Long time. And then before that, he was the president of the International Space University for many years. So Mike's been living in the space world for a long time, space policy, space law. I run into Mike's places all around the world, you know? And he's very well known, and as is the Secure World Foundation, they're doing some marvelous things, and Mike's providing some great leadership for that organization. So we're going to talk about the Hour Space Treaty, and I'm going to start us off, and then we'll kind of go back and forth, but this is a list of the major space treaties. Now, a lot of you know this, but some of you may not. But all of these have come out of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Copious has a technical subcommittee and a legal subcommittee, and they meet periodically. And most of these treaties, all of these treaties, really, some of them were based on UN General Assembly resolutions, and then it usually goes to the legal subcommittee, gets discussed and drafted in there, approved by Copious, and then approved by the United Nations and sent out for ratification to all the nation states. The number you see in parenthesis here is the number of nations who have ratified that treaty. So you see that the Outer Space Treaty has 105 countries around the world that have ratified this treaty, and so it is very widely accepted, sufficiently widely accepted that it really applies to all nations as customary international law, because it's been so widely accepted for such a long time. So the Outer Space Treaty came first, and only 10 years after Sputnik, so pretty quick. Then the next three treaties really further define some of the principles, the broad general principles that are in the Outer Space Treaty. So you had rescue and return of astronauts, liability convention, which is fairly detailed, registration convention, all further defining aspects of the Outer Space Treaty. And we came to the Moon Agreement, which was a little different. Some people say that it did further define provisions of the Outer Space Treaty. Many people say no, it's very different, and we're not going to sign up for that. You see, only 17 nations have ratified the Moon Agreement. We're not going to go into all the reasons for that now, but it is not widely ratified. So we're going to talk now a little bit more about the Outer Space Treaty itself and focus on that, and Mike, why don't you elaborate on the very title of the treaty? One of the things I think that is often overlooked when we talk about the Outer Space Treaty and it is a treaty on principles. So often people try to see this treaty as if it were, you know, like Title X U.S. Code or something like that. It really was an attempt to put down the very basic rules that would govern an environment in which states could operate in space peaceful. So it is one of the shortest treaties that the United States has signed and ratified. It is roughly the same length as the Antarctic Treaty, which is also essentially a principles treaty. And so right from the beginning, as we begin to talk, really reviewing the articles and the meaning of the Outer Space Treaty, understand that this is intended to be principles. It's intended to be fulfilled by the law of states. It's individual states that adopt the laws that implement this treaty. This treaty is not world government. This treaty is an attempt by countries to see a way that they can operate together in an environment sufficiently different from everything we know on planet Earth to require some special principles to guide our actions and our behavior, our legislative decisions going forward. So in that context, let's go back and start looking at the articles. We start, of course, with Article 1. And fairly simple. All of these articles are very simple. And Article 1 states exploration and use of Outer Space should be carried out for the benefit and interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind. The province of all mankind is very interesting language there, because there are some other treaties out there that talk about the common heritage of mankind, which is a concept that is advanced by developing countries that would give to them an equitable share of the benefits derived from certain resources. You see the common heritage of mankind concept and specific language in the Moon Agreement that I mentioned a few minutes ago. The common benefits, provision, and that's what this is often referred to as the province of all mankind, benefit and interests of all countries. It summarizes its common benefits principle. And when you think about it, Outer Space really has in order to the common benefit of all countries and really all people. There's almost no place you can go in the world where you can't communicate with just about any other place in the world via satellite. Even if it starts from your cell phone and goes to a cell tower and then may go, you know, landline to a microwave tower, ultimately it's probably going to beam up to a satellite and beam down somewhere else. And you're going to be able to communicate anywhere in the world through satellite communications. When you think about the benefits of remote sensing satellites to all countries of the world, helping them from land planning to evaluating what resources might be in their countries, all kinds of uses for remote sensing of the earth from spaces. There's so many applications in addition to just the advancement of science that we've seen that I have no trouble arguing that Outer Space has been used for the common benefit of all mankind and all countries. It's an easy argument. The common heritage of mankind concept is a different argument. Frankly, a lot of people like me, we don't even want to go there. We don't want international regimes that dictate how the benefits derived from Outer Space activities are going to be allocated to all the countries in the world. Without perhaps even taking into account the gazillions of dollars that are spent to do the exploration. So very different concepts there, common benefits, common heritage of mankind. Outer Space treaties, just common benefits, we can live with that any day. Space shall be free for exploration and use by all states. That's the freedom of use principle and that's one of my favorite principles in the Outer Space Treaty. If it doesn't violate one of the other principles, you can do it. And we've had many examples of the freedom of use of Outer Space. So let's go to the next slide, Mike. Well, Outer Space Treaty was adopted in 1967. A very interesting time in the space race where neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were sure of who was going to get to the moon first. And it was not possible to have even a remotely military mind without seeing that the moon could be the new high ground. And so the treaty was adopted in an environment where one of the single most important early purposes was to prevent claims of sovereignty of the kind that we saw in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries as Europe began its era of exploration. Nobody wanted a flag planted on the moon to mean that a country had established sovereignty on the moon. And so this term national appropriation enters the language and then we resolve the technological issues that get us to the moon. Nobody tries to make a claim. Even the American flags that were planted on the moon were planted with language designed to say this is not a claim. But then people started talking about appropriation as if it might relate to any taking of property. In fact this treaty of principles requires us to go back and see that it was really national appropriation that people were worried about. And they immediately say right afterwards a no national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means, by use or occupation, sort of a bow to those of us in common law countries that understand that prescriptive rights and property can be possible. And it has been an area of some controversial discussion. If there is a core understanding however of this article it is that it really was designed to make sure that nobody could claim that any celestial body was a part of their national territorial sovereignty. That was what the concern is. Understand that a very interesting aspect of the Outer Space Treaty is buried in here and it continues to plague us. And that is all of us that have either studied law, taught law, practiced law have done so in an environment where there was a sovereign that had played a role in creating that law. Either through the sovereign's courts or through the sovereign's legislature or through direct statements of the sovereign. We are in an environment in which we work to create law absent territorial sovereignty. So we struggle in a world where there is no sovereignty over territory but there is sovereignty over person. And for those of us like myself who've taught law this has been an absolutely magnificent concept to bedevil the minds of students when you're trying to get them to understand some of the implications of sovereignty. But keep it in mind because many of the arguments over the Outer Space Treaty really focus on this issue that we have no sovereign. We have nobody who can decree that a particular interpretation is accurate. The next point is that the moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes. The peaceful purposes portion of the Outer Space Treaty has held with incredible, incredible strength. Certainly space has been used to support military operations but we have not had satellite on satellite or spacecraft on spacecraft violence and we haven't seen it used as a battleground. There is an interesting issue buried here that we'll see emerge as we talk further on and that is the use of the term celestial bodies. That term is increasingly discussed in terms of not exactly knowing what a celestial body is and it's not clear from the travel preparatoire, the work done before the treaty what it was intended to mean. Does it mean every speck of dust in space? Does it only mean hydrostatically spherical bodies in space? Does it mean asteroids over a certain size? Does it mean all asteroids? The honest answer to all those questions is we don't know and it may be one of the biggest area of Likuna that we cannot precisely define. We don't know when the Japanese brought back particles from the asteroid Itakawa. Were they celestial bodies? When the United States brought back particles taken in the Genesis mission that were solar particles that had mass, were they celestial bodies? We don't know. It wasn't considered important when the treaty was adopted and there's never been case law to define it. So article two and four have some fascinating pieces to them also fascinating questions. Article five talks about astronauts and it's declared that they're envoys of mankind and that nations must render assistance to astronauts in distress. So rapidly after this outer space treaty came out nations were concerned about astronauts who might return to the surface of the earth in condition of distress. They may not even make it in the outer space or have problems coming back and that's why the next treaty was the agreement on their rescue and return of astronauts and space objects and it further defined the principles in the outer space treaty and it said if astronauts and talking about who's an astronaut these days is also an interesting term because now we see personnel of spacecraft a little bit different but anyway, in the treaties they talk about astronauts and so if astronauts return to the face of the earth under conditions of distress nations must take all steps possible to rescue them and then must promptly return them to the nation that set them up. If the space object returns to the surface of the earth under conditions of distress it's a little bit different. You take all steps possible. Not all steps practically. So all steps possible. All steps practical. Some people have said well may not be practical if it costs too much money so you may go to the state that set it up and say tell you what you pay me 50 million dollars we'll go get it for you or whatever but it's very different you know the obligations with respect to returning astronauts are quite different from the obligations inherent in returning space objects. Article 6 is extremely important. States are responsible for national space activities whether by governmental or non-governmental entities and Mike Gold is going to talk extensively about Article 6 so I'm going to leave this to Mike to handle and throw it back to Michael Simpson if you've got mics all over the place in front of me. So in fact liability was an issue that was very much on the minds of the drafters of the outer space treaty. Obviously there are substantial risks when you're dealing with rockets launching them in some cases close to the frontiers with other states and so Article 7 of the outer space treaty indicated that states would be liable for damage caused by their space objects but it's not a surprise international law is between states international law couldn't create a liability on a citizen of another state only a state could do that but there were enough ambiguities in what was meant by that article that it led to the creation of an entire additional treaty the liability convention. Most important things to retain about the way we think in general about space craft liability is that liability for damage caused on the ground by a space object authorized to be launched or even if launched from a country that had not formally authorized it is absolute liability it doesn't involve fault it doesn't involve anything that would mitigate that liability absolute liability. Liability for damage caused between space objects in space is subject to determination of fault and so you have two different concepts of the thinking about liability and looking at the outer space treaty and the liability treaty is an interesting exercise of view that wants some nuance to this concept of liability. It is by the way one of the reasons why states pass space laws that require registration or licensing or approval of space missions because they have a liability if the thing fails the state will be held responsible by other states. This article 8 deals with jurisdiction and control and it is interesting because states when they retain jurisdiction and control of registered space objects have a different status than the status of say maritime assets because states can abandon a maritime asset it's certainly well known in maritime law you can have a derelict you can have a vessel that simply is not under command and not under control and states simply no longer have any capacity to deal with it in that case on maritime law salvage can apply salvage cannot apply directly in space because you can't have a derelict I mean technically a piece of debris is a piece of the property of the state that launched it it becomes one of the challenges we face as we try to come up with debris conventions that can reduce the amount of debris in orbit is we have to find a way that we might be able to remove a non-cooperative object for which you have not gotten permission from the apparent owner because there are probably 40 of those objects that we would love to remove and dramatically reduce debris risk but we don't have permission from the countries because they see a national interest still in protecting that property from being approached or de-orbited for example the Russians argue that several proton rocket bodies are actively used for laser calibration well yeah maybe but they also happen to be in the way of a lot of other uses so ownership is not affected by presence in space but in fact getting rid of your obligation to an object you launched is nearly impossible Article 9 states are shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies and there's a duty to consult if your space activity may do so so this is typically harmful contamination of space let's say you know if we went to Mars and had biological material on board our space object that landed on Mars we would never know after that if things we would discover on Mars would be native to that planet or perhaps as a result of our interference with that planet there's also concern about back contamination coming back to the earth from space so the duty to consult basically if you can contaminate something or if you could harm somebody else's space activities you need to consult with them and make sure you're going to avoid them we see that in great detail for example in the international telecommunication radio regulations that have thousands of pages of how you ensure you're going to avoid harmful interference in the radio frequency spectrum for satellites in the geostationary satellite orbit so there's other treaties that further define this but it's an important principle and now kind of the overall spin that we want to give to this Michael keep in mind that its most important function the outer space treaty really does provide a framework for the international environment the legal, the regulatory the cooperative environment that exists for the use of space most particularly earth orbit but increasingly with an effort to see it apply to CIS lunar space and probably before too long to the operation of spacecraft in the inner solar system at the very least and so to give you a tangible example my colleague Ian Christensen and I both participate in a process called the Hague Space Resources Governance Working Group there is nothing in the outer space treaty that directly addresses space mining but because it's a treaty on principles it almost the entire discussion in this international body that has academics, governments and business representatives ties back to the outer space treaty what can we do that's consistent that doesn't violate the principles that makes an industry possible that permits benefit you can't have benefit if you don't have development and the way in which the outer space treaty has governed that discussion is really very interesting since several of the members of that committee come from countries who are ratifiers of the moan treaty but it's the outer space treaty that is driving that discussion because of its role as Skip says as a customary source of international law so the way that impacts individual countries and businesses is through municipal law through domestic legislation over 25 countries have passed laws that deal with the way their nationals will interact with space probably the strictest of those laws is the French law, the US is pretty close there are laws that are a little bit less comprehensive like Luxembourg's it deals very much with orbit very little with launch but the important thing is that countries are implementing the principles through their national law and when people ask about our commercial spacecraft and pedinast space like the pedinast act I often point out the US is doing what it's required to do complain if you will about some of the regulations they might have included in that law but they are required to regulate the fact that they don't have international consultation for each legislative piece is built into the laws countries are supposed to do that and so the outer space treaty increasingly now is being reflected in the space law I think one of the most recent countries to announce it will have one would by the end of the year is the United Arab Emirates and so more and more countries are recognizing that this obligation when you tie liability registration and the fact that states are required by the outer space treaty to authorize the actions of their nationals you need a piece of legislation and so that's what they're doing yeah and I got a doctorate in space law from the Institute of Air and Space Law McGill my doctoral advisor was Dr. Ram Jakku some of you in this room may know Ram's a prolific author to say the least he wrote a book edited a book on the national space law I forgot it on my shelf it's good to have and there's over 20 countries in there countries you'd expect like Russia and China and Japan but many countries that you wouldn't expect like mentioned Luxembourg so it's a great book to get if you want to look at national space laws in other countries this is our last slide on and the kind of the bottom line is it has allowed commercial uses to flourish it hasn't stifled or prohibited any of them without the outer space treaty what do you have out there for walls and outer space and I'm sure in the discussion period or later today we'll get into this a little bit but Mike Gold and I were at the Rockies game last night and we were talking about the legislation that's pending in the house right now and it's got a section in there asking for a report about whether the United States should withdraw from the outer space treaty and they were saying this is absurd who are the staffers are the people that are calling for this there's absolutely no reason for that you can get rid of the outer space treaty we've got nothing you know it's very broad in general but it gives us a framework I'm sure we'll kick that around a little bit in the discussion period China's planning to land on the far side of the moon next year I'd hate to think that that became territorial possession there flag and at least claim that half of it but there's a tension between freedom of use and non-appropriation the latest manifestation of that tension is mining in space and Mike and I were in Vienna at the UN legal subcommittee a month and a half ago or so and that was a big issue there they had a special program on it there I'm not going to go into it in this forum but it's an issue that people are talking about even though it's like decades before we're really going to be able to do that and we were laughing at that last night you've got to give these space lawyers and academics something to talk about so that's the outer space treaty broad overview and now we're going to bring Mike up Mike Gold Mike Gold is vice president of Washington operations and business development for space systems morale he's been involved in the space business for decades he's a wonderful speaker and we're thrilled to that Mike agreed to fly in from Washington DC and he's got a busy schedule but Mike speaking today not as his position from SSL but really as his position as the chair of the commercial space transportation advisory committee or Comstack as we call it and he's going to give us some valuable insight on what's going on in Comstack Mike do you want to talk from over here or where would you like you got so thank you so much thank you to Secure World Foundation to Sherman Howard and to all of you for showing up for this I mean people show up to hear about the outer space treaty and space law before 8am I don't know whether to congratulate or condemn you but God bless you all you're an amazing, amazing group and please remind me to be more careful when I tell Skip during Rockies games all off the record and say after Rockies but it's a wonderful introduction and thank you so much for that run down of the outer space treaty it's just great to hear a real understanding of what's occurring and as was mentioned I chair the commercial space transportation advisory committee and what I wanted to share with you today is certainly the interactions that I've had as chair of the Comstack and also give you a view as to how this regulatory environment in the treaty is playing in the real world for commercial space activities particularly innovative activities that are coming up so without any further ado we are in an era of extraordinary change in the commercial space industry and I think it would be fair to say there's never been a more exciting time to be in commercial space whether it's the introduction of space tourism or the asteroid mining of commercial lunar rovers private sector space stations we are about to enter an age of wonders in space but there is nothing more capable of stopping good technology than bad regulations and bad law we all as lawyers understand that and I know I'm being video recorded so I have to be careful what I say I always think that engineering is the easy part that I have complete faith that our engineers and technical folks can pull this off the legal, the regulatory the financial aspects that's the difficulty so it's really you attorneys I think that have the real rocket science in terms of getting all of this to work and just to give an example from my day job at space systems morale because I think this really shows where the rubber hits the road with the outer space treaty we are entering a new era also in the satellite world where previously you would purchase a satellite for a certain amount of money it gets launched in 10 or 15 years later when it wants that fuel you throw it away well that's not going to happen what we're going to be doing is utilizing robotic spacecraft that will refuel, refurbish repair satellites on orbit so a whole new era of this there are two government programs that are ongoing right now in this arena one is NASA's Restore-L which will demonstrate that a robotic spacecraft can refuel a satellite I mean SSL we build satellites to last I mean you're never going to run into hopefully a mechanical issue it's usually running out of fuel that's the problem, Restore-L is going to solve that that's a NASA mission, it's a Leo mission it's DARPA's RSGS the robotic servicing of geosynchronous satellites that's a geomission and the idea there is even more complex we use robotic arms to repair a broken satellite or better yet to replace components so that you're not flying old technology again seismic shifts here in the industry that will be very, very exciting however to get back to the role that bad regulations can make and forgive me for dragging out this old chestnut I think many of you can sing along to this story at the time because those of you who know I've had some experience with international traffic and arms regulations and the pernicious nature of those regulations at least as they were quite a while ago but history tends to repeat itself so forgive me if I remind us of our experiences with ITARM in my previous job with Bigelow Aerospace we were launching our spacecraft on the Nepper which is a converted Russian SS-18 nuclear missile so extraordinarily efficient thing to do economically or move the warhead, put on a commercial fairing and you're good to go rockets already built SS-18 I believe was designated Satan by NATO back in the days not a fun there and we were launching actually out of an active Russian nuclear missile base in Siberia I've never complained about the weather in DC it was an extraordinary experience and look when you're launching from an active Russian nuclear missile base with a nuclear missile you expect there to be some export control issues but it was the breath and the depth of the ITAR that really shot this in the end and the words that we were under was government supervision with the export controls so when I would go over to Russia there was a bunch of our engineers and we would be sitting across the table from a dozen former members of the Communist Party but we brought an alien into that room and said point to the free country and point to the post-communist whatever you want to call Russia they would have pointed to the Russians as the free country because we as Americans were traveling with not one but two Department of Defense monitors who were bringing down our necks watching every single word that we would say and worse yet we were paying for the privilege to the tune of $150 per hour per monitor plus room and board plus overtime we dropped somewhere between $300,000 to $400,000 direct fees to the government probably well over a million dollars per mission on compliance alone with ITAR I would joke with the Russians that the KGB may have spied on you back in the day but at least they had the good courtesy to do it for free and it's not the export controls that would mind so much if there was technology worth that kind of protective and while yes we had proprietary systems but as the famous Norm Augustine once said we want to do surgery with a scalpel not with a chainsaw and probably the best example of this what the famous one is what we called the Genesis Tech State and this was simply the stand that was built to prevent the spacecraft from lying on the ground with a few legs sticking out if you flip it upside down you couldn't tell the difference between that and a metal coffee table nice tablecloths and cutlery indistinguishable from a metal coffee table yet we had to have two guards watching that coffee table on a full-time basis and then have two department defense officials watching the guards watch the coffee table now I can only imagine the national security repercussions of this table technology leaking out from the Russians to the Chinese or the Iranians where you could serve coffee or even worst case scenario even tea so our problem with export control was not that we were trying to protect technologies we agreed that there are certainly critical technologies that need to be protected but table technology is not one of them and this is the problem you can run into when regulations are taking too far are implemented poorly it can really hurt innovation, entrepreneurship now we had the money to handle that at the time but not every company will and you could be preventing companies from moving forward with some very exciting ideas that will then go overseas so why do I bother you with this old chestnut being on his excuse to show the picture of my son and his anti-i-tar onesie friend from Johnson got him when he was born unfortunately export control reformed themes babyware did not catch on so the reason I get concerned is article 6 of the outer space treaty which you already heard from Schiff the activities non-governmental entities in outer space can move another social body shall acquire authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate state party to the treaty no two words in the English language more nervous than continuing supervision by the government because you just don't know how that is going to turn out again as was described this is a treaty of principles and it's up to each nation to interpret domestically and move forward with how they're going to proceed and certainly under itar we saw that that continuing supervision was not implemented at least the first in a sensible rational fashion certainly not one that was supportive of commercial space or entrepreneurialism so you've got some potential danger here for commercial space activity in a requirement the outer space treaty one by the way that makes sense it's not the principle itself but we have to pay attention to how this is implemented because in the wrong hands things could go very poorly so at the Comstant we actually move forward on this I think it's almost been two years now where we recommended a mission licensing approach and the idea was to have a limitation on this continuing supervision where you would look at national security issues you would look at international treaty obligations as well as harmful interference by domestic or foreign activities and if you met those you could get a mission license from the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation there was a nomenclature changes where we then started calling it mission authorization after that so that was a couple of years ago and then finally as of last year Congressman Jim Bridenstine I'm sure many of you are familiar with introduced what's called enhanced payload reviews and here the concept to address article six was to leverage the existing payload review process at the FAAASD and really simply add a number of additional questions to that procedure that would look at the actual operation of your activity well Comstant hasn't had a chance to say personally it's a concept that I like a lot because you're not creating more bureaucracy you're not creating anything new you're leveraging an existing process that I think reduces risk of something new avoids double dipping which we always want to do in a regulatory sense and was kind of a known entity that wouldn't take a huge push to move forward with and by the way this is the status quo that right now the issue with article six is certain innovative activities satellite servicing being the example asteroid mining and other private sector space stations that pretty much what you have to do now on a de facto basis is go solicit a payload review from the FAAASD the house as was mentioned and Skip and I were talking about at baseball game has introduced some draft legislation and I would put this more along the lines of the deemed approved presumed approved authorities somewhat difficult to describe but the idea is very much a presumption of approval and it shifts from an interagency process to providing exclusive authority to the department of commerce which I appreciate what is trying to be done but I think that could be problematic in a number of ways and have some concerns but what I'm most worried about is no action because the status quo right now is a complete lack of certainty predictability, there's no deadlines there's no transparency and it really empowers the bureaucracy to do whatever they want because there's no rules to the game essentially and what we need is a process and this is what comes back when we pass observations findings and recommendations about mission licensing is what we were trying to do was just establish a procedure some rules to the game ensuring sure in any of these innovative activities you want to know what the process is much less no one wants their launch suspended or canceled because at the last minute department of defense or the intelligence community found a concern that we need a framework to work within and we don't have that right now we're just operating again on an ad hoc basis every time with the payload review process it's only been done twice so far with aerospace and once by an express and a lot of what we've done in this ad hoc process can't be done on a regular basis so we've got concerns about where we're going to head with this in the future and I'm very excited to let me compliment everyone at Capitol Hill for tackling this issue because again we're all space attorneys we'll show up and discuss this at 7.30 in the morning let me assure you you know it's not over healthcare in Iraq on Capitol Hill but the fact that both the House and the Senate are taking a look at this Senator Cruz in particular is holding a series of hearings Senator Markey is ranking member it's great that we're going to try and get some action on this particular issue on Capitol Hill just a couple of other pieces of legislation I'd like to bring to everyone's attention in 2015 we passed the commercial space launch competitiveness out I won't go through everything in that slide but that also looked at a number of other regulatory issues that are concerned in industry Article 6 being just one of them but there's a lot of different questions we've got about space traffic management how we're going to handle that in the US and what entity within the federal government will be responsible what's going to happen to the International Space Station post-2024 and what the CSLCA did was ask for a series of reports from the White House and off science technology policies to kind of where we're headed on this and now what you're seeing on Capitol Hill is reactions to these reports and we're trying to take action another piece of legislation going back to Congressman Bridesdine that we saw last year with the American Space Renaissance Act and what I loved about what Jim Bridesdine did with this bill is we love stovepipes of the aerospace arena right you've got your national security space over here your commercial space, your science that's just not the way the real world works that all of these different aspects of space interact together and if we really want any of them to succeed we should adopt a holistic approach and that's what Congressman Bridesdine did with that legislation is looked at space as a whole and unfortunately the congressional process you know pushes us into our state the stovepipes we've got you know the commercial space bill we've got the NDAA National Defense Authorization Act we don't look at everything as a whole and that's what I like so much about the Space Renaissance Act getting back to the space traffic cop issue here you see what things look like in orbit and right now we are dependent upon the Department of Defense and the JSPOC for basically being the commercial traffic cop for all of the private sector space if I can steal a story from Congressman Bridesdine that he likes to tell we're all familiar with the Chinese ASAC that occurred in 2007 well we had the Department of Defense in the JSPOC warning China that their debris from their ASAC test is going to hit their space station I don't think that's the job of the DOT to do they should be focused on the war fight and I think there's a great deal of frustration at Department of Defense that they have had to take on this responsibility if you're not getting paid to do it etc and at the very least I think one would imagine we've had discussions of this at least I don't think any clear decisions yet that a civil agency should be responsible for at least informing the private sector of potential conjunctions that we need to take this burden off of the DOT so again they can focus on their primary mission with the war fighters so this is an issue that I think you're going to hear a lot about and then you've got small sats and cube sats and this is going to be a whole new issue as we go from hundreds to thousands of cube sats and small sats being deployed again another topic that the Comstock has been trying to take on that we've talked a lot about at UN COCOS here I'd like to steal a little bit from Doug Laverro, former Department of Defense official who says that the first time that a $10,000 cube sat smashes into a $400 million satellite, guess what this is some regulations and this is what happened with ITAR by the way, you never make good regulations in a crisis or emergency scenario and I think it's incumbent upon us as attorneys, as policy makers and folks who have influenced this process to try and come up with good regulations, good policies and get them in place now so that when an accident does occur and it will occur that we don't have a knee-jerk reaction to policies that are going to hurt entrepreneurialism and hurt the industry for decades to come so if I can leave you with anything take action now to put in place good ideas of good policies because if we have a knee-jerk situation related to a crisis we're just going to repeat history as we did with the ITAR I also want to make a quick mention of DARPA it's a confers effort, we talk about satellite servicing this is a number of ways that we need to provide some rules of the road DARPA is going to hire a secretariat you know my opus is it might even be SCEAR World Foundation before this is all said and done where you would look at what the rules of the road and what the common interface point should be for satellite servicing missions and DARPA doesn't want to be responsible for that they want an NGO that likes SCEAR World to be able to take that on to eventually fund it themselves but it's terrific that DARPA is looking at this kind of regulatory issue to make sure that all of our systems in space are interoperable both foreign and domestic so I'm excited to see that move forward we've heard a lot about COPAWIS I think that there have been some gross misinterpretations at the COPAWIS meeting that we were at relative to what the US has done particularly relative to the CSLCA the commercial space launch competitive stack there were those at the meeting that we were talking about the CSLCA was an example of the US legislating for the world and I found that particularly appalling because what we were really trying to do at the CSLCA and the private sector was very engaged on this was trying to meet our own obligations under the outer space treaty and I would argue that the US is in greater compliance with the outer space treaty after the passage of the CSLCA than we were before and find me another piece of legislation where you see the words international treaty obligations come up as often as it did within the CSLCA that's unique and we were making a real effort I think as an industry as a community on Capitol Hill to address the outer space treaty and make sure that we were conforming and it was very unfortunate I think some of the interpretations that were put forward at the COPAWIS were straight so just talking about the future a little bit here what can we expect Congressman Brindstein is developing a second sequel to the American Space Renaissance Act unlike most movie sequels I expect this one to be even better than the original so I'm excited about where this is going ahead we are working on a second commercial space launch competitive this act again Senator Cruz is already actively holding a series of hearings on this issue and again I really have to compliment Senator Cruz and his staff for focusing on this this is really important but it doesn't grab the headlines at least nationally so the fact that we're moving forward aggressively to sport commercial space to sport entrepreneurialism on Capitol Hill I think is terrific I will also see a new NASA reauthorization bill and in that bill you can expect to see I think a lot about public-private partnerships because I think you can't leave out the critical role of NASA and the US government in terms of entrepreneurship that we need the government as catalyst we need them as a customer and that's how we've gotten a lot of the new space capabilities that everyone is so excited about so government has a strong role to play and I'm excited about the positives that I think we'll see in a future NASA reauthorization bill as we mentioned with Article 6 there are efforts to address this I think we've got a long way to go but it's terrific that we're having explicit discussions at this point we talked a little bit about an entity that is in civil space like AST beginning to address some of the responsibilities that DOD has for commercial conjunctions and again a lot of public-private partnerships and in terms of the conversations that we've had at the Compstack again there are just some core principles that the private sector wants to see predictability in our regulations we need to know what's going to happen and say a guessing game investors and churs they don't want to see that transparency let us see for example if an application is denied tell us why and if it's classified and we have people who can support that let's have a classified conversation so I think that transparency is key for the private sector and the government to work together moving forward responsiveness we can't have licenses we're trying to improve this process both remote sensing and launch licenses etc but we can continue to work in terms of efficiency to move that forward so of course while I'm here to talk about the outer space treaty I don't think, have we mentioned yet that this is the 50th anniversary of the outer space treaty this year I'm not going to say happy birthday because I don't want to empty out the room for Marshal Angelo talks but per with the treaty I love what you said that it's a treaty of principles outer space treaty isn't prescriptive it doesn't tell every country exactly how you need to get to those principles but it laid out some general principles that are critical absolutely critical for holding the rest of the world and keeping them honest and that's why I believe that the outer space treaty is something that we should be rallying around because it benefits America, it benefits entrepreneurs in many many ways getting back to the COPAWIS sessions one of my concerns is directions that people were going outside the outer space treaty and we talked a lot about you know the asteroids and extraterrestrial resource utilization what's happening there and there was a lot of discussion about additional working groups and possible guidelines and other different treaty applications that are not necessary as we discussed the outer space treaty lays out the principles and it does a good job doing that and then it's up to the states to implement those principles and one of the great things is as was mentioned there are a number of countries that are even leaning more forward than the US Luxembourg and UAE is an excellent job with their space policy in terms of addressing article 6 and creating this common sense environment so we can actually learn from what some of these other countries are doing as we continue to tweak and develop our own national space law but the idea should be to rally around the treaty it does a good job what we need to do is prevent other less sensible more bureaucratic ideas from propping up that would hurt innovation, that would hurt development so let me just end by saying happy birthday outer space treaty you don't look a day over third thanks Mike Mark Serangelo and he is the leader of the Sierra Nevada Corporation space systems company Mark's been a great voice for Colorado space business for many years and SNC space does a lot of things in space but I think what we hear most about is the dream chaser and they've got a massive contract I was at the International Astronautical Congress last October in Guadalajara and I listened to Mark speak about the dream chaser and a program they had with the United Nations and it was very exciting well that is awesome and then when Mike Simpson and I were putting this together I thought what a wonderful combination to outer space treaty and what's going on in the UN with the Colorado space business so it's really a pleasure to introduce Mark and to bring him up to tell us about the dream chaser and what's going on thank you good morning I was told once earlier on in my career never follow three really good lawyers anywhere can you all hear me with this? it's a pleasure for me to be here and I do have to say guys when you go to the Rockies game talking about what's going on in DC is probably not the thing you need to do let me reteach you how to go to a baseball game in Colorado that's why it's called Coors Fear but seriously what I'm here to do I think is to give a little bit of a different perspective and that is to talk about the history of the using of this from an operator perspective from someone who has been part of this industry for a long time we started about 25 years the happy birthday to the space treaty we started about halfway since the space treaty was put together and I think the one thing that I don't know how many you all know the old song from the Eagles Hotel California there's a line in that song that says you can check out any time you want but you can never leave and as it applies to ITAR as Mike said I think that's one of the bigger issues is that once you get on that list you can never leave the list and that table that Mike was talking about was probably from the madman set it was from 1960s it just you can't get off of it and it's one of the big challenges but I'm here mostly to talk about the life in the real world as my team says that my job is to keep a lot of lawyers employed by creating a lot of waves and filling a lot of places I think that's what an entrepreneur really does you create waves you change and you look to fill holes where people need things or you think that there's going to be things that can happen we've been doing this for a while 26 years and we're based here in Colorado as was said and even probably some of you know our business some of you may not but we've been out on over 430 space missions so it's a pretty long history of what we did 4,000 things we've built to go to space and last year we launched something every three weeks and that's about 20 launches of something we built this year so it's a lot of activity, a lot of hardware which means that we run into all the issues regarding the space treaty all the time we do this globally we have 30 partners around the world we've done 70 missions for NASA and we've got right now business in 20 countries or so the four things that we do and I think is fairly common for this part of the space treaty we're builder satellites we're builder of technologies we're builders of other places, other worlds we're builders of motors and environmental systems and as was mentioned we're builders of the next generation space shuttle which is being built here in Colorado Colorado has really quite changed in the history that I've been doing this we went from not even being known in the space industry now by most standards being in one, two or three slot and it's a pretty amazing thing to see what's also pretty amazing when I step back we had our 25th anniversary last year and I realized a kid from nowhere is running a company that has now visited seven planets a comet, an asteroid, the sun the moon and we've been to Mars now more times than any other company in the world and the point of that is it's a really proud thing to do and my team goes home and says hey we landed on Mars today you think that's a cool thing to bring to a grammar school when they have bring mommy or daddy to school day well what did you do today we landed on Mars it's a pretty good thing but the point of this is not only are we very proud of it but we are really reaching the whole aspects of that whole space treaty concept we're doing it every week every time we launch, every time we work this isn't a theory this isn't something that's on a piece of paper this is real life every day and the real life goes on and on, this is a picture for some of you may have seen the New Horizons mission to Pluto what's particularly interesting about this is it was built and launched in 2004 and some of you know it got to Pluto last year and that's a long way to go the people who were brought on to this program to run this were intentionally hired on the younger end of the scale because the program is going to go on for 20 years and in our world we have to think long term like that it isn't something that turns over in 2 or 3 or 4 months and this mission is still going to fly by Pluto in a couple of years but it's providing data and doing a lot of things one of the things that I like to say this is an image of it's interesting the one in the back doesn't change anyway we have stereo it's a long way away from Pluto to here but I happen to be the unofficial head of the let's make Pluto a planet society as we talk about celestial bodies it's really quite interesting when we launched this mission Pluto was a planet and every one of us in this room wound up learning in school that Pluto was a planet I think I don't think there's anyone in this room that did not somewhere about 4 years into the mission we had to call this little spacecraft it becomes we are very personal about our spaceships they start getting a personality and you start talking to them and you sleep for about 3 months and you woke it up because it needed its power but one time when you woke it up to say hello and you wait for the beeps to come in we had to tell it that it was no longer a planetary mission a little spacecraft started crying you could hear them all the way past Saturday it was terrible but personally I think if something looks like this and has the interesting things going on it is a planet but the point of this is that the treaty is a real thing it has celestial bodies that we need to deal with this is a very interesting looking spacecraft called Cassini it's in the news quite rapidly these days you can't really see it in this picture but Cassini was built by over 10 different countries and it was a cooperative effort from around the world and its job was to go look for Saturn well this is one of the interesting pictures that came up from Cassini it's going to do a suicidal run into Saturn here very shortly and the reason it is does anyone know why we're going to kill the spacecraft? you don't count there you go we're going to kill the spacecraft because we're thinking that if for some reason it lands on one of the moons we some part of that spacecraft has biological material from humans on it and if that biological material got into water we could be starting a whole nother race of things and some day a hundred years from now somebody is going to land there and say look we found life and it's really going to be a piece of somebody from Pasadena California so the way to make sure that doesn't happen is we're going to run it through the atmosphere and into the planet and it's going to die but one of the things it did it took a picture here which I'm showing you fascinating picture of one of the moons you can't really see it but there's some blue outlined activities underneath this moon is oceans of water that we believe probably has life in it of some type at least I do and so when we're talking about the outer space we're not talking in theory anymore we're going and seeing places that are going to really expand our thought process about what we really are doing in space one of the things we're very fortunate in doing is we're building the plant growth experiments on the space space how to grow food in space which was probably a pretty good thing since we're going to want to have food not just to eat actually psychologically it's a really important thing so we got a group of many of the top botanists in the world most people that really know a lot about this I know very little even though I was raised on a farm we started with lettuce which is what you see here and it worked really well then they said well let's start doing what the best foods would be for long distance journeys and I put my hand up and I said chocolate but that didn't actually go over really well anyone know what the next vegetable chosen by top of the 40 of the top botanists in the world was no red rocket lettuce no so far in six months of doing this talk or this kind of talk no one has gotten it yet it's bok choy for a variety of reasons it has many purposes it can store well it's got nutrition the next one after that is peppers that we're doing our Chinese cabbage and peppers the reason for peppers is when you go to space when you go through space training one of the first things you do is you lose your sense of taste in space and the astronauts who are on the space station they're invariably what they ask for is hot sauce and they keep asking for hotter and hotter sauce the longer they're up there because we taste actually through our smell we wind up losing your sense of taste so we're actually going to grow peppers and one of the quiet inside jokes you find out is that when the astronauts come back after six or eight months on the station we give them the same pepper sauce that they had on the space station they can't touch it it's so hot it comes from the special place in Thailand that you don't really want to go anywhere near trust me but why are we doing that well we're learning how to grow food in space for the purposes of bringing that technology home so space when we go to the space training it's not just what we do up in space it's what we bring back home we know how to grow food with limited water and a lot of sunlight or no sunlight that qualifies about a third of the world that needs food so part of my job is to figure out how to take this technology and bring it back home this is one of my favorite little guys two spaceships we sent to Mars, Spirit and Curiosity it was a six month mission that we were supposed to go on basically one of them now is they are now well over ten years working on Mars and doing what it needs to do and this whole thing was a quite fascinating thing for us to work on for those of you who are geeks in space we actually put that spacecraft in this thing and one of the best kind of presentations I think I've ever been part of is the presentation we stood in front of a room of people like this 40 or 50 really smartest people in the world and so we're going to take your spacecraft your billion dollar spacecraft we're going to put it in this really big beach ball we're going to take this beach ball a spacecraft, it's going to hit Mars it's going to bounce I don't know maybe five, ten, fifty times we're not exactly sure then like a weeble it's going to land in the right position upright in a really good place and we're going to deflate the beach ball and the rover is going to roll off yeah they all looked at us just like that and they said no well the idea here is that sometimes when something is really crazy nothing else works it's the crazy idea that winds up happening and that moves forward and it's been going on for quite a long time this guy's curiosity it landed now four years ago those of you who might have watched it it was one of the most cool things I've been involved with all the museums around the world all kicked in at the same time we were fortunate to do the descent system the last part of the mission it's called the seven minutes of terror for those of you who may remember I had the last minute of the seven minutes of terror it really didn't dawn on us until we got out there to Pasadena and we're all sitting around and somebody came in and said good news we're going to have photographic evidence of the entire landing and we said well that's really good and then we realized well that means which one of us fails is going to be on that global TV and I realized I didn't have enough value at that point but the point of that is that we came in and it did work one of the things most people don't realize though is that if you look at this closely there are no solar panels on this guy it's actually a derivative nuclear power space treaty implications we launched a pre-stage version of a nuclear reactor from Florida nobody thinks of it in those terms but that's what it is and it is now working on Mars and it's been working there for quite a bit of time this is the first high definition picture from the surface of Mars pretty cool thing to be part of when you're seeing Mars like you're seeing your outdoors and this is the drill bit that was put together very interesting drill bit used resources like the Colorado School of Mines geologists on our team it's not just space scientists and rocket scientists and technologists like me it's a whole bunch of people botanists and geologists our governor who was a former geologist could have been involved in this project at one point in his career the whole thing about this though is that we need some Mars to look for stuff what we're also doing is taking technology and figuring out how to make it work on Earth one of the most interesting things is that some of this is going into the next generation of prosthetics soldiers and sailors and marines who are coming in needing arms and legs the big deal in the medical world is called neuro prosthetics thinking it and making it move and we're learning how to do that in space and bringing it back home to three generations of Mars you can see the growth of the government programs over a period of time from this little guy to where we are now this is the size of a minicooper of a car about 1600 pounds and we're sending that off to Mars the next generation is now in development we're part of that it's called Mars 2020 this is what it's going to look like it's going to launch as you can guess to Mars in 2020 the first thing about this is the first time that we're thinking that we're going to be able to take a sample in Mars and bring it back home again the space treaty issue we're going to have, is that a celestial body what does that mean for the future Juno is a spacecraft going to Jupiter one of the things that we're involved with is how to protect this spacecraft from radiation radiation is a major deal in Colorado a rad of radiation we get about 1.4 radiation because we're closer to the sun here 0.4 of 1 when we go to Jupiter it's 20 million rads of radiation and this spacecraft goes at 165,000 miles an hour at the peak speed which is Mach 250 and Greg I know you apply your plane fast but probably not heard of that the space shuttle by comparison flew Mach 25 this goes 10 times the speed of the space shuttle and the whole point of this is how you protect it and that's part of our job well that radiation protection comes back in and says can we make it in the next generation medical X-rays so that you could take 1,000 X-rays and not get hurt wouldn't that be a good thing if we could do that one of the things that we're working on we got the contract to build prototype ground prototype of the next space space station called the space gateway that's going to be built here in Colorado so in Colorado we will have both the space shuttle and one of the versions of the next commercial space station and I'll get to that in a second we started the satellite industry in 2003 that's really the beginnings of the small satellite industry as we know it today and this was our satellite called Chipsat one of my favorite little guys the reason that was special was the first satellite you could control from the internet I could control it from my laptop and now we are having thousands of satellites being produced the rate of change some of you know Moore's law about the rate of change of technology does not apply here Moore's law is too slow the number of space objects that are going to be here by the end of the decade is going to be 24 times as many as there were at the beginning of the decade this is what we're doing now over in Lewisville we have an assembly facility to build satellites on an assembly line for the first time in history we're also building this guy it's called dream chaser it's the next generation space shuttle and I put this picture up because I like little brother and big brother here it's a fun thing to do it is to scale but what's quite interesting for us is that our vehicle has as much usable room in it as the space shuttle did space shuttle was really a big cargo truck and I say it was like if I was moving from New York to Colorado I'd use a moving van and there'd be a cab up front and a big trailer in the back and I'd be driving that moving van around town so I'd want a good SUV we're the good SUV for space the space utility vehicles we like to call it and we're very fortunate to have a long term NASA contract as was mentioned this is a fun picture just taken just a few weeks ago in California where we're doing flight tests NASA opened up the historic hangar where the shuttle exists right now and it was a museum basically not as good as wings over the Rockies but it was a museum and we were able to now sit inside and we've got our vehicle being developed in the same place that the shuttle was which is to me it's a historical thing we like the fact that we're passing on that torch from one generation to another but the space treaty done 50 years ago is as relevant to us today as it was when it was written one big difference 50 years ago there were only about 6 countries that had a space program and they did not imagine although they should have a space industry we flew before we went to California we actually flew this vehicle around Colorado and as a company as a person who's both pilot we're into a company, a technologist we had a long list of all the things we needed to do to go do a ceremonial flight around Colorado we wanted to show it off to our friends and family and thank everybody we actually flew it over Scott Carpenter's home in Park in Boulder Scott was an advisor and a friend we did everything right except one thing we notified the FAA we did everything right except on the morning we did this there were over 400 calls into the police departments for the UFO that was flying over didn't anticipate that one although I probably should have it was a lot of fun and we did enjoy making it a work around here so this is what it looks like today in its second generation what we're doing with this kind of vehicle is really the things that the Outer Space Treaty is really addressing it's five different variants off the same vehicle we're flying crew and cargo to the space station and other places we're doing exploration with it we're doing a science laboratory with it and we're going out to fix things in space all from the same basic vehicle and one of the cool things about it is it can land in any airport anywhere that Southwest can land I like to say 737 can land we can land because we took out all the hazardous materials we're actually the first green spaceship that's in the fleet that has operated which means we could come back and land in DIA this creates an awful lot of different kind of opportunities for what we might do with the vehicle as we go forward and one of the things that we're looking at and I like to take a moment and talk about what commercial space is you hear a lot of the words sometimes it makes me laugh at what's now called the commercial spaceflight federation that is about 14 years old 13 years old and at the time we had the first board meeting of the commercial spaceflight federation so we did it in a Denny's around the table in California, true story there were about 7 of us Elon Musk was one of the founders and there's a group of us now group numbers over 80 since that period of time what makes it different? there have been commercial space companies since there's been space Lockheed Boeing, all the companies in the history of space the difference and the really big difference when it comes to the space treaty we own the spaceships it's a property intellectual property rights for the attorneys in the room it's a we own the asset the government is buying a service from us and that changes the game completely we own everything we build the satellites, the space stations, the rockets the spaceship is a property of my company which changes the world of how you see things when the space treaty was first put together they did not imagine that a company like ours or a guy like me from nowhere could be in a place where we would be owning space assets and that's why we need to look at how this goes forward we are now doing this on a global basis basically we're providing a turnkey space program to a country we can provide a spaceship, a rocket astronauts if they need to and put it all together so that a country that doesn't have a space program can buy a space program basically it's a timeshare and that's a concept that I'm sure was not thought about in 1967 but it's real and it's working quite well and we're doing that working with agencies all over the place one of the things that was brought up is that we had this crazy idea that maybe we could do things the treaty calls for the peaceful use of outer space but the problem is that most of the world can't get to outer space so we said what could we do about that well we came up with this crazy idea of maybe doing a mission for the United Nations United Nations has a space agency there are 84 countries that are part of it including the United States it's never done a mission since it started now almost 50 years ago so we said let's think about this we have a spaceship, we have the ability to do a mission so why don't we do a mission and why don't we do it in a way that could actually benefit the world and at the same time bring attention to the fact that the space is changing so we came up with this idea that on our spaceship we could carry about 25 experiments and we said suppose we take 25 countries who have never been to space on board, underneath the mantle of the United Nations let them have their first mission we can paint the spaceship blue seriously, we can put their flag on it and we can land it in any country in the world that we want to this is an operational issue there is of course the legal issues and the governmental issues and all those other things but for the most part the US government has said well you're not selling the vehicle it's like an airplane frankly the Boeing 787 has more technology in it than my space plane does and that's going everywhere in the world so this idea which was pretty far-fetched, we thought was going to take four or five years to get through the UN took seven months because they realized what a way to highlight the peaceful use of outer space and in June of last year we announced an agreement to do this mission and the mission is now slated for 2021 and if you look at the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs raise awareness of space exploration foster dialogue with the space industry promote cooperation between nations all the good things that the UN is supposed to do they just didn't have a way to do it so we found a way to do it by creating a specialized mission and what we're doing with this mission is essentially taking our vehicle and turning it into a laboratory and the UN's job is to figure out which 25 countries are going to fly on board when we go fly our job is to make it work and to bring it home and to land it and what was really fun and probably the most gratifying this is what one quarter of one side of the vehicle looks like all the kinds of experiments can go inside and I'll end with Walt Disney in a minute that's just a tease Walt would be really happy by doing that so what was the really cool part about it well we launched this and we announced it and about three months ago we did a first gathering of countries that might be interested in going 45 countries showed up who wanted to possibly be on this mission and they were countries and I've been doing this all my life they're countries I never knew even had a space program we got a visitor from Mongolia now I don't know how many of you have ever been to Mongolia I haven't but I didn't and I've been to 60 countries I've never been to Mongolia I didn't imagine that they had a space program so what was also fascinating was more than half of these countries were represented by women leadership and they came to this meeting in their national costume a woman coming from some very remote place in Mongolia showing up in Dubai which is where the meeting was getting off the plane and seeing Dubai I don't know what that was like it's probably like going to outer space or something but what's fascinating because what they said was that we never thought we would have a chance to go to space and the whole point of this was as a kid growing up I said wouldn't it be amazing if I could someday go to space or make something happen and as I traveled the world I realized there's so many smart young people in the world that shared that same opportunity and this was what was motivating this particular program sure it's commercial, sure it's a business but sometimes in a business you can pause and say let's do something that's really interesting and good without necessarily being something for profit this woman showed up and said you don't know how big a hero you are for doing something like this and I said I'm sorry I've never traveled to Mongolia and she said but you understand that you were this company nobody knew of and now you're doing something like this that paled in comparison to the next conversation I had which was a woman from the south Sudan I don't know how many of you are geopolitical but the south Sudan is one of our newest if not the newest country in the world it is a mess of a country and it's likely to be in the middle of a huge problem so I'm asking, there was another woman who came up and I said I'm sorry I mean I don't mean to be disrespectful here but why on earth is the south Sudan interested in something in space doesn't make sense to me she looked at me very calmly very directly and she said we're going to have a genocide in our country in the next five years and we want to record it right so that's when we realize the power of what space can do and treaties aside and all the things that we can do this is real life these are real people these are real things going on every day and I had with Walt Disney because Walt for some of you don't know and I like ending on a fun upbeat note Walt was the first spokesperson for NASA NASA was smart enough to realize that partnerships are a good thing and they went out and they found Walt Disney and he got all sorts of interest in the space program and helped them get off the ground that's why the whole Mercury 7 came about and a lot of history came about with early NASA programs but it also affected him pretty well how many of you have ever been to a Disney park? in the Disney Charter a quarter of the business of Disney in the parks have to be focused on tomorrow that's why we have Tomorrowland that's why we have Space Mountain that's why we have missions to space he thought that back even in the 60s in the 50s that that was what would be important for the next generation of young people to see the future and he was going to help that happen both for NASA as well as for the world I was fortunate enough to see the back end and start thinking about life is art and art is life we helped sponsor the Star Wars launch last year we were part of the whole Star Wars activity and never in my wildest dreams that I think that I would be helping the launch of Star Wars program in California what you see here is the first ever marathon in Disneyland and you all are calm as an audience the audience I spoke to out there were many thousands of people broken into three categories those who were Disney characters princesses and dressed up second group of people who were professional runners if you're a marathoner doing a first ever marathon is like flying a first ever airplane but they came from all over the world so they're all running in place with their camel backs and moving around while we were speaking and the third were Star Wars dressed characters can you imagine talking to this audience in the middle of the talk a march of lookies walking and they just looked at me very calmly and they moved on and it's a fascinating experience but the whole point of that story besides it being fun is that we do we are not only thinking about space we're thinking about the future of our kids and how we move forward this is a pretty famous picture some of you may or may not know it but at the time the outer space treaty was being put together that affected me and was one of the things that got me started going in space it was the Odyssey have any of you seen it most of you have seen it what was really cool about that I got the chance to meet the writer behind that his name is Arthur Clark he wrote that in 1948 a book called The Sentinel he imagined the world of space travel communication before there was a space program and he imagined what that was going to look like and he used music from Strass which is the famous song that's in the movie from the 1800s wrote the book in 1948 the movie came out in 67 to 68 at the same time the treaty did and it affected a lot of people including me as I saw it later on as a teenager and I don't know if I can show this but in closing if wonderful music says we're finishing the talk before the question is answered why did I show this what you see here is a space station in the movie it was a commercial space station what you see going up here is a commercial space plane and for the 1960s pretty good graphics and frankly pretty good design and that's the deck of Dream Chaser in the 1960s and I saw this and I said let's be able to someday think about doing something like this and it looks like a bit of a cartoon but 50 years ago it wasn't a bad view of life does anyone know who operated that space station Pan Am everybody remember Pan Am Pan Am at the time was the most valuable brand in the world more valuable than Coca-Cola and apparently no longer there although people have been trying to resurrect it from time to time but from that period of time we had two things the most valuable company in the world is gone and this idea of commercial space is not just a movie anymore here's a kid from nowhere running a company in Colorado we're building a space station and a spaceship going up that movie has come to life and not just for me but for a lot of people so when you talk about the space treaty it's not an abstract it's for real life and an ending dreams don't have an expiration date in my world these are things that keep going on and on and on and the space treaty is something that will need to be not just thought about by smart people like we have here but put it to practice put it to practice every day and this is something we face so thank you very much for listening to me lesson number one business people who are actually doing things in space and have really cool slides to show much more entertaining than lawyers but let's bring the speakers up and we have a good half hour or more for discussion so we'll go till 10 o'clock and if people need to leave feel free to leave a 10 but let's see kind of where we are then and we'll leave the dream up let's see is that the only I still have your mic so who wants to have the first question Chris good morning first thanks to the panelists they form an interesting it's always interesting for me to hear people talk about Article 6 the requirements for Article 6 and to understand better like your views and understandings of Article 6 when we look at all the things we want to do in space in the near term long term do we need to amend the outer space treaty we need to modify then what's our course of action as a state, as a nation to come up with interpretations or understandings to do all the things that we want to do and still be in compliance so the question is do we need to amend the outer space treaty or modify it or is it adequate for moving forward I can get a warm up question here right away I'm the fool's goal standing so again an excellent question and one that is being discussed in the halls of congress right now I think I'm just speaking for myself at this point as I mentioned in the presentation and as we heard the outer space treaty is not prescriptive it's not detailed it doesn't say exactly how you get it's principles and I think that the principles that were articulated in the outer space treaty are pretty eternal safety peaceful uses of interference I don't think that I've seen principles that were laid down in the outer space treaty that are necessarily problematic as a matter of fact I think are very helpful and more relevant now than they've ever been and my practical concern and Mark makes an excellent point this is not theory this is not academic anymore this has real world implications for ongoing activities when we talk about practicalities to amend the outer space treaty will require two thirds of the signatories right on that secure world foundation and two thirds and that's at the pretty significant 51% let's just say it's a pretty significant share of the members and if you've been to a copua session you know you hear a lot particularly from the developing companies you and I unfortunately talked about this at a baseball game and you give them the beer that's when it starts to come out it's always been a developed world versus a developing world debate and that's what I think is so wonderful about what Mark has been doing with this company that you're actually helping to heal that rift and demonstrate that it doesn't have to be an antagonistic relationship but my fear from a practical perspective is if you had the votes to open up the outer space treaty I don't think that it would be in America's interest about what was going to march in through that door so again as I said I would favor not opening up the treaty I mean in theory if you were to give me a magic wand I'm sure there are a number of issues that we might want to change some issues that could benefit from clarification and I think we can do that via guidelines I mean long term sustainability guidelines that were passed I think are a good example of how you can improve the treaty without opening it back up and I'm much more comfortable in that kind of conversation that kind of framework than I would be actually opening the treaty up itself I don't think we would like what would walk in the door if we open it up let me just tackle that this is for a moment there's one thing that the outer space treaty does not provide for that you don't need to have in its text but could still be useful and that would be an occasional gathering of the people who signed it and ratified it to talk about some of those clarifications I think there are just too many players right now that don't want to mess with the treaty it's like holding a constitutional convention you have no idea what would emerge at the end of it but there are people who would like to at least begin some discussion of what some of the terms mean there's just a number of those terms that we didn't think we had to define in 1967 could be at least interesting to put people on record saying what they think they mean and in effect what I'm saying is that modern treaties very recent treaties tend to include what's known as a committee of parties there is no such committee of parties built into the outer space treaty I don't think I'd like a formal requirement but gathering a few people with the signatories to say okay let's talk about these issues at least could give us some opinions of qualified publicists that would be useful in trying to maintain what is a cooperative spirit that really does drive the success of that treaty let me just add from a political perspective on Capitol Hill I think it's important that we not demonize those the staffers or the members that are asking the question because I think it's a good question to ask and I think it's excellent that we have this conversation so I appreciate those members and staffers that are raising these issues and engaging in a constructive conversation on Capitol Hill let me add two points one is as you see the dates of these treaties that came out they were really all relics of the Cold War so back then you had Soviets and their allies and us and our allies and it was a lot easier to get things done now we have lots myriad of countries and companies that have active space programs and differing interests and you still have a bit of the developing countries versus the developed countries but it's much more complicated than that now so it would be very difficult to develop consensus at this point in time second point is that the law in my opinion should never lead the technology so until we're doing things in space that need more regulation or more laws we shouldn't create them it's impediments to them I think the best example of that is the most prevalent commercial use of outer space is communication satellites we've developed through the international telecommunication and every country has their administration that's part of the ITU like we have the FCC it's a very detailed regulatory regime for use of the orbit spectrum resource that followed the technology and that's really the best way for it to develop so I'm not a fan of trying to whether it's amending the treaty or coming up with new treaties to provide impediments to the advancement of technologies next question yes here, why don't you speak into this since you're right here I'm Sandy Pitzak, Tomorrow's Enterprise Margaret, I am not a lawyer I'm just a rocket scientist so I'm trying to learn about space loss so something that you mentioned Article 9 of the Outer Space Treaty says states to avoid harmful contamination space in celestial bodies and I was wondering what the panel thinks how this relates to the debris issue because I know from a technical standpoint I've worked on space debris I'm thinking about these mega constellations of thousands of spacecraft and certainly for the people that are customers and operators of these but for everybody who's not that's just so much for an object debris that's potentially a hazard at that point so I'm curious to hear your interpretation of that so asking again a really excellent question let me actually go back to something Skip was saying that was so important when we were at the COPOIS legal subcommittee meetings together and there was literally days days spent on the asteroid mining issue right days and again as Mark mentioned in 2001 we're all science fiction fans but I like keeping my science fiction in my personal life not my policy life and I thought it was I don't want to say a complete waste but certainly we could have been spending the time on more productive issues and more near term issues such as the one that you just raised I mean to me that is one of the most important most clear and present danger to the functioning not only in future space but to the operations that we have today and there was a little bit of conversation at the COPOIS of how we deal with that issue in relation to article 9 and even just more generally what you do with cosats and I think it's unfortunate that the asteroid mining issue has taken all the air out of the room for that because it's such a critical issue so in terms of the outer space of the treaty again I think the principle is there so certainly there was a conversation that we could have about how we protect the space environment how we avoid these aspects I'm loud enough you can hear me anyway so back on I think again it's incumbent upon the states underneath the treaty to implement the principles of the treaty and when it comes to that small sat issue I think there's actually an exciting opportunity for every country to come up with different ways to do that maybe one country requires transponders on all the satellites maybe another sets up a more aggressive registration regime and I think it's great that we'll see how each country tries to handle that and then we can all try and adopt the best practices from it so from an operating perspective I think it's a great question how many of you people recycle somewhere in your life recycling is less than 20 years old and the reason I say that is that there are things that can be done the idea of debris is one that's a very popular idea so the practical part of debris is really falls into three categories things you can control, things you can't and things you don't know about the things you can control, what can we do what could Coppola's do and make sure that any new satellites that go up have the capability of being de-orbited, brought down so from the ecological point of view we couldn't clean up the whole world we could stop it from getting worse and in my mind that is an addressable easy, the satellites we put up we try to make sure they have basically without getting into the science you probably know it well but you keep 5% of your fuel you don't use it so you can turn around the satellite and force it to come home come home quickly, quickly being months or years the half-life for things that break up in space can be 50, 100, 200 years so when they break up they create a lot of mess so the idea is to stop the mess from getting bigger that is an addressable real-term short-term issue and is one that we could do we're all driving unleaded cars that was not something that was there because we want to protect the environment so doing things that are doable, reachable, practical to stop the problem from getting better I mean from getting bigger is probably the first thing that we could look at and do something that's pretty practical so we probably all have seen it somewhere in our life that Superman movies TV show faster than a speeding bullet well a bullet goes about 1700 miles an hour a piece of debris goes 17,000 miles an hour anything a cup-sized piece of debris can destroy something really big and when something gets destroyed in space it doesn't blow up like we see in Star Wars it breaks up into thousands of little pieces of debris all going 17,000 miles an hour so stopping that problem and there's the the shoot-down scenarios which is not really a big issue that's happened a couple of times what's more the issue is a satellite the space control starts tumbling it goes from one orbit to another and in between there's a whole bunch of things it's got to go like the Frogger game it doesn't always work so stop it from making it to getting to that level is the practical side I think from an operator's perspective that I can bring back to Copeland and say that's something we can do we are doing it, we've shown that we can do it we can make our planet better the oceans are cleaner, the air is cleaner and one thing I think we can do from a practical point of view and unlike Superman we don't get a do-over if we have that accident and just sorry two other points but we move off of the topic one, and we find this in really every legal and policy issue is we have to have balance as we talk about reserving a certain amount of fuel or transponders of different requirements you're always going to get pushbacks from kind of the entrepreneurial side where they don't want more regulations balancing that need for preserving the environment and protecting it without hurting innovation and that certainly comes back to the discussions we always get second I think there's a business opportunity here that there's some interesting technological solutions that I've seen cleaning up the environment so I think we should always view these things it's not only a problem but a challenge that could actually create a good business case but I think there's an element to your question that we haven't responded to yet and that is this argument that is now global about whether small sats, micro sats, nano sats cans sats, I mean they got smaller and smaller are debris and and so it's a very live debate the more active your country is in space activity the more likely there will be many voices in your country saying it is debris but the new countries that are emerging wanting to get to space see it as opportunity and access and so this is one of the things I love about the dream chaser idea is it does give people a chance to go to space in a controlled object to do serious space work while the next necessary technological change in micro sats is being developed and it's coming very fast and that's micro thrusters micro thrusters both based on traditional propellants which have their challenges, hyper golecs or now increasingly other kinds of propellants from miniature, vass, mirror technologies to ion to nuclear, electric and all of these things that we're working on would enable us to take a micro sat and put it into an orbit let its operators have a conjunction warning and let it move right now the biggest problem is that so many of the architectures from micro sats and smaller don't include maneuverability as we add maneuverability I think we will less and less categorize the smaller satellites as potential debris we'll still have the debris problem but this other political problem of people seeing opportunity and threat in the same object depending upon both position relative to access to space we'll start to go away when we can maneuver and at that time we will be probably compelled to accept some form of space traffic management the two big issues in this if I were a lawyer in space law what I would be doing right now and this is your inside scoop for where you want to practice if you're a lawyer there's two things that are going on the issue that Mike is talking about is the idea from my perspective control do you exert control over your space asset it's no different than do you exert control over your ship at sea if you do not it's something that can be salvaged the control issue is what's going to happen in space but most importantly we're talking about mining and small satellites that's not going to be the big legal issue that we're going to run into in my view in the next five years it's going to be privacy and that's the issue that most of the people I talk to don't even think about but we now have today the capability of looking into every one of your backyards every hour no one is understanding the idea of the technology for persistent exquisite surveillance meaning it used to be Google Earth we've all used it at one point real estate you've seen it it was metered that the images were going to be months old on Google Earth and that's how they protected privacy that's not going to be the case anymore there are going to be images that you can have of any place in the world at any time so the reaction from countries is instead of just owning the airspace where planes fly through up to 60,000 feet we own all the way to this other system that's what countries are saying so if you fly over my country we have the right to shoot you down in this country right now we could take an image of any place anywhere every hour and I'm not just talking about the US government anymore so I look at where the practical reality is that's one of them the second one is existing right now we can go down the street it's UAVs it's the same concept the small satellites and small UAVs that UAV which I own for $400 has a camera on it I can fly it wherever I want to fly it and there's tens of thousands of those coming online every month that's where if I were looking at practicing law I would deal with the privacy issue I would deal with the ownership issue and the control issue because those are real-time things that are unregulated right now for the most part so I'm going to write a law review article called Paparazzi with Satellites you won't be very far off how it's going let me just add a couple points to this I do, I think space debris is one of it's the one issue out there that could deprive us of the use of certain orbits and it's a very serious issue and it's technology as well as legal Google the Kessler syndrome Don Kessler was a NASA scientist a couple decades ago who developed the theory of cascading collisions you start some collisions and it just cascades and you have enough pieces of debris in certain orbits let's say a sun synchronous orbit or something like that and all of a sudden the potential of collision is so great that you don't want to put a new satellite up there so you could deprive users of certain orbits which makes it very difficult to use certain orbits if you need a sun synchronous orbit or something like that so we really we really need technological advances there and again, technology should lead the law and I never would have thought that two satellites would have accidentally bumped into each other and it's happening and you know an active iridium satellite that wasn't insured so it didn't impact the insurance market but this stuff's going to happen and we better get ahead of that game and so there's a lot of I think it would be a great business plan to be able to do that then you need a good space lawyer to work out the issues of ownership, registration jurisdiction and who pays who pays okay, you sir just a quick question Cambridge University out of London is running a study right now to propose a 50 nautical mile orbit regime for commercial space does the space treaty get involved in that? 50 mile orbit regime, 50 miles above the surface of the Earth lawyer Leo states where it is they're going to bring it down to 50 nautical miles above the Earth's surface do you worry about that? definition and delimitation of outer space has been an issue since the outer space treaty and there's no legal definition of where space begins we've generally thought that if you're in orbit you're in space I don't know going down 50 miles 50 nautical miles? that's almost the 60 statute miles that's pretty darn low I've heard 110 kilometers and things like that Mark, you have any thoughts on that issue? it sounds low but the commercial space companies who are doing tourism right now of which there are two, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic and others that are coming online the issue of you becoming an astronaut is when you cross an unofficial but relatively official line generally around 100,000 feet 110,000 feet you're going to go off to a place where you can claim that you are an astronaut so I think what they're trying to do is recognize the fact that in that regime that there is a lot of uncontrolled outer space basically there's a gap between the top where we can fly with planes and high altitude balloons and when we go to space that place of the upper stratosphere in between doesn't have control so by bringing and I'm being on a positive side by bringing it down it actually allows for some control to happen above the place where balloons and airplanes can go at this point in time in development so right now it's a no man's land it's sort of an empty area with no regulation so I might argue that it's not a bad idea either to raise the aerospace law limits or drop the space law limits but to have an empty gap in between where you can actually do activity these days it's probably not a good idea I think that's why they're doing it it's been a 20 year agenda item of the legal subcommittee of copios to try to come up with a consensus definition of where outer space begins and until you've heard the debate and stayed awake throughout the debate it is almost impossible to describe how complex human mind has made this decision and understand for one there are geopolitical considerations certain very large countries of which the United States is one have not been too eager to have it really clear where outer space is simply because there's certain rules that apply in space certain rules that apply in the atmosphere and we'd sort of like to pick and choose in a few cases which rules apply there's a narrow area Mark's exactly right it's a narrow area that's this middle zone there is something that is scientifically closest to consensus but not complete called the von Karman line which is the point at which atmospheric lift no longer is possible at any speed and so yeah, that works the problem is it changes it comes down depending on solar phenomena it's so you can't imagine when lawyers get into talking about those scientific issues it gets pretty pretty amazing one of the issues that's emerging though in this rapidly changing world is what they call powered flight orbits powered flight orbits begin to be possible with certain kinds of propulsion that would enable you to fly low orbits in the 50 nautical mile range where you're really not in orbit in the classic sense because you're having to maintain speed against just enough drag that would have ordinarily pulled you down before you completed a full circuit of the earth I mean an orbit basically is flying fast enough to fly over the edge of the earth before you fall into it and so this area in the middle is beginning to be interesting and of course it's particularly interesting to military folks but it also has some extraordinary research implications so don't count on this being settled immediately and as Skip I think made the point count on national legislation making the decision in the near term about the airspace over their country relative to this idea however maintaining space all the way into the solar system the only country I know that's formally done that is Colombia do you know of another that's the Bogota declaration it was actually all of the equatorial countries Mike and I were talking about this is the baseball game last night it's been a heck of a baseball game so from the real world side space is where you float that's where it came from you actually lose gravitational control and effectively are able to move and float without having to go through manipulations as some airplanes do that's where it came from for the most part and yes I think exactly what you're saying but maybe Colombia may be the first one to go but it's certainly in it's been something that a lot of countries are looking at because of this this issue one of the practical realities of even a spacecraft like Dream Chaser is called point travel basically it's you launch in some fashion from the United States you skirt the edge of space and you come down somewhere else which means we go around the world in orbit we go around the world every 90 minutes so in a day we see 18 sunrises and 18 sunsets it's the easiest way to think about it it's very fast but in point travel there are a lot of people at some point in the future would love to be able to get from Los Angeles to London in an hour and there's a supersonic version of that there's also a way to go up into the high altitude into this zone we're talking about and then come down the other side and land and that's probably going to even be more practical than supersonic travel at some point in time. Next question. Alira Salman from 100 years starship I have a comment and then a question first comment to Mark I really love the idea of being conscious about bringing your research back to Earth we talked about the vegetables and things like that so we try to do it one under why it says but my question refers to article 5 of the outer space treaty and we start to have astronauts who are now employees of commercial space and article 5 says that you have to render assistance whose responsibility is it when there is distress or some kind of situation where we're starting to cross it's not sovereign nations but the commercial space officially government astronauts are really employees of a commercial space endeavor so let me paraphrase that question as I understand it so you now have personnel of spacecraft employees of companies that may be on say a suborbital vehicle or an orbital vehicle but if it returns to the surface of the Earth in the conditions of distress how would that be handled under article 5 of the outer space treaty would it be different than an astronaut returning with the rights and responsibilities of members to that treaty be different who wants to tackle that well in the words of something that was written 2,000 years ago do unto others as you would like to have done to yourself and the point of that is it's from my side as an operator as a potential space pilot if somebody is in distress you put the flags down and you go help if I'm on a boat and the Titanic is going down I'm going to go out and try to save people if I can get there regardless of what the flag is of that particular ship on the ocean is it might be no different in space you do what you can do and if my asset happens to come down in a country that doesn't like me the hope is that that asset gets returned in very difficult situations we've seen our ships go into Iranian waters for example recently we got the ship back and the people back so I think that's the way we view it is that you have a responsibility in space you have an obligation in space and you also realize that there are four but the grace of God could be you so would you want to be saved if somebody was on the other side of the coin and that's how we view it whether it's a partial flag or not and I think that's the practical now can it be done is a whole other question you unlike the movies that you see where people go flying around space and jump from space station to space station and somehow there are all sorts of things the laws of physics and gravity don't apply you hear sounds and explosions things like that don't happen the answer is it's probably not possible to save anybody in space because the systems are not coordinated it's theoretically possible but it's really going to be difficult because everybody has their own design but you raise a fascinating question that I think we're struggling with in a number of ways in terms of the responsibilities and obligations that the outer space treaty was set up for states how much of that flows down to the private sector and you know there are attorneys and I won't name names but there is at least one lawyer to talk about who's testified before the house that none of the outer space treaty applies to the private sector including the appropriation language and that a private sector company could go to the moon plant their flag and claim it for the private sector because they're not a country and the outer space treaty only prohibits it from countries so I agree with Mark and I think I certainly fall down in line with that the outer space treaty and I'd be interested in your thoughts on this that even though your private sector currently the nation is responsible therefore you bear those responsibilities but I think there is a spectrum of differing opinions in the legal world I think the first thing to keep in mind is that I made the point that there is no territorial sovereignty in space but there is odd persona of jurisdiction and you as a citizen of a country are subject to the laws of your country and the outer space treaty makes it clear that those laws are to apply and I've heard the arguments too I mean a certain person who lives in a cabin in a remote state but in fact the treaty pretty carefully makes sure that citizens are included and that's why we argue that the government needs to legislate to let the citizens know what their obligations are you know I think that we need to keep in mind going forward that the outer space treaty again will provide a skeleton it will provide a structure but it's not going to exempt somebody going to going to the moon claiming it for XYZ corporation it's just not likely to ask you a question on this just because I'm so fascinated to the answer because it's not so much the rescue aspect and you raise a great issue I think the rescue makes sense and we would all sign off on that as Mark says but doesn't the outer space treaty include visitation capabilities where another nation could go to your private sector moon base let's just take an extreme example and say you've got a private sector moon base China wants to go in and inspect that moon base I mean they are not only do you have a clash I think of private sector versus government interest or control perspective you could be violating ITAR while trying to comply with the outer space treaty in fact the outer space treaty does say that as much as is possible and practicable one should admit inspections and visits from other parties to the outer space treaty and that there are challenges part of the argument in the United States is ITAR was passed after the treaty and in the United States legislation passed subsequent to a treaty takes precedence over the treaty it doesn't take precedence over the treaty in international law however so you do have a real challenge the one thing I do want to clarify relative to my thinking about what Mark said is that the challenges of saving or protecting somebody in space are very real the challenges for a spacecraft landing where it wasn't intended to land in the United States are the more likely challenges that we have to face we promise that we would let you know about Lacuna in the outer space treaty and this is one of them I do believe there is anybody who can tell you for sure with a legal opinion whether or not a private citizen would be treated as an astronaut by all the ratifiers of the outer space treaty that part we just really don't know we have heard debate where some people say only public astronauts the counter argument from the good lawyers is oh but anybody authorized to go to space by that person's government becomes a publicly authorized space flyer that sounds like astronaut so if you like litigation you could hope that there is some possibility for this to be lit again it's not such a bad idea it's similar to if an airplane had a problem and it had a land in a country that was against the country that it came from that plane would be given permission to land it would be taken care of and people would be taken care of and it would be sent home but interesting to Mike's point itar doesn't apply in space in my view and that's going to shock waves to my lawyer friends but itar controls the export to the country that you're not supposed to export to if you're exporting to space there is no country by virtue of the same treaty that we're talking about so something that's in space is not actually itar controlled in my view so I love that view but so let me say this that itar not just country to country but national to national so even if I'm talking to a foreign national here in this room I can conduct an itar but it's intentional meaning that it doesn't cover espionage it doesn't cover someone who does something without knowledge and all you have to do is take reasonable care to protect that so if that person went to my lunar base and it was a country that were against in terms of itar first itar doesn't apply secondly I'm not responsible because I can't protect all I have to do is use reasonable protection against that unfortunately the treaty does say that the person inspecting is supposed to coordinate and consult with you and therefore you could be considered to be but if they do it without your knowledge if they go to my satellite without my knowledge I'm not responsible for the challenge is as Laris points out the outer space treaty does provide for this notion where the national of a different country could request an inspection and is supposed to consult with you and so if you then say yes have you consented to showing off the propulsion system of your lunar lander let me tell you the past is always the future so we're actually looking at the the idea of piracy which is what this is actually if you want to think that it's no different than people boarding a ship that as they do off the coast of Somalia today or as they did 400 years ago in the Caribbean that's what it is in effect somebody is coming on board something that you own for the purpose of taking something away whether or not it's intellectual or real it's the same thing, it's piracy and just to say we're at an ITAR in space which is the worst movie ever starring Michael exactly we're seeing at a baseball game so this almost goes back to Bigelow's CJ request that we had in terms of if you take a foreign national and even the act of them being a passenger on something like Dream Chaser so let me say that back in the day this is pre-2009 that we were told by department from Director of Defense Trade Controls that if you just took a passenger onto a private sector space station onto Virgin Galactic that that would require ITAR permission because just the act of seeing it was actually a transfer of technical information now I pushed back on that and that was just that was at the core of our commodity jurisdiction request and we were arguing just because you fly on a 737 doesn't mean you know how to build a 737 and the Department of State granted us an exception to that although we're still under the ITAR and it wasn't until the NDAA of 2013 was passed we actually got out from underneath that but still to this day and NASA has great experience with this on the ISS that there have been some pretty critical times where NASA has needed to transfer technical information to the Russians and ITAR has gotten in the way and I know that there were conversations between the agency and state saying that look if you want to prevent me and ISS falls out of the sky then it's on you and so this has been still problematic again we've made great strides in export control we will continue to do so but I think that vigilance is the price we pay for success and freedom and we really do need to keep paying attention to these issues and how it plays out in the in-space environment because one of the great things about space is that I've always been excited as a Star Trek fan is the international nature of it but no one does this domestically there's always going to be a foreign composite to it and ITAR has been a real barrier to that and I think it's very beneficial in work okay I have my marketing people pointing to their watches so we're past 10 o'clock so we're going to have to end the program but some of us at least will be able to hang around because we can continue this discussion I'm sure for quite a while it's it has been great we have as you've noticed we have a professional videographer back here we've recorded this program and it will be I don't know how long it will take to get it in the position where we can post it on our website on our website maybe on the Secure World website we'll also give it to Mark and Mike the post if they like but it will be publicly available basically so thank you again for joining us and thank you so much to all our speakers