 dw i'm ddod i chi, Llywodraeth, ac yn ddod i chi ddod i chi, rydyn i'n ddiddordeb ti'n teulu canoedd yma i fy modd weld ein swydd, dwi'n golygu fy modd yn ei weld wybod gweithio, ond ar y cyfrifiad wedi mynedach sydd yn y Unig Ymgeid Zugwyd, oherwydd rydyn ni'n golygu bod yn ddiddordeb gyda'rdeu trei'r cyfrifio gw chickoedd o'r r steep sy'n ysgrifennu oedd yma yn ei drwy i maen nhw. Mae'n rhaid i'r ysgrifennu ni i fynd yma i gyd i fynd ymeth ydi! I'm really delighted to be here in New York. As Liz said, this is my first international visit with the UK Space Agency. I can dedicate two whole days to space sustainability and with such a diverse and knowledgeable group of people both here in the room and online. It's amazing how many people have joined us online. So hello to you all. I'd like to extend a particularly warm welcome to our young professionals seven of those are funded by UK scholarships and I'll be joining you tomorrow for the networking breakfast so I'm really looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow. My biggest thank you, which I'm going to put in now is for the UK Space Agency team, so Liz, Leigh and Ray and the other people around us from the UK Space Agency. It's not easy to prepare a director for a speaking event such as this and it's especially not easy to prepare somebody who's only been in post for eight weeks and has never worked in space before. So a massive thank you to all of the team for helping me to prepare for this but also we want to make sure that I don't just stand here pretending I know everything there is to know about sustainability. That would be a bit pointless and probably wouldn't be a particularly exciting speech. So what we're going to make sure that we do is for Liz and I to take the questions but to have a little bit of a conversation as well and we will also commit where we have questions that you're asking that I just can't answer stood here today that we will as a team answer those on the chat as we go or throughout the couple of days. So that's my commitment and I'll just get it in early that I don't necessarily know everything there is to know yet. I think another couple of weeks in post and I'll be all right. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about the aims and the tangible actions of the work that we do in the UK and what we're doing to promote the importance of space sustainability and our priorities for investment in this area and our planned way forward both domestically and internationally. Liz touched on my background and you know have some experience in delivering major government projects and innovation and it has prepared me quite well in ways I wasn't expecting for this role. I worked in energy regulation and for two years I was the programme director for the energy network price controls which has a reputation as being one of the most horrible projects you can kind of be part of in regulation because the problem is so complex and you're essentially working out how much profit you will allow energy network companies to make in order to protect consumers but also to make sure that we have all of the right investment in the right things. There are thousands and thousands of linked decisions that all have to be made for the price control for a particular date when the previous price control runs out. Ultimately and it goes back to some of the things that we were talking about earlier today ultimately it's just one enormous compromise between security of supply making sure there's value for consumers, making sure that you can have the right level of investment in maintenance and safety, the ability to attract investment, the ability to enable innovation through that investment, the returns for our investment community, some of whom are here today I believe, addressing concerns of our environmental groups, addressing the concerns of the local people and making sure that consumers are represented. All of those wrapped up into lots of decisions in a regulatory framework that is going to be one compromise, there is not a single right answer for that. I was sitting pondering on that this morning actually when we had the first panel discussion and some of the parallels in the kind of complexity of problem solving there. The other thing that I'll touch on which has some kind of relevance although Ray wasn't very impressed when I told him about this. I started my career in automotive engineering. I say career and I say automotive engineering, I'm not an engineer by background. I just turned up there as a temp when I'd run out of money as I was studying. That's something we can talk about with the young professionals about my slightly unusual career path. When I got to Lotus they were working on a project that most people didn't really think was going to take off particularly. That was a small project for one Elon Musk and his friend from PayPal and that was the first Tesla Roadster that we developed on a Lotus at least platform. Not only did the Tesla Roadster take off in the manner in which it was expected, it wasn't ever expected to be the ultimate car that they would develop. The Tesla Roadster, at least one of them, literally took off when it was blasted into orbit with Starman at the wheel. I did check just now and it's still there. It's not great that one of those things is up there but perhaps it's quite a good example of what we don't want to be doing in space. Why am I here? Why did I take this role? I think it's fairly obvious. The reasons why, I mean it's a brilliant portfolio to have, but we talk about the global problem of sustainability and I think we can talk about the global problem but I think we can bring it back down to individuals as well. So I'm going to talk about my dad for a bit. My father was born in Norfolk. He was born in a place which is famous for its flat landscape and really beautiful landscape and vast skies. Those skies when he was born in 1948 were pristine, so unaffected by human endeavours apart from a brief foray of a V2 rocket in 1943 which briefly reached orbit. But the first human-made object to be deliberately launched into space was in 1949, so a year after he was born and it climbed to an altitude of 393 kilometres. The first artificial earth satellite was launched in 1957 and by 2030 we know that there will be thousands of operational satellites up there in orbit. My dad tells a story and I don't know what's true and what's not but he's really good at stories and he talks about being in his driveway next to his car in the late 60s and seeing a thing come towards him from the heavens and thinking very clearly that it was actually going to land on his head or his car which I'm sure he was quite precious about at the time and it went straight over him and he believes that he thinks that it might have been a Russian satellite or a Russian rocket or spacecraft. We've never been able to find out if anyone's got any ideas bit vague on the date but quite clear about the car but he was born in an environment that didn't have anything up in orbit but now we're in a very different place. So I'm in the fortunate position of having in a role where I'm confident that I can make that tangible difference and a role in which I'm captivated by the breadth of work and the passion which my team and the wider community and all of our international partners are tackling the issue. So at last year's summit held in London, Minister Freeman launched the UK plan for space sustainability which encompasses regulatory leadership, industry-led standards that reach beyond international norms, continued UK leadership in the international arena and plans to bring sustainable capabilities including missions for active debris removal or ADR and in-orbit servicing and manufacturing. The event last year was also the setting for his Majesty the King who was then the Prince of Wales to announce his Astra Carter and the Astra Carter is a roadmap to help accelerate sustainable practices in space and ultimately to protect the lives of people on Earth. Shortly after the 2022 summit, the UK Space Agency published its corporate plan for 2022-25. It listed sustainability as one of the eight delivery priorities namely to deliver capabilities to track objects in orbit and reduce or remove debris and to lead global regulation and best practice to make space activities more sustainable. My appointment in April and the restructuring of the agency around its priority areas signals our commitment to a sharper and more sustained focus on this issue. Our cross-agency space sustainability programme is designed to mitigate the risks caused by space debris and promote the responsible user space through a combination of regulation, standards development, technology development and international missions. I'd like to tell you about some of the initiatives that we're leading. I have a 30-minute platform, but I think I can sum our approach up in I think six words. We're going to stop making it worse and we're going to start making it better. So here are the highlights. The commission of two follow-on design studies for a national ADR mission led by Astroscale and Clear Space. The outputs will inform the agency on which mission concept to progress to a full design and launch phase in 2026 to demonstrate national capability to rendezvous, dock with and de-orbit to UK pieces of space debris. Both Astroscale and Clear Space are here today. You can give a little wave and do feel free to talk to them and ask about the work that they are doing over the next two days. Crucially, at the end of that mission, the servicer will be refuulable and will be ready to be used again. In other areas, investment in the Earth and Space Sustainability Initiative, which aims to establish a new industry-led environmental, social and governance, or ESG space sustainability standard recognised by the finance, insurance and regulatory communities worldwide. Another part of my team who are not here today is the rollout of a space... We have to use different words in sustainability because none of us can say it properly. It's the rollout of a space surveillance and tracking service to a UK-licensed satellite operators for the first time under a project called Monitor Your Satellites, and that warns of possible collisions so that they can manoeuvre out of the way as necessary. We've launched the third funding call, which is focused on technology for sustainability in space under our Enabling Technologies Program, a national funding initiative providing opportunities for emerging and innovative space technology research and development. This will provide a step change in technology readiness levels for emerging technologies. On the international side, we've invested significantly in the European Space Agency's Safety Program, which includes demonstration missions of active debris removal and in-orbit servicing, as well as many smaller missions and activities developing clean space technologies, improved space situational awareness, collision avoidance and safe re-entry and end-of-mission disposable. We're also the lead nation on the important ESA space weather monitoring mission, which is Vigil. Meanwhile, we continue to work with the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which has come up several times this morning, to promote best practice globally and strengthen collective efforts to ensure the sustainable use of space for all. Crucially, we've established our dedicated sustainability team to coordinate all the cross-agency programme activities and wider engagement through the targeted international events such as this and all of those really interesting future forums and conferences that are coming up that we've started to hear about today. So, as I said, I am new to the organisation. Eight weeks in and counting, I'm in awe of the extent of the important and timely work being delivered by what is a relatively small space agency. The UK Space Agency has around 300 people. My priority is to maintain momentum whilst seeking those new opportunities to learn, collaborate and grow. So, what does that mean for us as we move ahead? We will, of course, drive forward delivery of the UK plan for space sustainability. We have made it a priority to invest in industry, especially in companies that work directly to deliver space sustainability through innovation, and that includes our attention to follow up on the debris removal mission mentioned earlier with a servicing mission in 2028 to repair, replenish or refuel a UK spacecraft to enable it to continue or extend its funding. By the end of this decade, we intend to have developed orbital assembly or manufacturing by reusing the spacecraft previously launched to remove debris or perform the servicing mission to conduct entirely new tasks. We also plan to focus on utilising strong international partnerships. Both as an active member of the European Space Agency and through partnerships with global organisations, as they are fundamental to achieving our space sustainability goals. The scope of these activities is still to be defined, but it demonstrates the UK's continued ambition and leadership in this critical issue. In the UK, we are working towards our next, what we call, our spending review process. The UK has been through a series of Treasury-funded one-year settlements for its agencies and departments. The next one, which will start in 2025, will potentially be a three-year. We're never quite sure at this point in time. What it does mean is that we have started to look for those things that we really want to attract funding for internally in government. How do we distribute our taxpayers' money in the right way to fund eight priorities of the UK Space Agency? We do, in the UK, we do have a very clear purpose that we don't want to put too much of our taxpayers' money into the work of the Space Agency. The reason for that is that we want to catalyse investment, so we want to make sure that we invest in the things that are going to grow and grow as private companies take on the reins. That's a really important principle for us. But we have to make sure that environments such as this, conversations such as the ones that we'll be having today and tomorrow and going forward, that we think about the right things for us to start investing in over the next two, three, four, five, ten years in order to really think about our strategy. Ray is working with the department to make sure that the strategy is the right one. The UK Space Agency's Deputy Chief Executive, Ian Anett, recently spoke about us championing change for the greater good in space sustainability. So through all of the activities that I've just summarised, the UK Space Agency is trying to create social and economic value, build knowledge and take a stand, and in other words, be a thought leader by championing change. But we just can't do that alone. I definitely can't do that alone. I urge everybody here to work together as sustainability champions and to take collective action now to mitigate the effects, reduce the burden on future generations, and ultimately to ensure the safe and responsible use of space. I'd like to take the opportunity to play a short video. Now, this is a surprise to me. So we decided that I wouldn't see the video until now. So the team worked really hard on it. They asked me if I would like to see it, so I haven't actually seen it. So I'm looking forward to seeing it as much as you will. It visually summarises the work of the UK Space Agency. There is some infographics as well that is contained on your app, and will also, I think, be shown. And so you'll get a good idea of what we're doing. But it's good to have the voice of the team and some of our partners to describe that. We know the Earth's environment is fragile. We need to realise that the space environment is fragile as well, and we need to ensure we preserve it for future generations. Imagine that future where your children or your grandchildren couldn't rely on space and satellites like we do today. Imagine they don't have weather satellites or satellites monitoring climate change or GPS satellites guiding them. That's a real possibility if we don't address the issue of space debris today. The UK has an aspiration to be a leader in space sustainability and to enable that with doing a few things. First, we're leading on a policy basis, so we're working with other nations, the United Nations, for instance, to ensure the long-term sustainability through regulation and guidelines. And secondly, we're leading on developing cutting edge technology so we can operate sustainably in space now and in the future. What we're looking at here is a simulation of the debris that might be produced if two objects were to collide. You can see is the point of collision and the debris spreading out across the other side of the earth. And what we would then do from this is we would be screening this debris against active satellites or UK satellites and looking at which of those may have another close approach with the debris and look at the sort of ongoing effects of what would happen if this collision was to occur. Here is our next generation of debris removal missions. It will remove two dead UK satellites from orbit. We'll rendezvous with these satellites. We'll capture them. We'll give it a big bear hug with our claw-like capture system. We'll pull it down. We'll drop it safely in the atmosphere where it will burn up, where this material will dissipate. We've removed that risk from orbit and we show that we can address a problem of space debris. This is the structural qualification model for the LSM services spacecraft, which is an end-of-life servicer for satellites in orbit. At the moment, we're working on qualifying the structure of the spacecraft so that we know that it will operate well in space and be able to deal with the hostile environment that it's going into. We're encouraging operators to prepare their satellites for servicing, to put a docking plate on board that therefore we can go and capture that satellite and remove it if it's failed much easier than trying to capture it with a robot arm, for example. And then moving on from there, there's a number of other in-orbit services that we are looking at, such as refuelling. On the UKDR mission, we're including a refuulable attachment on that mission, which will enable it to be refuelled in orbit so it can extend its life and last much longer in space and do more. We're now at a point with space sustainability where we were with climate change perhaps a few decades ago. If we take action now, it'll be far easier to deal with a problem than deal with the cleanup or legacy issues. So the time to act is to ensure space sustainability is now. A bit emotional after that. Is that what you were expecting? Is that what you were expecting? You weren't sure? I do feel quite emotional about that after that, but I also do feel really excited because it is a really fantastic thing for us to be doing. And that beginning part of the conversation really brings it home to me. We all need to be able to maximise space in order to maintain the way that we live now. Last year I was sea kayaking on the south coast of the UK and a fellow sea kayaker had a very serious medical emergency. And I was able to use my personal locator beacon to summon the coast guard and he had probably two minutes left and we were able to get medical treatment to him while we were in reasonably rough seas in order to save that. That sort of thing is what we want to keep hold of. We don't want to have a situation where it's not reliable or not possible at all. There were a couple of questions this morning that came out in the first panel session which really touched me as we were going through that session. The first was about how do we turn rhetoric into action? I hope I've given you a few examples of that and how we turn it from thinking about what we need to do to actually making tangible actions. There was also a question about young professionals and how we can make sure that we've got that sort of generational perspective but also how we can really tap into people. We had a conversation at dinner last night about how we've got a lot of people who really get this stuff now that 30-40 years ago the conversation around Earth sustainability and climate change was a really, really challenging conversation to have. I think we were in a different space with this, excuse the pun, and we were in a different place because we've set that scene. We've had people thinking about sustainability and the ability to protect our planet already and we can take onto the back of that, I think, in a way that will be really helpful. But we do have to tap into diversity in what we do. We really have to get diversity of thought, diversity of backgrounds, diversity of countries, diversity of cultures. All of those things will enable us to tackle what is a really, really difficult problem and to tackle that in the right way. Before closing, and we will have to take some questions, but before I close my speech part of it, I really want to just take the opportunity again to thank Secure World Foundation for hosting what is turning out to be a really inspiring event and to all the speakers and delegates for your advocacy and a special thank you to the Space Generation Advisory Council who have helped us get this off the ground. The opportunities and challenges being discussed here must be at the top of all of our agendas. We must stop making it worse. We must start making it better. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, Julie. I think just from my perspective anyway, I just thought it was added a real kind of human element, real kind of personal element to this with your speech. So thank you very much for that. I think we've actually got to close quite quickly. So just a flag and I know Julie mentioned this earlier that there are questions that have come through on the app and we would, you know, there's quite a few of us here. We've got, you know, a head of sustainability myself. We've got people in the regulation team, international, et cetera. So and our engineer, somebody from our chief engineer's office as well. So please do come and contact us. We would be very, very happy to talk to you in the margins and answer some of the questions that are here and any others that you may have. And we will also try and answer them through the app. So just to make sure that we're covering it all off. Before we finish, very, very quickly then, I was just really interested to know that with you bringing your regulatory background and in terms of, you know, now coming into the space sector and you coming to the space sector, hearing everything that was discussed this morning, were there any, was there anything really specifically that struck you or surprised you and what, you know, do you think that you can bring to the role given your background? Thank you. I think it's about trying to broaden out, I may as well use my experience by trying to get us to broaden out our thinking and to take lessons as far as we can from other sectors and other industries. I think that we understand the challenge that we've got, that we have here and I think that, you know, I have to rely on my team to help me with some of the technical aspects and that is, I think, is an advantage because it means we get all of those voices. I just want to say two things. Did I overrun to avoid the questions? I'm so sorry about that. But I just want to paraphrase two things from this morning. Mark and Rebecca said two things which I've just smashed together in my head and Mark said time is running out and then Rebecca said stand up the next Greta and that's effectively what we need to do. We just all need to stand up, think about the time that it's ticking and get ourselves into a position where we can really make a difference. Great. I think that's a really perfect way to end this keynote. So if you can all just join me in thanking Julie very much for her excellent remarks. Thank you.