 Rhaid fawr, Gwyrddoedd Cymru, Gwn Llywodraeth Llywodraeth, yng nghymru Cymru yma yn ddod. Ceisio'r cyhoeddydd a'ch ddwynghyn nhw? Freidio'r cyhoeddydd ar y cyhoeddydd Cymru? Rhaid fawr, Rhywodraeth, Gwyrddoedd Cymru yma yn ddod, Cymru yw Yn Nfread Llywodraeth Rhaid i fi wneud dros y Dygwrn Dweud? Vegon y tuwrtyn lle, mae'n maelio'r cyhoeddydd Cymru yma, Mae'r gwaith yn bwysig yma. Mae'n baswch i ddwy mechanism ar y chiesio cofryds Ffryd CyngorClwyddiant, ynghylch chi ar ddangos cyngor, David Jordan, er hasiwyd hynny o ran nydd â'r cyngor. Felly wedi cael eu scrist yma i ôl. Prygau o'r wyf yn yr oed, ond ynddod diwrnodol yma, ac rwy'n credu beltiau'r cyfrifig ddechrau, am ddiddordeb gyda'r tref, ond hefyd i'r rhain o amser, Llywodraeth hefyd yn ei bwysig. Mae gennym i fynd i'r colli Julius Barnham yn y ddysgu Llywodraeth Llywodraeth yma. Rwy'r digud i'ch bwysig ar gyfer cyflawni gwahanol. Mae'r parw sy'n gyflwyno'r ddechrau yma o'r Llywodraeth Llywodraeth Cyngorol, ac rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r bwysig i'r Gweithredu Cymru a'i fod i'r Ffynol. Mae'r Llywodraeth Cymru a'r Llywodraeth Cymru a'r Llywodraeth Cymru, Felly, eich hwn ynghyrch yn bwysig y bydd yn cael sydd yn ddod o gael y llai córdedd a'u risiol i ownig хочетсяllau, a'i gael ffogol, os yna'r rai syniadau cynnig ddiwedd i llainolau strategiol? A'r ddod o'r ffogol wedi'u gwneud o'r telfodol very fawr. RAF-A-LLAI Ddweudio nid ydi'r cyffredinol, byddwn teimlo'i adroddau a'r ddod o'r ddod o'r ddod o'i ddegwydau, Yn ymveidiol i'r llunio a'r llunio o'r iawn, oedd y ganddant o'r ddweud o gweithio i'w edrych yng nghymru i ffordd a fyddion ar y cyfaint a yw eu llunio'n dweud. Yn ymddangos, mae'n ystafell o adreffianliau badeigmateb yn y wardrofau ar ymarfer, a mae'n ffordd o mewn gwirio sy'n gwirio'r busgiol a rhaid i ddechrau. Mae'n rhaid i ddweud gwirio yma, ac mae'n cymryd o'r ffram dryer yma, oedd ynafootbeth yn y cyfaint yng nghymun iddiad. ond y King's website as well. There are quite a few of us, a few of us from Fassie here tonight. If you want to talk about Fassie a bit more, come and talk to us at the reception later on. We'd be happy to talk about what we do and if you want to get involved and so on and so forth. So at this stage, I'm going to hand over to one of the future aerospace thinkers, my colleague Julia, one of our doctoral students at the college who's going to introduce our speaker. It's a great honour to introduce the right honourable Lord David Willis as the speaker for the Fassie summer event. On a topic like space sustainability and UK space policy, his expertise in years spent building up government support for UK space power certainly provides us with incredible insight. After serving as Member of Parliament for Havent from 1992 to 2015 as Minister for Universities and Science from 2010 to 2014, he's currently the chair of the UK space agency, President of the Resolution Foundation, board member of UKRI and a visiting professor here at King's College London. He's written widely on economic and social policy. His book, A University Education makes a compelling case for the ongoing importance of the university and in his book, The Pinch, it explores how the baby boomer generation has attained peak position at the expense of their children. I could continue with many more accolades but I think it's time to allow enough space to answer the pressing questions posed for this evening. What does space sustainability even mean and what can the UK do about it? So I'll pass it on to David. Well great, well thank you very much for the invitation to be here. I'm delighted to be with you. I'm a great admirer of the work which the Freeman Institute does and I particularly appreciate it because Julia has been my parliamentary intern helping out with my research on space policy over the past through the link to FASI. So it is and the wider association with King's because I'm a visiting professor attached to the Policy Institute. It's great to see Professor Bobby Duffy here from the Policy Institute. So I feel I have lots of ties and connections with King's and it's a great privilege therefore to be able to be here and speak with you. And of course I've been involved with in space policy for a long time both as the minister then in various commercial roles including being on the Board of Surrey Satellites and there's a group of old colleagues from Surrey Satellites here and now chairing the space agency. And I wanted to give a tiny account of where we are and what our priorities are on the space agency and then particularly focus on sustainability. And I think in the space agency we are increasingly launching programmes that enable us to deliver the priority objectives which we have set out of course guided by the department and by ministers. In fact just today we announced another tranche of funding to boost propulsion imaging and solar technologies which is actually part of our permitted 70 million pound national space innovation programme. So our programmes of intervention to promote the UK space sector are gaining pace and gaining resource. In terms of the kind of framework of policy as I see it the priorities and the responsibilities we have to discharge the space agency I'll give you a very brief list. I do put at the top of my list space discovery space exploration the sheer excitement of scientific advance through space based activities. And I would remember the wise words of my friend Jean-Jacques Dordand the former director general of the European space agency. Because both when I was the minister and more recently serving as an expert advisor to ISA you sit on these groups and turn up and say to the director general we really want to see more applied to private investment promoting the private business sector in Europe we've got to be business facing. Reminds me that he was always being told as director general that was what his priority was. But he said why is it therefore that the only requests I get to meet a head of government from one of ISA's member states is one we've done something particularly exciting in space discovery. Why is it it's when we're landing on a comments that I get asked to come in and brief the prime minister of various countries and tell us something about the underlying excitement and significance of space discovery and space exploration. So it's right to have that at the top of the list. Second and this is something very relevant for the Freeman Institute. The second thing is certainly for the UK doing better at linking our civil and security space programs. Because I think for me I would observe in the past 10 years probably the most significant change in R&D policy and space policy has been the rise of the security interest and the extent to which it is now directly engaged with and influencing wider policy. I'm bringing out next week with policy exchange a 10 year on update and review of the eight great technologies that I identified in 2013. It's an opportunity for me to reflect on what's changed and there was a time when technologies and key technologies went out of fashion. What has brought them back and made them prominent in the government's agenda is the security angle and the security concern. The Office of Science Technology, many of the people there have a security background and we observe in space policy the importance of space as a security domain as well. It's striking if you get to what is probably the most important statement of science technology policy in the last few years namely the integrated review it begins with the, it sets out four objectives and the first is and I quote sustaining strategic advantage through science and technology and goes on we will incorporate science and technology as an integral element of our national security and international policy fortifying the position of the UK as a global science and technology and responsible cyber power. So that is the second important feature of our environment that link to the security agenda. Third is levelling up and that we are very fortunate in having a kind of spine of space activities that go stretched across the country but it's really important and one can again sense the priority behind this that we have we recognise that funding programmes have to extend beyond the south east and indeed again recent activity just launched a government fund to build space infrastructure £50 million fund we're looking for co-funding with space partners what do we say more than half of that fund has to be spent outside the south east and with a space mine going from the south west right up to Scotland it really should be something that we can do. So that's another key part of the framework. False priority is just space to harness interest in STEM and again I found increasingly that the Department for Education who themselves are preoccupied with STEM subjects see space as a great way of interesting and engaging people in STEM education and again showing that we are at the space agency aware and sensitive this agenda just launched the space to learn programme which will channel over forming pounds of space agency funding into major educational projects and that's forth. Then fifth on my list is the international agenda and of course ESA is absolutely at the top of that and you'll all be familiar with ESA and ESA is a key agency there was I guess post Brexit there were some I think there were some people in government who thought we'd left ESA but no we are absolutely committed to it it's an intergovernmental body and George Freeman and the team did a fantastic job at ESA ministerial last autumn so it's a key partner but what we have definitely added is a set of strong bilateral relationships we partners around the world in space and we now have a modest amount of money that we can put into those partnerships we've just been allocating some of the first 20 million pounds that we've got and some things stand out our relationship with NASA is more significant than ever and definitely NASA themselves are interested in promoting international partnerships there's a lot happening there I'll talk later on about particularly the moon to Mars agenda but bilateral links to NASA we had space as one of the items on the agenda for the bilateral doing the Prime Minister and the President the other week and we are doing particular projects with them today this lunchtime I hosted a lunch with the head of Jacksear Japan as another key partner where relationships are growing and probably the astroscale investment is one of the biggest single items public expansion on space we've seen it's yielding an original Japanese company heavily engaged here and other bilateral relationships as well Australia springs to mind so a recognition I think emerging from the integrated review that space is an area where we can forge bilateral partnerships from Brexit and then for us in the space agency last but absolutely not least on that list is promoting private investment and this is where there is still a degree of tension between our role as a civil commercial agency and the security angle and the security angle which you can see influencing research and it's no bad thing what's the is there a requirement is one of the questions that all my friends on the defence and security side what's the requirement and then the integrated refuse question own collaborate access those are ways in which you approach space if you are thinking of it as a national resource to be allocated to meeting specific national requirements if you come at it from a more commercial angle sometimes people will have got an idea and there'll be an entrepreneur somewhere in the world who's built up a space business and that may not immediately tie in to a UK national requirement and it may not necessarily lend itself to an analysis of own collaborate or access but this is a growing successful innovative company and if we make the right offer we may be able to attract them to engage in some of their activities in the UK and if we have an aim of promoting private investment private activity, private R&D we don't need to try to work out and have a national requirement before we just try to encourage them to set up in the UK so the civil way of thinking is still a bit different from the security way not that one is right and not wrong but they are just different and that for us is the distinctive value above all we add we are seeking to promote private investment from major UK based companies and always trying to attract more here to the UK as well so there's a kind of review of our the framework within which we operate, I'd like to pick out now three kind of distinct opportunities which have particularly caught my eye which are sort of hot for us at the moment it's not an exclusive list but you can't cover everything and I'd just like to refer to three one is the Leo constellation opportunity which for us in Britain above all means one web I was one of the advocates of the government taking the stake in one web it sometimes referred to as a sort of bankrupt company as if it was a terrible failure it wasn't that it had failed it was at softbank it's long term investor didn't have the resource to carry on investing in a way that the company had expected so in my view we had a commercially viable UK headquartered company delivering one of the world's few Leo constellations and this was a fantastic national asset that you should invest in and of course after the UK government invested Indian investors and others came in I still think it's a significant opportunity for the UK and it's now being crystallised first of all by the need for them to start planning gen 2 the next generation of their satellites and it would be great to see as much as possible of the supply side for their gen 2 satellites companies active in the UK that would be ultimately a decision for one web but obviously we're trying to ensure that British businesses batch fit and able to take as much as possible of that advantage and then we'll also see how it's relationship with the EU and UTEL sat plays out I am still sufficiently naive even optimistic to dream of one web being seen as the European constellation the European Leo constellation kind of matching what they already have and that fantastic asset in Galileo but I fully realise that that involves tricky issues for the EU about us now as a third country issues about the the golden share and at the moment the EU are insisting that they're going to have some other offer, some other entity separate from one web but we'll see how that plays out but I still think there is an opportunity there for one web to be an important EU asset so Leo constellation was the first on my list second on my list is launch and indeed as I engage in my update of the pamphlet I did 10 years ago for policy exchange on the eight great technologies and re-read it with the purpose of trying to find out if my speculations about these eight great technologies had in any way stood the test of time or whether they had just proved how technology foresight was an impossibly difficult activity I still remember as a boy watching that great James Bond film I think it's Sunderball where he rides his jetpack and I think as a boy when I first saw the film I envisaged that by the time I was this age I was shooting to the office with my personal jetpack instead I either take the train or cycle to excellent 19th century technologies which David Edgerton reminds us it's often the old technologies that carry on for the longest so the question is does the eight great technologies list just look like eight examples of the hopes of the jetpack that weren't fulfilled and my analysis out next week is a bit more optimistic than that in my discussion of space and particularly satellites the chapter entitled satellites and commercial applications of space that I was pleased that one of the things I observed and I think this is the first time that it's a very British minister opportunities for the UK to host a spaceport if we get the regulatory framework correct so that is now at last beginning to happen and it is very sad the what happened to virgin and of course it was a great pity that that mission did not ultimately succeed however it was at least a test of the things that the government needs to get in place and there is a legislative framework for space launch and there is a CAA responsibility and it was discharged and the launch happened and that puts us in I think a very good position for as we hope to see vertical launch thriving quite possibly from two different locations both in Scotland both in Shetland and in Sutherland and both are moving ahead vigorously and you will know the opportunities for launching north into polar orbit over ocean from well designed launch sites with a regulatory regime that's up to date and available and our regulatory regime is still ahead of that in many else in Europe so that launch remains an exciting strategic opportunity for the UK and then third on my list is lunar and beyond where the all of us who go to the US now have got a very clear sense that after years when the US was agonising and not quite clear what to do and didn't see the point of going back to the moon and being there done that and was now going to be for other people to go and you can sense now there is a clear and deep seated strategy of getting back to the moon and using that as a base for then going on to Mars and they are very serious about it the UK has not played any significant role in lunar activity over the first 50 years but that is now changing I think the next decade will clearly show far more lunar activity than in the previous 50 years put together and there are niche opportunities for the UK great UK and Italy are working together on a lunar pathfinder lunar gateway that we are going to see some opportunities there and I observed when I was last in Washington talking to the head of NASA that they got a very clear sense of some distinct UK assets we have this first of all through a series of excellence which I don't fully understand but it does look as if we have a nuclear isotope Amorysium 241 that is particularly well suited because of its hardline to be used to power nuclear it could be to power nuclear basic more likely to be powering long term missions the Americans certainly want to see the journey to Mars quicker than two years and they know it needs to be powered and our supplies at Sellafield because of the form of AGRs that we had in the UK which for the longest time has been categorised as waste it's certainly turned out that our supplies of Amorysium 241 in our nuclear waste is something that the Americans are very interested in indeed and that is an opportunity for us then there's of course Rolls Royce's expertise in microreactors which looks like something that could be very relevant for helping to power a lunar base so there are in particular areas interesting and constructive conversations going on where NASA thinks that the UK has a role to play in their ambitions for getting to the moon and beyond as well of course as the fantastic work that's been done on Roslyn, Franklin and Miles Sample return so third on my list of kind of current hot priorities is making sure that as the US returns to the moon and many other advanced countries go to the moon for the first time the UK carves out a creative and important role for itself contributing to the missions and playing a role in the lunar economy so I'm trying to give you a quick review of both the kind of framework within which we operate in the space agency and talk through the hot topics at the moment and now like in the final part of my talk to take a few steps back and kind of look beyond all this to kind of what the point is of it all and of course I've already touched on some of them the excellence and excitement of discovery through space the security concern space is the ultimate high ground the economic opportunity from everything from the O constellations to the lunar economy and the and the sheer usefulness of space delivered services and that's really the key to what I wanted to talk about in the final part of my speech which is the role of space in tackling the biggest challenge we face which is the climate emergency and ensuring that life on earth, human life on earth is sustainable and manageable which excessive global heating makes very difficult indeed and of course there are some classic roles already there's first of all the increasing importance of space just in monitoring what is happening the truth's mission will enable us to have even more accurate measurements of global warming and climate change against the background of solar activity than has been possible in the past and I was delighted that again there's another initiative just in the last few weeks with the satellite applications catapult we've been able to fund GHGSAT with their activities here and I think it's great that we've been able to find a way in which that will enable the same monitoring from space but not generic across earth they've now got the technologies that enable them to link methane to particular large scale installations and at that point when you can track releases particular installations suddenly real monitoring of climate change and use of that kind of information in green finance funding for installations with low levels of emissions penalising installations which the measures show have got high levels of emissions all that becomes more possible so almost every month that passes the capacity of space based data really to get granular information about the drivers of climate change becomes ever greater and then using space based assets actually to help tackle climate change and here of course is exciting of another initiative which we are helping to fund and support from the space agency namely space based solar power I think space based solar power has gone from the realms of the highly speculative and rather eccentric to be increasingly recognised as potentially very useful indeed linked into advances in technology and robotic assembly in space but I think space based solar power has got a real contribution to make at least as serious as nuclear fusion and probably on a much tighter timetable being available in the time that is needed to provide green and reliable energy sources so space tackling the climate emergency not just monitoring it that's what and so space can contribute to the sustainability agenda on earth but all of us who care about space and the space sector space research and the space industry will know that we will just be seen as total hypocrites if whilst we say we can use space to monitor climate change and contribute to sustainability on earth we do so in such an ill-conceived short termist messy way that we make space activities themselves unsustainable we can't preach sustainability for earth and not practice it in space and that is a challenge that I think we need to address if we want to try to protect the environment on earth we also need have an obligation to protect the environment in space and space has contributed massively to an awareness of the vulnerabilities of planet earth on things of those wonderful images from the early Apollo missions showing planet earth but we also need to think of what the space environment around earth looks like now and that's why I know ministers and the government attaches such importance to space sustainability it means the growing and acute risk from space debris it means the importance of proper plans of satellite georbiting it means ensuring that we do not lose access to some key orbits just because the amount of space debris makes them unusable and that I think is a real risk we don't know how much of a risk it is because we haven't even properly researched it but it is a real risk and I think the problem is partly that lay people such as myself start off with a picture of space as big and infinite and pristine and pure well when you start thinking about orbits and space debris it's not at all clear that orbits around the earth really are such a large space as soon as you allow for the speed at which every object moves which increases significantly the chance of a collision as soon as you factor in the speed at which objects move suddenly low earth orbits don't look so big and spacey after all they don't look a bit more like the M25 and the challenge of understanding the risks of collision and what we should do about it and the risks of parts of some of those orbits becoming unusable is very real indeed and the if you look at simply the plans that Elon Musk has that the Chinese have for the amount of small satellites in low earth orbit over the next few years which could be a sketch change in the amount of satellite activity in low earth orbit clearly going up into tens of thousands one estimate I had and of course not all these plans will come to pass but one of the estimates I saw was on the basis simply of stated plans to construct satellite constellations we could be talking of 100,000 satellites in low earth orbit over the next decade or so everything we've previously assumed about easy access to space ceases to apply and there is a real risk you only need one or two more collisions with an exponential increase in debris and of course as we all know then potentially triggering further collisions to realise that we're running a very significant risk and the second issue is of course how pristine is space we're sending quite a lot of stuff up and as we rediscover the moon we should just remind ourselves that so far we have left on the moon approximately 400,000 pounds in weight of material instrumentation of M kit we have left approximately 70 different satellites and other space devices we've left 96 bags of human waste we have left I think several golf balls and we've left a variety of plaques recording our presence and I think for us in the UK in particular all this brings to my mind some parallels with how we approached human exploration on earth and some of the assumptions we had about what belonged to western powers as we discovered parts of Africa and Australia and only very later on began to think about what our responsibilities were for these places and where they were just untouched wilderness where we had an absolute right to do with them as we wished I think space policy starts also opening up some quite deep questions in space philosophy about what claims we have what obligations we have whether we can lively leave this stuff on the moon we have left organisms on the moon by accident or design I think the Israeli mission that left organisms on the moon those with potentially very long lives indeed is that there is no real regulatory model there's no real moral compass that sets out what we should do and we in Britain I think do have an opportunity and a responsibility when it comes to space debris if there's any area of law that's most relevant it's maritime law and we all know that maritime law on salvage is developed over centuries and Britain play as the main naval power for many years played a dominant role in the development of the maritime legal system is it hopeless to imagine that some of that could be applied in space there is a the most Christy part of earth which was being was going to be subject to various territorial claims was the Antarctic Britain played a key role in the formulation of the Antarctic treating trying to define how different powers it was a kind of permanent truth it froze it froze various national claims and agreed rules about what activities it should or should not happen in Antarctica can we learn anything from the negotiations around the Antarctic treatise that we can apply to the moon just when the race to get there is beginning what are the moral frameworks behind this one of the reasons why Britain has a very successful biotech industry it's not just the scientists and the technologists and the medics wonderful where they are but that very early on a moral philosopher Mary Warnock was to write a moral framework for human fertilisation and embryology which is the basis for a regulated regime that has proved to be well respected and effective and has been the basis for a lot of subsequent biotech work it's not, is it too far fetched to think that we need that kind of thinking about our responsibilities both for low earth orbits and for the moon now before we find it is just total chaos and anarchy out there so what I hope is that as well as considering these as exciting scientific and technological issues we also realise that there is some deeper thinking required about that has to be the fundamental bedrock on which any kind of read international framework for these activities rests and that's for me what the sustainability agenda ultimately means of course it's practical activities monitoring climate change trying to contribute to clean sources of energy it is also trying to provide a shared moral framework about what our obligations are to maintain the condition of our planet and what our moral framework is from maintaining the condition of the space around us and the moon and if I may say so I think these kind of messages are getting through and I'm delighted that next week for example King Charles who was probably in the past sceptical of some of this King Charles is hosting an event around Astra Carter an attempt to agree international standards on what sustainable use of space could be so I look forward to the continuing excitement of the technological advances the growth of the UK space sector but I think also we have a distinctive contribution and responsibility for thinking very rigorously about how we discharge those responsibilities not just for our nation but globally thank you very much thank you very much we'll now open to questions could I please ask you to identify yourself and this particularly applies to those who are asking questions online my colleague Ray will be taking the questions online and feeding them into the into the discussion it becomes very difficult to distinguish whether anonymous is one or 16 different people whether somebody is hogging all the questions or not so please if you are online make sure we know who you are we will try and get through as many questions as possible but first of all I'll throw you open to the room if I may yes to that please thank you very much the names you and Grant I'm now really a journalist I've been doing a lot of reporting on the Ukraine war and I also warned people shoved a book across a table nine years ago to certain people and said please read this so my question reflects my previous work as a intelligence analyst in law enforcement joining up the dots are there any particular procedures or technologies where you think things are pretty well arranged now within the UK and with partners I can see your smile you've already worked out what's coming to properly utilise these technologies in other words the organisation and the people or are there areas where there's a danger opportunities could be delayed because we haven't got the A to Z we're only about A to M now thanks I said I do think the legislation five years ago or so now on space launch is still putting this as an advantage there's a kind of mini European space race underway and the Norwegians and the Swedes and everyone but I think our regulatory regime and the CAA's role does give us an advantage and I would say secondly and the minister George Freeman is very interested in this the whole regulation has launched state of new satellites and where we've got a very delicate balance we don't have to be so heavy handed that people just go and use a different launch state on the other hand I think we expect proper standards on de-orbiting and things like that and again my impression from over in the US is some of the US regulators would now say except in private they were slow to cotton on to some of the issues around the speed at which Elon Musk has launched satellites and they hadn't really got fully into thinking about de-orbit arrangements and such like and I think some of them rather would do a bit more advanced thinking about what was a reasonable regulatory requirement to him so I don't want to sound complacent but those are some areas where I think we are in a quite a good position but wider and on debris that's been so frustrating but even though we have tried to play a constructive role when I was the minister I could see coming up we've got the 50th anniversary of the original out-of-space treaty and of course interestingly we are one of the first three signatures after the USA and the USSR we are the third signature the guarantor power so I did ask around in the government machine was there any point our convening of 50th anniversary of the out-of-space treaty conference to try to update it and already relations between the USA and Russia as it had become were so bad that people said there's no way an official conference is going to get anywhere however informally through the United Nations through building coalitions and consents we've made quite a lot of progress in the UN even without even when the great power tensions are as bad as ever so I think we can play a constructive role Thank you Yes gentlemen there please Thank you very much I guess bias had it as of a couple of weeks ago so a question you talked about three opportunity areas your first one being Leo technologies and you talked at the end about space sustainability being the elephant in the room we maybe even passed a crisis point there as well I guess two questions one would you consider that there could be an opportunity on a sustainable Leo approach in the UK so not considering Leo as upside and space sustainability as a difficult thing to try and manage over here but thinking about making the next generation of sustainable Leo space technologies recognising that in a few years maybe after there's been some event or maybe after there's some sort of a consensus there will be a demand for low polluting cars in space if we can think of it like that and the UK might be very well positioned and the second point is you talked about the link between space sustainability and utilisation of space and climate change monitoring on earth but there's an emerging area MIT and others are looking at it on space environmentalism where they're looking at the potential effect of ablation of the satellites and the upper atmosphere and their view is they don't know what the effect is but given that it's increasingly a volatile chemical system up there a precautionary principle might well be something that could have some merit to it and they're also concerned about the fundamental unpredictability of return to earth particularly when you have more and more satellites going on how do you think about those matters? I think they're both very fair questions and the truth is that they are increasingly on the agenda and of course although I put one web satellites are significantly higher in orbit so one issue is when we say Leo how low does it go and obviously the lower you are and say the narrower your swath the more you need and are the trade-offs here that we're in which getting up higher towards a thousand kilometers is completely different and advantageous and there's also interesting ideas around of course of linking Leo and Mio and creating other kinds of conservation that doesn't require an incredible density of satellites in very low earth orbit and then secondly yes this is why I'm so reminded of the painful lessons from western exploration and empire building in the 19th century now again I'm a lay person I'm only reporting what I read I do not have the capacity to reach a critical assessment of it but people who make observations such as Elon Musk is saying that if the astronomers are worried about his satellites affecting their ability to astronomy he's going to paint them all black and then it's going to be okay one question they've started asking is what exactly are the chemicals in all this black paint is suddenly going to start using and what in turn do they have any impact and what's going to happen to that and has anybody thought about the amount of chemical that is being going to be used in this way so there are all those type of questions where I do think the space community has been very cavalier in the past and we can't just like the world is getting focused on sustainability and people start thinking what is the complete design life of this motor car or this computer we don't just have to say space is the solution to the Earth's problems we have to think much more rigorously about the complete design life and the functioning of stuff we're sending up into space or putting on the moon thank you anxious to make sure we don't ignore our online given the issues of space debris and the need to be able to both look up as well as down from space what are your thoughts on deep space advanced radar capability being planned for a UK location which certainly can contribute to levelling up there are various opportunities around I think the UK can play a constructive role I think that idea at the moment is pretty speculative so there's not much more I can add about it but yeah the UK these are capacities that if they do make sense we should develop thank you any more questions in the room yes gentlemen over there please thank you I'm a student here of wall studies at King's and I'd like to ask slightly outside of the scope of sustainability but given how much cooperation in the space affairs in the case of the European Union is there any desire or actual inertia in the UK now towards space cooperation in the commonwealth after all Canada and Australia are both rather involved in the space exploration and there are countries that would certainly be willing to cooperate with the UK on that matter so is there any move towards that or is that something to be said later thank you yes I think there is I mean first of all there's more widely there is undoubtedly an effort going into commonwealth scientific collaboration and a revitalisation of the network of commonwealth universities and the it's a pity in a way that it required Brexit for this time these are things that could have happened anyway but the truth is they have been energised by the experience of Brexit and it's great that we're putting more effort into those type of relationships and then the Five Eyes community although Five Eyes kind of the legally tight arrangements are in certain quite defined areas of intelligence cooperation and cyber security there is a growing informal space Five Eyes network and you can see that growing and then finally Orcas which I think someone has already referred to Orcas is not just a submarine programme it is also a framework for potential future collaboration in other technologies and there is a genuine question therefore about the extent to which the Orcas Treaty could be a framework for collaboration between the UK Australia and the US on space technologies it may not there yet it may not happen but that is it certainly now there is a legal framework where that could be possible Thank you we'll take another one from in the room and then go back online down at the front please here Hi Allie Grey of 20 years at Inmarsat before it was via sat and now at PA consulting so thinking about two of the jewels in the crown of the UK space industry one being Inmarsat now via sat and then the other one being the small but very shiny jewel of one web and potentially Yultasat if we went glass half empty on that we could think about those two entities as taking flight from the UK potentially but if we think about it as glass half full are there opportunities for the UK Government to think of those two entities as a route into international collaboration commercially I mean I think they are both great assets and look I have been a the deal has now gone through and I have got to know Mark Dankberg via sat and he has made very significant undertakings as part of the agreed deal and I do think Mark Dankberg I've got him up there alongside sort of Martin Sweeting as one of the people who have been in the business for a very long time and do think very strategically and he's certainly very exercised about the space debris sustainability agenda and that's not solely because he's in competition with Elon Musk so I think and of course we are hoping and expecting that there will be via sat I mean they bought Inmarsat for a reason and they clearly have ambitious plans on centres of excellence in the UK and such like so I think that has great potential and Mark is quite eloquent about the sort of Inmarsat's history and understanding and valuing its history and understanding its origins as a global service so that's very exciting and then for one web we will see the util sat deal is not as far down the track as the via sat deal we will see what it brings home to me is that it would be great if we had some kind of wider defence and security framework between us and the EU because at that point some of the obstacles which I referred to in my talk don't need to repeat them some of the obstacles become much less of a problem and I as I say my dream was optimistic in all this is for European countries and of course it would begin with France with util sat seeing one web as their Leo constellation asset with crucial and the asset is partly just some basic obvious things like spectrum and so I can see a future constructive negotiation but it's nothing like as far advanced as what's happened with via sat thank you to pick you back off of what you just said the ESA has begun using the term European strategic autonomy in the last year or so how do you see the UK responding to this new philosophy at the ESA will the UK support the idea of European strategic autonomy in space I think this is the high level report is very interesting and a challenge I mean it's a think piece and it's certainly not yet been endorsed and setting aside UK the UK I mean I think my reading of the German comments have been how do we pay for all this already so there's going to be a lively debate about it but it does it brings home the endless kind of UK both opportunity and dilemma of both having a special relationship with the US but also a partner with Europe through membership of ESA I can if you don't have the US strategic umbrella quite as closely as we have with the special relationship I understand why strategic autonomy matters and the folklore that I heard and probably someone in this room who can correct me with a folklore I heard about the origins of Galileo was the following exchange at a conference in Brussels in the 1990s when the visiting US general responsible for GPS which is ultimately a US military system was asked by a European can you guarantee that in all circumstances EU states will always have access to GPS to which he replied no comment and the so the that's when if you you start thinking about what are your capabilities and what do you need I understand why Europe thinks like that I think it's very ambitious to imagine you could go for what our current capacities are to the sort of full blown model and anything like what looks to me like a pleasantly modest cost in that high level group I remember thinking that the pricing looked a little bit low and you may have to prioritise but starting to try to add some other specific capabilities might be a direction of travel for Europe thank you we're inching the last few minutes could there please sorry Aaron I'll give you a tricky trick with the microphone thank you hi my name is Felicity Box I'm an MBA student down the road at Imperial College and I just wanted to talk about I think you've likened kind of the problem the space environment and orbit environment to the climate environment here on earth and in the kind of climate change you fight there are three strategies of avoidance, mitigation and adaptation and I wanted to get your take on whether you think that the rate of innovation in those three areas in tackling the space to every problem is keeping pace with the growth in the total number of space based assets that are going up there and if it's not what can we do to accelerate that rate of innovation yeah and here I think and again this is a parallel with the green debate on earth there's the there's new satellites and old stuff so one thing to try to do is to make sure everything we put up from now on you've got a property orbiting strategy you know what's going to happen you've got that plan and that is a minimal requirement which let's face it we are not currently meeting it's not clear that the Chinese proposed constellation meets those requirements it's not clear that Elon Musk is meeting those requirements there is separately then what you do with the stuff up there and obviously for that you've both got mitigation by much more sophisticated tracking plus trying to deorbit but to deorbit both a set of technological advances and you need some regulations around sending up something that gets very close to something else in space which is manifestly dual use and again the classic British perspective which we are very keen on is having an operational regime agreed controls if you try to look at minimizing the risk of conflict emerging from space based activities so that you could signal if you send up something into space that starts getting very close to other satellites and inspecting them that some system for registering what you're doing, for indicating what their purpose is so as the world gets very turbulent and very dangerous with different military powers all this type of stuff now we should be thinking that's why I'm so pleased to be doing this with the free ministry because it's the kind of thinking we need to ensure that incidents in space don't themselves become triggers of conflicts back on earth Thank you. Freddie. Thank you Lord Willards. My name is Dr Freddie Laker. I'm a visiting fellow here at Farsi. My question is really about ultimately technology is a social process and the question is really about how do we sell this to the public? How do you sell space to a public when you look at the social imagination of space comes primarily from science fiction films that how do you sell something so intangible so far away from the day to day realities of the average Britain especially now in the economic crisis that they should be thinking about outer space when they're struggling to survive and live I mean the reason why I thought about this as you were talking about technology we have supersonic technology we had Concorde and yet we mothgold it because it was just too expensive it's a rich man's technology and so that's really my question to you in terms of how you bring this down to the everyday person in our society. Thank you. Yeah and I think on that I mean the starting point is the sheer usefulness of space and we sometimes add the excitement of it to get in the way of community justice usefulness and the more it manifests that the services we need that depend on space and it's so frustrating that it's seen as a rich man's toy just like Concorde partly because of the personal wealth of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and I always try whenever I'm talking especially to fellow lay people about space I say don't think of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk as two rich billionaires playing games think of one guy who's got a network of cars and another guy who's got Alexa in more and more of our houses one of them is trying to ensure a completely integrated satellite based system linking up all his cars and the other one is trying to get an integrated satellite system for linking up all our houses and there's a race on between them the idea at some personal hobby is grossly to underestimate what they as strategic thinkers in business see as the purpose of having a satellite constellation and then the second boy that I was trying to make in my talk is some appeal to the moral instincts and that's why and for me it's and it's a point that Tim Peake makes it's the moment when the astronauts on the space station have to go and sit in the Soyuz capsule incase the debris is sufficiently is so close that they need to make an emergency departure and that is actually getting more frequent and it's that kind of challenge so those are the kind of ways I try to communicate and we can all do better but I think that that's instead of the slightly naive glossy it's just also amazing and exciting I think it's those type of points, usefulness that you rightly say moral framework that for me as a former politician who had 20 plus years facing real constituents that's how you actually communicate and get it home to people what some of this is about okay thank you unfortunately I think we could probably quite easily go on for another hour and a half of this right we must draw things to a close I'd like to start off with a few general thanks thank you you all for attending and to those online who joined us and sorry we couldn't take more of your questions thank you to Ray in particular for fielding the questions and as a sign how busy she's been before this aula who's actually left to set up the next stage of things are sort of an administrator in the person who keeps me in line and make sure I end up in the right place at the right time so thank you there for all those efforts and thank you to Julia by my parliamentary term and I've been there in thanking Julia also thank you to Sophie and Aaron for operating the microphones for us however our main debt of gratitude of course is to our distinguished speaker tonight Lord Willett thank you very much for giving so generously of your time and your thoughts and just as a small token of our appreciation if I can actually do this in an elegant manner a small token of our appreciation and I hope the audience will join with me and thank you very much very kind of you