All right, so I'm going to begin to talk with just about to slide on space applications. This is probably a crowd that knows a good amount about that, but I always like to just reiterate the many ways that we use space before we talk about why we care so much about keeping that, that area sustainable. I'll then talk a little bit about the space environment and the sorts of changes that we're seeing there. Then I'll talk about threats to space assets. So both inadvertent damage, things that, that essentially happened by accident, and also concerns about intentional damage, which unfortunately are becoming very relevant and recent days I didn't put any slides in here on Ukraine and some of the ways space security is starting to play a role there, but I'm happy to talk about that at the end as well. And then I want to spend at least month amount of time talking about not just what the problems are, but what we think some solutions to this might be, particularly on the policy side. Okay, so first just these reminders of the many, many ways that we use space assets. So first, just on the commercial civil side, right? We have broadcast satellites for TV, the communication satellites doing, you know, your satellite phone, things like that. But now increasingly Internet. All over the world. Also, GPS location signal is used for travel, for shipping, for all sorts of different purposes. The timing signal is key for global banking. Your pay at the pump. Actually, if your gas works because of the GPS timing signal. We use our remote sensing satellites and all sorts of different industries. Weather forecasting makes a huge difference for transportation, aviation, all sorts of different areas that really rely on the satellite data there. And of course, science as well. And then on the military side, particularly in the United States, assets are critical for the way that our military works. So we use communication satellites. You, their military communication satellites are actually the military will also use the commercial communication satellites for their purposes. They use GPS for triplication and navigation. Gps also used for precision weapons. We use both the government kind of reconnaissance satellites or spy satellites, as well as commercial remote sensing imagery for reconnaissance surveillance and battlefield awareness. And then the military also has their own weather satellite system. And so they use that data as well. So lots and lots of ways that we are reliant on our space assets. And so we care a lot about the space environment, kind of the long-term sustainability of that environment. But there are lots of challenges there and things that are changing rapidly. So the amount of activity we're seeing in space and the number of objects going into space is increasing rapidly. So I will show you a chart and you know, with even more recent ones, it's becoming more and more pronounced where we were always kind of going up pretty steadily since the beginning of the space age in terms of the number of objects we're putting into space. This more countries getting involved in space activity and the countries that were involved were putting more stuff up there. And now with the advent of these mega constellations and like SpaceX and one web and others really starting to increase their launch rates. You're releasing a kink in that curve and it's going up very, very rapidly. So we have that going on. And the, the, in the US, the national security space strategy, which actually came out a number of years ago. But as me and once the 2016, but it's still relevant. Talked about space as congested, contested, and competitive. That's a term or a set of terms you hear very frequently in the space community on the policy side. And so I'll talk about each of those as well. So this is where the space is congested a piece comes from, right? This is the rapid increase in objects in space, not only operational objects, but also debris objects. So you can see over here that kind of steady rise that I talked about. Because this one includes debris. We see a couple of big jumps in 2007 and 2009. And then the number of active satellites, It's also increasing. If we zoomed in here, you would see it even more dramatically. Right now there are, I think this is as of January, there were 4,550 operational objects in space. This is one. I've been teaching space policy at Georgia Tech for almost 10 years. And this number typically if I forgot to update it semester to semester or from year to year, it'd be off by like a 100 or something like that. Now if I don't updated, it's off by like a thousand. It's going up so quickly. It's really yeah, feels fundamentally different to me, even these kind of little way. So 4,550 objects of those, about half of them belong to the US, either to the US as a country or to commercial and other entities that are within the US. Of those, 2700, 1600 of those are SpaceX Starlink satellites. So you can see and others, there's this rapid increase, but there are a couple very clear contributors to this new trend. And so SpaceX is the big one there. In terms of debris that are more than 34 thousand objects that are larger than ten centimeters. So about the size of a softball, Those are large enough to destroy a satellite if they hit it. And then in terms of debris that's smaller than that, which still poses a potential serious hazard to your satellites. But we can't monitor it very well and so we don't literally can't track it and so we worry about it less it to some extent, there's at least 0.5 million pieces of that size. And this is just a nice nasa image that helps reiterate the idea that we do care about things in space even if they're very small. So this is a one centimeter impact or getting an aluminum block out 15 thousand miles per hour. So thinking about the beads, we have going up and in low-Earth orbit. And obviously it can cause a very significant amount of damage. Okay, so I wanted to return to this idea. I said in the beginning about what are the threats to space assets that are purposeful or, or not purposeful. So here is, let's start with the, the inadvertent things to things that are not necessarily done on purpose. And I would break these into a couple of categories. The first is avoidable things. So this is something like you put your satellite up in space. It operates for its whole lifetime and that it runs out of fuel, and now it becomes a big piece of debris. And you can avoid that by, you know, when it's getting low on fuel, you purposefully G orbit it or you move it out to a graveyard orbit, right? So we can avoid that by kind of planning ahead. Similarly, upper stages of rockets or removable elements, you can design your rocket in such a way that those will come back down almost immediately. So we can avoid putting those up. But, but historically we have not an error, especially from earlier in the space age. There are some very large upper stages that gives him Soviet rockets that are up in space. And unless we do something will be there for, for many, many years. There's also this kind of relatively new item on the list, which is the acceptable failure rate. And this really goes back to these mega constellations and places like SpaceX. So with Starlink, SpaceX originally talked about having acceptable failure rate of something like 5%, right? They're going to launch their launching hundreds of satellites. And so from their perspective, kind of using this Silicon Valley mindset, you know, get things on fast, get them up there, just keep kind of refreshing the constellation. That even if 5% of their satellites are dead on arrival, they go into orbit and they never actually turn on. That was going to be fine from a business perspective and from the ability to provide their service. From the perspective of space debris, that's a problem, right? Because 5% when you're talking about 10 thousand or 50 thousand, right, you start to get really large numbers of debris being added. So another thing that you, you know, you should be able to avoid, right? Or have a much smaller acceptable failure rate, then there are accidental creation of debris. So this could be a satellite that stops operating unexpectedly, right? So you still have fuel, you're still planning to be in the normal lifetime of your satellite. And maybe there's a space weather event or some other technical issue and suddenly your satellite stops working. One of the most famous examples of this is Europe's end VSAT. So it's in a large environmental satellite. It's about the size of a school bus. And yeah, it was a big, very advanced satellite and one day it just stopped communicating. And they never got it back. And so it's just this giant school bus size satellite in a very popular orbit that we have no ability to control. So that can, that type of thing. It can lead to the next issue which is unexpected collisions, right? So when we have these objects, the objects we can't control. But even among two operational satellites, There's the potential now for, for collisions to occur in orbit. And I'll, I'll show you we have seen that already. And then there's RF interference and unintentional jamming. So when these satellites become too close together, particularly in geostationary orbit, that can sometimes mess with each other's signals. And then there is this other one, particularly of interest to the astronomy community about interference with observations, with astronomical observations. And I'll talk about that in a little more detail. So I mentioned that there isn't examples, it's not just theoretical, the idea that things could collide in orbit. So in 2009, a Iridium communications satellites us as a commercial communication satellite, collided with a defunct russian spy satellite with Cosmos 2250 one. When they collided to create a 2000 pieces of debris that were ten centimeters or larger at that trackable size, really just created a whole cloud of debris. So one of those jumps that you saw in the, in the curve earlier at that is this 2009 collision really added a lot, a lot of debris to the overall environment. So this issue of interference with observations, there's a good likelihood that you may have heard of this. Basically, this really came up with SpaceX as basic, started to put up more of their Starlink satellites. Actually even had a friend in my neighborhood is not not a spokesperson and it'll who texted me because she was like Miriam. I saw these like lights in the sky and they were going right in a line and like what is going on, they tried to sell me a video. Like, I don't know, It's the Starlink satellites. Normal. You'll see that now. And so they are, I mean, they're even visible to the naked eye. Because of that, they are also a big irritant for trying to make astronomical observations, right? And so particularly for ground-based systems, they are could've interfering with that capability. There was a study that showed just from 2019 to 2020 ones. This is from SpaceX just making the initial launches back in 2019 and that kind of ramping up over that period. There's been a 30 fivefold increase in the number of corrupted images. I should've looked at which exactly which gravitation this was app, but for one particular observation area. And so it's really, you know, it's, it's not even saying constant, right? It's kind of this issue was ramping up pretty considerably. Spacex didn't say they care about this issue or that they don't want to mess up astronomy essentially. And so they originally there first thing was that they tried something called the dark SAT. So he used an anti reflective paint to try and make it not so bright. And that didn't help a little. They could decrease the visibility by about 50 percent, which meant it was not visible to the naked eye. But it still did interfere with astronomy. And now there are many, many more satellites coming. So they're looking at other solutions like they have one where they use like a shade, which another way of hopefully limiting the reflection but really isn't a clear solution. And an even the ones that are being explored are mostly being led by SpaceX right now. And SpaceX has not going to be the only mega constellations operator, right? That it's not even going to be, you know, they're not all going to be in the U.S.. Right? There's also other countries that are developing these types of constellations. And so I think this issue of how do you address it and what do you what does your responsibility is going to be? The ongoing issue and probably a bigger issue than just one US company. One thing that's going on, the International Astronomical Union has actually made a request to the United Nations to look at whether there's a responsibility under the outer space treaty. So the outer space treaty talks about space being available for everyone and non-interference with other people, space activities. And so they're basically asking if under the Outer Space Treaty there might be a responsibility to limit this type of development and kinda protects the night sky, right? Both for certainly for astronomy, but even for the average individual to be able to look up at the sky and see the stars and not just see a whole bunch of moving dots, right? So I don't know how far that's going to go. There's a lot of government support for these mega constellations systems, but I think an interesting, interesting ongoing activity. Okay, so the next specced space is contested. So we saw the congested piece, right? There's just lots of activity happening up there. There's oldest creation of debris that we're concerned about. But then there's this other side of it as well. But I think of more or less the sustainability side and now onto the security side. So we have more than 50 nations operating in space. We have some issues about kind of irresponsible activity in space. But then also some nations that are going to purposefully try to cause damage and space, right? So this is a pretty big concern in the US, has talked about this for more than 20 years. Satellites are inherently vulnerable, right? They eat, the whole idea is they travel in a predictable orbit. You basically know where they're going to be. Even the US spy satellites, which the US government does not release the, the location of those. You can go. There are websites with forums from amateur astronomers that are like, oh no, it's right here that gets in this orbit. Everybody can see that it's huge. And so Ino, an amateur astronomer can see it in their backyard. Definitely Russia and China and others can see it. You know, whether it's red. So these satellites are inherently vulnerable, vulnerable just based on the design. And as you saw in those first couple of slides, they are very valuable. We rely very heavily on our satellites, Both far our economy and then also for our military. So back in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld chaired a committee that looked at issues of space security. Any warned about this idea of a space Pearl Harbor, that someone could take out some of us, particularly the military base capabilities and the US right now wouldn't really have any way to respond. And especially back then really would be kind of caught off guard by that. And in particular, there was concern about the possibility of a preemptive strike. So the idea being, you know, if you were going to take a military action and there were some people actually before Ukraine happened that the thought, even with this one that could have been, could have been an example. It happened. So say you're planning to invade another country. What you might do first is take out maybe some reconnaissance satellites or GPS or other things so that, you know, the US or other actors would be slower to respond, right? You're just not able to move as quickly. You don't have your maybe your communications capabilities or your navigation capabilities as high-quality as you would otherwise, right? And so there's some incentive to be kind of a first-mover do at the preemptive strike, which is sort of the most dangerous type of situation for international security, right? That's the, no matter what the domain, that's the thing you really don't want to see is that, that incentive to be the first, first 1 to move. On the defense side, the US has been kind of more and more specific and communicative about this challenge. So this is kind of reiterating the same i, idea that we just talked about, right? That other nations have noted the military and economic advantages that the US gets from space. And so they've devoted time and energy to developing counter space capabilities. And specifically, a conflict with Russia or China would likely involve attacks on US Space Systems. Which would have a huge effect both on the civil side and also the side. Okay. So what do these things look like? You talk about intentional damage to space assets. You can usually break these into two categories. So kinetic and a satellite weapons are probably a thing you have heard about. If you've heard about satellite weapons, these are either direct descent, so you take a missile on the ground and launch it at a satellite and destroy that satellite. Or you can have a CO orbital anti satellite, which means you launch it like a regular satellite. It can be in space for however long and then eventually relocate it next to the target satellite and destroy it. And these are the big kind of flashy ones were actually kinetically smashing things, creating pieces, creating a bunch of debris. There's also a lot of options that are non kinetic ways to attack satellites. So and these can be either temporary or permanent. So for example, there are laser based weapons that either you know, the temporary one, they call it dazzling and it's kinda of your shining it at the sensor, usually as it's going over a particular area. And so it just can't be used while it's being kinda messed with, right? But when it goes over the horizon or you turn off your, your laser, it works again, right? You can also essentially shine a laser at a, a sensor like a remote sensing imager and completely blind it, right? So you burn out the sensor and it's not going to work ever again in the future. So you still, you know, you're destroying the satellite, the CME, what is a kinetic except for you not just have one giant piece of debris or one kind of non useful satellite rather than lots of pieces debris. As you can imagine, nuclear weapons would be very bad in space. I don't have it in this lecture, but the US and the Soviet Union actually did nuclear testing in outer space in the 60s. So again, not a theoretical situation unfortunately. But so what do you put a nuclear weapon in space? The electromagnetic pulse first kind of knocks out everything in its field of view, so you'll kill all the satellites are there, but then also creates residual reality radiation so that the other satellites that pass through that are off also likely to be damaged. So something like that nowadays would really be kind of indiscriminately damaged. A ton of Erica? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The people are are using these these weapons. Yeah. So good question. So some of it is happening like this. So the next two on the list, definitely. Yeah. I mean, jamming and spoofing happens constantly. So in Ukraine, from the very beginning, GPS has been jammed over that area. Yeah, that's very common. Spoofing, maybe less so where they're giving that kind of alternate, alternate signal that you might be picking up. Those are the kinda local area stuff and the things that are interfering closer to the earth. That's very common. And you can imagine just things like with communication satellites, jamming Voice of America over certain areas, things like Iran does that all the time. So some of that is happening and cyber attacks too. We don't I don't know of any cyber attacks on military assets that had been made public. But the US weather satellites where cyber attacked by China. So that China had the capability actually to control the satellites. But they didn't do anything with it, didn't, it didn't cause any damage as far as anyone knows, but, but they prove that capability essentially. So, so some of it is happening. You know what we haven't seen, I'll talk about as a satellite tests, kinetic and to satellite tests. We have never seen someone use one of those anti satellite weapons against someone else's satellite. Alright, so, so I'll, I'll get to them in a second that people have used it against their own, but they haven't used it against others. And there's lot of questions. I think about why that is. There may be a little bit of a, a norm against it that people, you know, because no one's ever done it. It seems like a big deal. There's also, it, it's potentially risky because we don't know. This could be good or bad depending you look at it, but we don't really know how exactly people are going to respond to these types of attacks. And so there was a number of years ago, a lot of people in the US take the perspective that if you attack one of our satellites, so the US, I think the US official statement, it's something like we've said that those assets are critical national assets, which is kind of code for destroying this could mean war or kind of thing, critical asset. And then also we've said that we can respond in a time and manner of our choosing so we can kind of respond however we want. But that leaves everything open. And so, you know, I think a lot of us people have interpreted that as if you attack our satellite, it's an act of war. But there was an event a number of years ago were some Chinese, I think Chase scholars, but Chinese space sector people were saying that that could be a D escalatory thing, right? Because a satellite, you know, you're not hurting any people like nobody's, it's not in your sovereign territory on the ground, right? And so this is actually kind of a, a less aggressive type of move that can be more of like a warning thing would be to destroy a satellite. So very different interpretations of what it would mean. Which in general I would say is very bad. Because you can have kind of inadvertently sending the wrong message and escalating. But that might also have made people that level of uncertainty makes it more risky. And so that might have also deter people from doing it. But there's a lot of question of is it just sort of a flip? And are we going to start happening? Okay, So these capabilities I went through are not just theoretical right? People, people and countries have these. So the US, Russia, China, India all have that CO orbital, a stat capability, and all have that direct ascent at a satellite capability to launch a rocket into stories I like. Russia and probably the US also have those laser weapons that allow you to dazzle and blind optical sensors. I will say the US official statement, as we only have one offensive space weapon, which is like a communications jamming device, but that is almost surely not true. And then in terms of the electron electronic warfare, the tactical jamming, the cyber attacks, lots of countries have that capability, right? Us, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea. Lots, lots are able to do that. So I mentioned that these anti satellite tests have happened already. So before talking on this slide, I should say the US and the Soviet Union, just like we did, tested nuclear weapons in space the 1960s also tested all sorts of direct ascent, as I said, unlike capabilities. So from I think the first one is in, was in 1959. So almost as soon as the first satellite was launched, the US and Russia were also working on ways to shoot down those satellites. So there was a long, a long history of, of testing with those two nations. They kind of stopped in the early nineties. And then there really wasn't any anti satellite testing until this test occurred in 2007. So this was China, essentially without warning, shot down their old weather satellite. It created a huge amount of debris, 3000 pieces of debris in a pretty popular orbit. So these, these pieces of debris are not going to come down for many, many years. And they frequently cause potential collisions, right? Where other satellites have to maneuver around them and things like that. There's all sorts of interesting elements about this. There's some reports that the PLA, which carried out this test may not have fully communicated with the civilian leadership about the ramifications of this test. So there's a huge international backlash, particularly because of the creation of debris. And so there might've been some other kind of political things happening behind the scenes there. But that test really, I think for a lot of people was a sort of a wake-up call, right? That these things really can happen. It's a concern. The EU, the US, one year after China did that test, we shot down one of our own satellites. So the US official story was that there was a Defense Satellite that had gone up and had malfunctioned. But it was a huge satellite and it had a bunch of hydrazine fuel on it, which is very dangerous if people around it. And they said because it was such a large satellite and so much fuel is still on board that if it had an uncontrolled re-entry, it might survive the re-entry and it could cause a lot of damage can be really dangerous. And so as a responsible space, after we were actually going to shoot that satellite down, break it into pieces so that then it would not harm anyone on the earth. Almost everyone, all the kind of experts in the international community were like, Okay, but definitely that's just an ethics satellite tests like to try to show China. I think of what you're doing. And I think I was definitely in the latter camp. It just seems like too much of a coincidence that the only time that's ever happened was one year after trying to do that. But I did just recently read an article by like kinda down in the weeds technical guy at nasa who had been pulled into this process of deciding like, you know, should we should've down what should we do. And he describes this whole process of having to go to the president that they knew was going to look bad and blah, blah. So I made it really was like a satellite that was going to cause a problem. I don't know. But so that happened. But the US did it very differently. So we provided advanced warning to the international community, said, you know, there's this situation happening where we think the responsible thing is to shoot it down. We, the US did it at a, at a very low altitude. So pieces of debris only lasted about a week an orbit. They did a trajectory where you wait until the ballistic missiles on its way down to hit the satellite. So the debris is kinda pointing backwards earth for the most part. So it's also kind of like were you to do a test, here's the responsible way to do it in 2019 than India actually did a test. In some ways it was similar to the US. So they also did this kind of downward trajectory. They, they did a very low orbit. But another way that was not like us, they did not provide advanced warning. They did not have any kind of story about this is necessary for safety. And by contrast, the Indian Prime Minister came on television and made a public statement and said that this test proved that India was one of the like, great space powers, right? And really kind of taking the idea that having space weapons and space weapons capability, that's what makes you, you know, that's what you have to be in the kind of the top tier of space nations, right? So from a, from the perspective of the community wants to have sustainable space activity and not have weapons in space. Not, not a good, a good change. So that happened. And there's also some, on the political side, some people have the idea that, that, you know, there was already at the time talk about having a ban on debris creating at a satellite tests. And India for a very long time with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, they were, what are the states that didn't have nuclear weapons before that was put in place. And therefore, they're banned forever from developing them. And they are not part of the nuclear states club. And that this was maybe an action to say like, No, this time we're going to be one of the one of the main ones who had it before any kind of agreement was put in place. So again, just speculation but plausible. And then most recently in 2021, Russia carried out an anti satellite test. This one is very bizarre to me, or I will say at least was until recently. So Russia, they did, like I mentioned, they've done tests for decades, right? They test all sorts of advice. I'd like weapons. Everyone knows there was never any debate in the space community of whether they have this capability or not. They definitely have that capability. So why did they feel the need to do this test? And they actually, it wasn't, wasn't quite as high as the Chinese had to settle it to us, but it was a higher orbit. It wasn't super low orbit. It did create a significant amount of debris. And it created debris. That isn't the way of weather satellites, reconnaissance satellites. It actually goes over the orbit of the International Space Station and the Chinese Space Station. So a pretty, you know, problematic place to destroy one of your satellites. And I, you know, there have been a lot of debate in the community about why Russia would do that. And just last week I was at a conference. And now I guess one of the leading theories among intelligence analysts is that it actually was directly related to Ukraine. And a way of kind of showing, I guess to your point back there, that the satellites are at risk, right? And that just kind of a reminder and a shot across the bow. Look, we have this capability. We're not afraid to use it if we're going to do this during peacetime and create that amount of debris. Certainly will. You know, if we feel we have to, we're going to do that during wartime as well. So I think back in late 2021 nobody would have made that connection obviously. But I find that, that plausible now. Okay, so there's those capabilities. The other thing that states are doing is this rendezvous in proximity operations. So this is happening especially in the geostationary orbit. But basically you have all these satellites that are stationary over one place on earth, right? All in this kind of belt around the equator. And the US, Russia and China all have satellites that are out that orbit. But I think all three of them describe as like surveillance satellites that they're meant to look at other objects in space and, and, you know, help with space safety, that kind of thing. They call them inspector satellites or that the US ones are geostationary space situational awareness program satellites. But they also are not just generally looking out for safety, but very clearly going next to other people, satellites and getting very close to them and listening to them and things like that. So the Chinese system SJ 17 has moved all around the geostationary belt, but it's actually only co-located with other Chinese satellites. The Russian system has went and sat for a long time first between two Intelsat satellites. These are commercial communication satellites, but they're used by the DOD. And Intel sat at the time, could have reported it publicly and reporting to the state department and they asked Russia to stop. Russia's response was basically like, Oh, we're just testing our system. No. Like there's no rule about this. You know, we can we can move around just inspector satellite, Never mind. And, you know, and they're basically right. There's no rule against it. So they continued on. They have parked extra UK military satellite, French military satellite. The French really did not like that. They were very vocal when that happened. Us or European weather satellites, all sorts of things. Just recently in 2020, a Russian inspector satellite went to a US reconnaissance satellite. The US did put out a public statement when that happened. And then they had a crazy system were the Russian inspector satellite had like another satellite come out from it. I think I don't have another slide on this. So had another cell, they come out from it and then that smaller satellite maneuver it around. And then another projectile, it came out of that at something like 20 thousand kilometers per mile or per minute, something like that. So it was like Basically like a bullet. And so they, again, the US made that public and said it was very provocative and all that kinda stuff. So that kind of activity is happening. And then I also at least on one slide on here to say, by the way, the US has done similar things. So we also have moved our G SAP system next to foreign satellites. And so there's probably some electronic surveillance happening, maybe some imagery being taken. The US I mean, you can find newspaper articles where we, they say G SAP has the ability to take images and they've even use the term reverse engineering, right? That we can, we can see stuff right up close and, you know, enough to reverse engineer capabilities. So, you know, on the Earth, these certainly in the US, but other places too that those military systems are extremely highly classified. But once they're up in space, now we have this situation that others can just go next to them and look at them in detail. So this is only really been happening the last few years. And I think the military establishment is still trying to figure out what that means and what they can do about that. Okay, So speaking about what can we do about that? Here's the last portion of the presentation, is talking about what are the things that are going on right now, especially in the policy community to try to address these issues. And I would say, you know, the, the ways that people are trying to solve these problems really align with the nature of the problem. So for the avoidable debris, we look at things like debris mitigation guidelines and I'll talk about each of these in detail for accidental debris, issues like space situational awareness in space traffic management, when it comes to the purposeful creation degree. Now the military talks about space domain awareness, norms of behavior and resilient technology. And then for existing debris, we looked at active debris removal, though just a little bit on each of these. So space debris mitigation guidelines, this is the area where as an international community we've really come the furthest. So it's just trying to get guidelines that everybody can agree on how to not create that much debris in the first place, right? So all those things I said about, you know, well, you have a big upper stage rocket. Design it, so it comes back down instead of continuing to go up into a high orbit. Now people agreed, oh yeah, we should design it that way and we can avoid that creation to bring in the first place. So these three creation guidelines have a lot of kind of things like that, that essentially everybody internationally could agree on and sign onto. And then a lot of countries, including the US, have incorporated those into our own national guidelines. So now, when you develop a satellite, you go get your FCC license to be able to communicate with it. They'll make you agree that you will fall all of these guidelines. So that one, we probably need some new guidelines and they're working on it with the mega constellations because some of the old rules like the orbit after 25 years doesn't work if you're putting up, you know, hundreds or thousands of satellites every year. So you're gonna have to change some of those rules. Then on the avoiding debris, we've got space situational awareness is kind of the first things. So space situational awareness is the characterization of the space environment. So just basically understanding what is up in space and where is it going and then ideally what is it doing? And we want to have this information and in order to avoid collisions between these objects in space, right? Partly we're looking at debris, but even with the two operational objects, you want to be able to have that, that image of what's happening a space and the ability to predict and say, Okay, you guys might collide, right? You're on a path that, that's creating some danger, provide that had biggest warnings, you can actually do the maneuvers and avoid having any kind of collisions. Right now, the US operates, by far the most advanced space surveillance capability in the world. We provide. We provide our data for free to all operators. Although I will say, when I say our data, it's not the raw data out of the sensors and that it's a, you know, kind of a pretty basic data product and also a set of warnings. So the US, even for China, Russia, they will say like warning, you might collide with a piece of debris or you might collide with this other element. But there's a little bit of just trust me on that, right? They're not going to give you all the data and algorithms they used. There are other, So China certainly has a system, russia has a system. They don't share any of the data from that. Europe is developing a system. Not as advanced yet as the US. They also only share their data with European operators right now. So US is kinda the main, the main provider right now. And then I would just add in here back to this issue of light pollution and the effect on astronomy. A lot of the solutions that the Astronomy people would like to see are in are essentially the opposite of what the FSA people ask for. The space situational awareness. People want everything to be more visible and more. We want to able to see everything that's up there. So they're kind of pushing in the complete opposite direction from the perspective of space safety. So I think this is one of that kind of interesting to different communities working all with good intentions, but really at cross-purposes in some ways. Okay, The other piece of so you have three situation awareness, which is where is everything, where's it going to go, send these warnings, right? And that we have the US does a pretty good job of that. There are improvements can be made, but, but we've got it the piece. We really don't get a space traffic management. So that's now you've got this warning, right? You might have a collision AND operator to write, but what do you do about it? Right? Now this system is completely ad hoc, so you get that warning, the other guy gets a warning. If you want, you can pick up the phone and try to call them, send them an e-mail. Try to coordinate if you're going to maneuver or how are we going to cover all those kind of things. But that's the system, alright, for the whole, full, whole international space activity. Don't right now have any central decision about rules of who should move or how you should move or at what threshold you should move. None of that. There's no international agreements on that stuff. There is growing recognition that we probably do need agreements on that stuff. And I'll give you a couple of recent examples of y. So this was just this past summer between the European Space Agency in space x. So on the 26th of August, he said in space x both got one of these warnings, right? You might have a collision in space. Then as time goes on, right, your data gets better, the likelihood of collision increased. So ESA sent an e-mail to space x. Spacex said, Well, yeah, it's a higher risk than it was, but it's still not above our threshold for maneuver, so we're not planning to do anything about it. Then on the 29th of August, the probability of a collision increase even more that went over ISA threshold of like okay, if there's a one in 10 thousand chance of collision, we feel like we have to do something about it. They send another email to, to SpaceX than the threshold went up even more. Conclusion went up even more to one hundred, ten hundred, which is extremely high for, for this kind of activity. And he said I couldn't get in touch with SpaceX, like they didn't respond to their email. And so finally, ISA maneuver their big earth observation satellites are like huge, really important Earth observation satellite moving around this little like, you know, SpaceX Starlink satellites. Clearly easy. It was not happy because they sent out a tweet after it. It's not usually how we try to deal with these kinds of issues. But basically it's ID, no space, ignored us and refuse to move and blah, blah. And space x then later responded in kind of in the press and things that there was a bug. Essentially their email, like we didn't see the email. And so we sorry, we missed it. Yeah, even if all this is true and it was a bug, but it's plausible. Obviously not a great way to run your international space traffic management plan, right? They probably should not be coordinating these things via email, which is basically what the court says. Okay. Then there again was another one just recently. So this was in December. China actually filed a complaint and overall with the United Nations saying that there were SpaceX Starlink satellites are made to close approaches to its space station and require the Chinese Space Station to maneuver. I put the exact terminology there, but they're basically the outer space treaty says that, you know, the country in which those entities operate is responsible for those commercial entities. So they said, you know, the US, you're supposed to be responsible for these guys and they're putting our astronauts at risk, are taken out at risk. You need to step in and be responsible space actors. The US wrote back also through this note verbal, verbal UN, process. These are both available online. I really encourage you to read the full text. They're really interesting. But basically said to us, said yeah, we were monitoring the whole thing and we don't think it was a close approach. We think it was fine and that's why we never said anything and never provided any warnings. But like I said, with SSH system, it's not perfect, right? So it's definitely possible that the US and China had different, you know, we're monitoring the same thing but seeing a different picture, right? Or they have different thresholds of what it means to be too much risk, right? So lots of issues there. But again, kind of airing out in this very large diplomatic issue. Okay. So that's space traffic management. I do a lot of my work there. I think there's a lot of work to be done in that area. Okay, Then lastly on the kind of combating threats, these purposeful attacks. There's a couple of things we do. So when the Space Command, space Command and Space Force for created just a couple of years ago, they adopted this term space domain awareness. Phase domain awareness is the same thing, a space situational awareness that I just talked about. And the only difference is that the military is trying to emphasis, emphasize that when they track everything and they look at where it's going to go and all that. They want to look at it from a military perspective and not trust everybody, right? They want to know, you know, what is that object doing? And is that object possibly a threat, right? So just a different perspective when you're analyzing the same data. So that's one thing, right? You try to look and have an idea what, what threats are out there. And you have to do a good job on this. Otherwise, when your satellite breaks up an orbit, if you're not sure that happened because a piece of debris hit it or because a Russian at the satellite hit it, you can't really do anything about it, right? And also, by the way, if Russia knows, you can't tell the difference, they're much more likely to attack, right? So it's a carry out one of those attacks because they're not there's going to be no. Impact on them, right? Because you can't prove that they did it. So it's really important to have for the military have a really good capability here. There's also now a lot of movement towards trying to have norms of behavior and outer space. So the US, for a long, long time pushed back against any kind of agreement on beyond the outer space treaty of what we can do in space. The US wanted full freedom of action. Actually, Russia and China proposed bans on space weapons. And the US was like, No, not gonna do that. Now the US is much more interested. And those kinds of things, now that we're kind of other people can do those things as well. So the current system is pretty limited. The Outer Space Treaty bands harmful contamination or harmful interference, but it's a pretty vague term. There's no rules about how close you can get to other people, satellites, what, you know what, at what distance or you're doing something unsafe or unresponsive. Irresponsible. No requirements for having consent, right. So when Russia said like, Well, we're not breaking any rules, that was completely true, right? You do not have to. There's no rule about how close you can get to somebody. There's no rule about having to ask them, you know, everything's kinda fair. So, so now the UK and the US is on board as well. Started a process in the United Nations to say, okay, well, let's actually come up with some rules here. Let's come up with some norms of behavior. What counts as being responsible. I did there one side and there's a, there are some technology solution so you can harden your satellite. There's also a big move towards, instead of having, you know, to give the military one big extremely capable satellite, break that up into 20 or 50 smaller satellites with capabilities that work as a constellation. That means general heightened news. And the Joint Chiefs of Staff has talked about there's other satellites as being big, juicy targets, right? That when you have all of your capability in this one giant thing, it's a lot more risky than, than spreading that out. So that's one of the potential technology solutions. Redundancy is another one, right? So partly you get that by breaking up into a constellation, but also having, you know, allies who have similar capabilities are commercial capabilities. The Navy, when GPS came around and got better and better, stops teaching celestial navigation, they actually went back to teaching it again a number of years ago. Because otherwise there was kind of a period for the Navy where if GPS had gone out, if somebody had attack that system, they would've been able to navigate anymore, right? People had not been taught other other methods to do that. So having things like that as a as a backup, clearly not going to work as well or be as if he has good, but I'm still better than nothing. And there is some development under us and also for offensive technologies. And the very last slide. So those things all deal with kind of looking forward to the future. How do we deal with, you know, not adding more debris, not having collisions start avoiding conflict in space. But all the stuff is already out there this for 34 thousand objects, including giant things like NBA sat. None of the other solutions deal with those. And so both the European Space Agency and nasa had put out studies saying, even if you stopped putting things up in space now, right and just left it, how it was, you would expect to have essentially a couple of collisions every few years and those would continue to cascade. So it's something I maybe have heard of the Kessler effect, but basically it's, you know, you get a collision that creates a bunch more debris, which means you have a higher likelihood of a follow-on collision. Even more debris and it kind of cascades like that and eventually could make space unusable. Though he's a nasa. Basically both both agreed were already in the Kessler effect. Even if you put nothing up there, that cascade, it's very, very slow, but it's on its way. And so they're both kind of supportive of this idea of active debris removal. So you actually go up and take pieces debris out of orbit. Technology. I think the technology is moving forward on this fairly well. It's challenging, but there has been in space demonstrations and things. And I think it's actually the, the economics and policy and international relations side that are the big barriers here. So from the economic side, there's no real reason a company would do this. Nobody wants to pay, they'll want it done, but nobody wants to pay to do this, right? Nasa has enough trouble funding things they want to put up in space, right? They don't want to put millions of dollars or even billions of dollars to take stuff down right out of their budget. They don't feel like they have that. So and that's the same with every every country. So there are issues with that. How do you actually pay for it? How do you make that sustainable? Um, and then there are international relations issue. So if you develop something that can go up and take a satellite of out of orbit, you know, you're designing it to remove debris, which is great. But it can do the same thing to a reconnaissance satellite or some other, you know, anything else out in space, right? And so it is by its nature, space weapon. And so a lot of countries feel very uncomfortable with that depending on who's developing this technology, right? And then lastly, there's like some legal issues. So the outer space treaty, under the outer space treaty, whatever you put up in space you own indefinitely. And so you actually can't lay some of the biggest, most dangerous pieces of debris in orbit right now are really large Soviet upper stages. From earlier in the space age. But nobody can remove those unless russia agrees to let them, but does not seem like it's on the table anytime soon. So that is another kind of unresolved issue as well. So a lot of problems on the kind of the policy side for this one. But we'll say moving for a lot of people are very excited about it. All right, and I think that's all I have. So I am happy. I think we have at least a few minutes for questions and discussion. Thanks. The AGI created this kind of visualization of a satellite and the kind of the different pieces of debris in orbit. Not to scale. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of debris. It's definitely becoming an issue. Yeah. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. This is there is. There is. So the theirs on two levels, on the international level, the Outer Space Treaty, like I mentioned, says anything that launches from your state, even if it's whether it's a US government thing or it's a commercial thing, the US is responsible for that, is liable for that. So the US has to actually license and provide ongoing supervision of anything that wants us all space X stuff the US government is liable for on the international stage, which is why China put their thing and, uh, you went to the United States even though it was a SpaceX satellite. So there's that on the international level. And then because of that on the national level, we do have regulation. So all of those Starlink satellites, SpaceX had to go and get an FCC license to operate them. And they have a license, I think right now what I said, they had 600 satellites in orbit. They have a license, I think for now it's 30 thousand. The FCC has said you are allowed to put up to 30000 satellites into your constellation. So it's not that they're not regulated. They had to go and get that license and everything. But the license was granted, I think, particularly in the US, but in the space community, even globally, There's a lot of support for commercial activity. And if you listen to the debates, have any DC, a lot more of it is, how do we support Starlink? Get more things like Starling. More than, you know, there's a little bit of concern about this. It's starting to get, get more attention, but there's a lot more excitement and pride and the growth of the commercial sector. They're taking over and it doesn't need to be all government funding and providing services. So, so they're being there, being regulated, but they're the, the mindset and NDC and even globally as you know, we want to encourage these things. And, you know, like I said, it's not just the US. China has got a license. One of their companies has a license for omega constellation as well. So they're just aren't ready to launch, but similar to Starlink. So even if the US didn't allow it, you would see it in other countries. I think management needs very unfortunate. But he's also very challenging international division. So let's do yes, do you actually see converges? So what is it going looking for? Yeah, I think so. I think the, you know, these numbers and the speed at which objects are being put in space and the number of collision warnings that we see going out, just the, the, the rate that those things are happening, I think is getting attention, certainly attention to the space community, but I think even beyond that, it's starting to expand. So I'm really hopeful we'll see action on that. The like, the pessimistic view in the space community is that every major international action happened after a disaster. So there's going to be some big collision that cause a big problem and then we'll get a space traffic management system. I'm still one of the optimists that thinks maybe we can do it before that. But we'll see us and we're world that I think it would make sense for us to lead on that effort. But we're a little stalled domestically because remember I mentioned the US military runs that space situational awareness system. They're the ones who send of the warnings. They're not great at international data sharing and cooperation that just not, I'm going to give and they say that they're like That's not our main mission, that's not what we want to spend our time doing. They want to look for threats. And so there's an effort can see Obama administration to shift that data-sharing job over to a civil agency, either to FAA or Department of Commerce. But there's I don't know, there's discussions in Congress of which agency is the right agency and like how much funding they need and like exactly how it can be organized. And so for 56 years, it's been stuck in that. Like purgatory. Yeah. So hopefully that's gonna get us all soon and then the US as a system and then we can lead ignore zone. Yes. Yeah. So they yeah. So they have the space surveillances surveillance system for the United States is optical sensors, radar sensors. They have a couple of in space sensors. But usually what they're doing is when something gets launched, the light from the very beginning, they they track it and identify it, and then it gets identifier on it and they try to check for it every once a while. And sometimes, like if you saw on the news there was like a space weather event and some basic satellites were launched or were lost. What they got pulled down because of the increased drag from the atmosphere expanding. So they, you know, things like that can happen and it messes with your predictions of exactly where the satellites are. And so they, it is not uncommon for them to lose satellites for some period of time, right? So they're kind of checking for the satellites on a periodic basis and they match them up with, here's where we thought everybody was. Here's we thought they'd be now for the five are there, or we lost this object and they might do more searching for it. But it's basically that they're basically kind of using optical and using radar to kind of ping what's out there. And they put an identifier with it and they just try to keep track of it over time. As we know, there are definitely people in the loop. Yeah, definitely people in the loop. And actually one of the big challenges right now is the US has been, oh gosh, I want to say for a decade or something, trying to update the underlying computer system and software that does this. So I think it's pretty outdated. But yeah, I mean, it's a it's a complicated I mean, it's a fairly complicated process to, to keep track of things. And it's a big data problem to do all the analysis, select the collision that happened with Cosmos Iridium. Part of the reason that happened is because the US was only monitoring collisions for military assets. So they actually weren't at that time looking to see if commercial assets, we're going to hit other things. So they didn't send out a warning. So nobody ever tried to avoid that one. Right. But when that collision happened, I guess back to the bad things happened and then we changed. After that happened. They were like, Okay, well now we'll track all operational objects. And now they even track, they track all operational logic and all debris that they're able to track. So we'll even your bill even put out information about these two pieces. Debris are likely to collide. No one can do anything. But like every once a while, if you look at a situation where to Twitter people, they're like, Oh gosh, Here it comes tonight. Well, there were 03:00 AM. Still going to be a new cloud. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a good question. The what I would say, the launch itself would be detected, so our missile Early Warning satellites would pick up on that. So that's how you get. And that's probably a good thing honestly, for kind of international security. You really can't launch a rocket to orbit without, without it being detected, right? And so we don't have to worry too much about about those going going secretly in terms of when it can see it. I mean, typically the lower altitude it is the better. Because it's just going to be relatively larger to see and, and more visible. But the sensors, depending on the sensor, go all the way up to geostationary orbit so they can see stuff out. What does it 36 thousand kilometers. But some of them are better and lower. A lot of my bed best that low-Earth orbit, right? And best at 10 centimeters or larger. If you're smaller than that, even in low Earth orbit, you probably can't be detected. Your question? Yeah. Okay. Were there any questions online? I forgot to paint and I am local here at Georgia Tech. So if you guys ever do, something comes up and you want to chat about it or questions about this up. I'm happy to meet our chat so I'm around. Thank you for having me write it in a few minutes. Great. Perfect. All right. Well, thanks for coming. I was talking about. Yeah. Okay. Good. Yeah. Yeah. That's a little crazy. And there's certainly stuff with with Ukraine now. Like the two are the most traumatic thing that happened. Nobody's attacking the space hazards or anything. But there was a, there were reports that someone was hacking the Russian satellite ground stations. And Russia said that that's not happening. And that if it did happen, that would be an act of war. Which is kind of yeah. Which like I said, there's this debate about what exactly is the limit and how do you bring back these things? But that's still, maybe that's a bluff, but like it's pretty intense thing to thing. And then the other thing that happened is Russia. There's like a kind of a commercial arm ish of their cosmos, their space agency that does commercial launches. And they were supposed to launch a set of satellites for a company called O3B. It's Partially owned by the UK government, but it's a commercial entity. And there, the name stands for the other 3 billion. It's like a big communications satellite thing, kinda like Starlink, not quite as big, meant to provide Internet could have people all over the world are otherwise really get it there anyway, There's just do a launch with Russia has been planned for a long time. You speed, are you package up your satellites in the thing that puts them out in space and you send it over three months in advance. So they launched this past Saturday and a couple of days before the launch. Russia said they would only do the launch if if O3B would provide assurances that the satellite should not be used against Russia in the war. So basically like no communication traffic that would help Ukraine. And it also required that the UK has to like DV, that's like not own the company anymore. And essentially both of those are kinda non-starter. For sure the satellites are going to get used any grain. And like other like Starlink actually, Elon Musk sent a bunch of extra terminals if Ukraine, because having that satellite Internet and satellite communication is hugely important when everything's getting shut off. So and same with a lot of the remote sensing. Commercial entities like Max are another they've been really proactive about like purposely sending imagery Ukraine and making it publicly available and things like that. So yeah, so that was a non-starter. And so basically Russia said, if you don't do those two things were not going to launch and we're not going to provide your satellites back. We're not going to refund you like you to be this kind of forfeit. All are satellites though. Yeah. And it didn't happen, I guess now it's like okay, didn't watch them. Yeah. So there isn't it? So I don't know. I mean, it's not if I flip the space up was not dramatic in the in the scope of the war in general. But for all of this like space security stuff, the whole time I've ever been involved is all theoretical. What would happen if or can you imagine in the event of conflict, how would, you know? But now it's like some of it's starting to play out. Yeah. No, sir. It's very bizarre. Yeah. And there's questions about because all these commercial entities and actually they have in the US military satellites almost certainly are helping Ukraine as well. And so there's a question about if those are targets. And so might you see an attack on some of those assets? That's possible. Yeah. Yeah. Really Yes. That's a really good question. I mean, I think those fibers I'm going take the LSAT. I think the size itself is like a big concern in the sense that I think if you look at that list, which things are most likely to happen. It's probably sider because it's hard to attribute. You can have big effects. The fact that you look at constellation of satellites, it actually doesn't provide as much benefit because you can attack the system as a whole or take the ground system. And I think those are very likely. But the only downside to cyber is there less. If you see the missiles and what you're definitely going to cyber who's a little more uncertainty. But I would say there's a lot of concern about that and I think there's some recognition that's probably our problem area. But the large extent, the space community and the cyber community or different movies. And I think trying to really understand, like we know that there are side group duties, but like, what does that mean and what do you do about it and how do you deal with that? I think that's all. I just don't like just on its way of getting discovered. So the the Space Force put a report at the end of 2021. And he's been making these big thing about like Space Force is going to be a digital force and like they're really want everybody has like programming capabilities and all that. You know, all these different kind of more data analytics and all that kind of stuff for everybody and Space Wars. And I think it's basically a recognition of this ride that like, yeah, we're good at it. Like we may have conflict in space with Russia, but there's a good chance. It's all going to be like on a computer essentially. So think they know and they're trying to ramp up that capability. I think that capability is still lacking in the broader. Maybe there's just not that many people come out that have the right overlap of skills. First. One is effectiveness, activism, like using, oh, yeah, I bet you went up the big group of people. One of those exam. Yeah. So I think that could definitely yeah. And I think well, if that wasn't things with the Russian statement, right, that if there was happening of our system, then we would be more like what are the third party does that? That's what I was thinking. How would they know and how would they like? Yeah, I don't know. It's a very dangerous creation as much because of anonymous, you know, no. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Yeah. It sounds by magnitude of the craft that thank you for your very interesting talk. I really enjoy that I learned lousy. But interestingly, it is quite surprising to me that, that those satellites are critical, so they're very adaptable to attacks. Because it seems to me if you have N2 by magnitude potential formats you may. Object. Dynamics is very complicated as this very, very accurate integration or integration that you've got a tertiary. Got curious, well, how are those or integrations convincing? Like three days. Three, right? Yeah, when you get a warning from Space Command, I think about three days. So I think you make that ESA one. They must provide an initial want it like five or seven days. But the only thing I'm ever going to people actually taking action, it's usually the three-day golf introversion. After that, there's Dockery. That would be my guess. And even that three-day wine that there's a lot of operators that are like men play. We'll take our chances. Well, yeah, there's getting to be too many collision warning though. We can't overall. So and we don't really trust them. And there's a there's an individual down at UT Austin called more of a job who he he has a great presentation where he was he's been able to get through us data, whatever you can get. But then he also got some of the commercial data and he got Russia to give him some data of a. And B shows that the same object in three pulled from the three different databases in three different locations. And so yeah, it's not exact. But they can they can predict forward. They do a pretty old but it's not, it's not an exact science. And so you get three different data sources. There's three different marker, which is definitely, like I said, that might be the Chinese starling thing, right? As they might, China might legitimately have had a different location. So yeah, that's a challenge. Doesn't make space traffic management really hard. Because if you don't, whose data do you use to Herman, like how likely the equation is? You're gonna have a rule, like if it's this likely you have to move. What will who's, who's telling you how likely it out? And probably the whole world won't like cooking and certainly the US milk. But I still makes us quite okay. I'm a very vulnerable or high even though the frequency is only three days, correct? Yeah. I mean, that's that's enough to maneuver. So they can they can query up getting reason that yeah. With that time period. But it's still there. I think it's it's a rule of thumb of when you move is usually about a one in 10 thousand chance of coming within a kilometer of the other object. But yeah, so that's how they're, they're kind of, most of the systems are treating the object as kind of a point. They have a kilometer bubble or the lips around it. And it's like, how likely is it that those ellipses are gonna cross, huh? That's kind of how they're doing. You know, in some ways it is pretty complex. Like you need a big system. You need to do either. Like not just anybody could do this analysis, right? But on the other hand, it's still a little bit rudimentary. And this is one of the complaints we talk about doing space traffic management. And some people are like What you can't do spacecraft management until you get better at, as I say, because I believe, you know, like one you in Russia, China, each time a different thing and you probably all wrong. But it's also not. So that's mostly I mean, definitely people are maneuvering every day based on that. Thank you. Sir. Yeah. What do you think if you come under one unified essence, insist that they supply however, a all these different person. Yeah, I don't know there so there are definitely people calling for a new entity or the UN or somebody to be the central repository. I'm, there's not like stomach for it among the individual nation. Yeah. I think that like, you know, ideally that's what you want and somebody do some kind of harmonization and actually, and then sort of thing. So usually for the satellites, the entity that has the best data is the satellite operator themselves. Because they have, they're communicating with the satellites. They know, you know, pretty exactly where it is and they have that telemetry. But then, and the US is kind of experimented with trying to get operators like send that information in. But they're not very good at adjusting it into their system. And, you know, I think that's and it's how how do you get everybody to do that? And and then there's issues of like even if he didn't integrated system, whether you have the cellular operators or not. How do you know someone's not purposely putting in that data, right? Or, you know, maybe not all the time, but in certain circumstances and, and in the USA mentioned we don't release data even though people nowhere else by satellites are. They don't put it in the public catalogs that data. They make a little colony. Oh, there's somethings like when the objects are missing, it's like it's definitely a hundreds. It might be 1000 or something that at least there's a whole bunch objects. It's all the spy satellites and all the like dense five satellites and pieces of advice I'd like they don't put any of it. But it's like everyone knows where they are. It's like a silly yeah. It's like a constant source of frustration. And McKinsey, I remember in space as our country, their life enough because five-year blah, blah, we're still rocking pupil size, let's say. Yeah, I wonder about that as well. It so smells like an impact on their board as strong or events. Verify that on paper. Yeah, here I've got through, I think the idea was like they're so bright interchanges the whole gothic love. Yet I couldn't Cynthia Jones, entire region where the cars yeah, it's a steal that here for they're no longer doing that. I feel like yeah. They decided it didn't actually help. Yeah, Anything astronomy issue. So they have a little bit and then we think that what they want to do it again. Yeah. Yeah. It's I mean, it's tough because I think it probably cost them money in class, whatever. And they basically, I mean, my sisters, they were doing it very review because they want to be good citizens or because we're getting a whole bunch of bad press. But I've been able to get them to do that indefinitely and very shaky on your client? It's possible. Not very sure, but I feel like it's possible with all the different countries all launch into these kinds of things then? Yeah, I could see that we're just I guess. Yeah, and I think it'll be interesting to look at the specific data. There was a picture of a report that came out. Maybe we'll have better statistics on it. But it seems like it's getting pretty dramatically, gets home periods of time, but it's like okay, this whole X number of hours, you just can't do it. And it also makes some biases because then you have limited time window to look at the sky and I imagine objects and they have to lie in this window. Inference a lot of the studies. Yeah, it's really afraid the issue because I think that one is like they don't want like this other goal that I've set a goal. But they're also, it's like hot, well, how much are they willing to change and the renewal? Well, they're just trying to put up a system for communication. So Starlink is designed to be like this massive constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit so that, that provide the Internet all over the world. So if you have a satellite dish, you can access Internet wherever you are. And, and it's super fast because it has the geostationary satellites and you'd have to like, you know, the delay is enough, like you can't play video games. It's like you can't really do voice on it. And so that was the idea with doing low-earth orbit. Except that if you need to have it like a zillion satellites in order to not lose your connection. So that's what we were doing. A zillion satellite. Is there anybody in the base policy academy that's coming at this from an angle of like decolonization. Like Yeah, you should look at Danielle MIT Media Lab. I can just hire somebody issues. But she does a lot of anti-colonial work. I mean, she has like a million if one person, but because she has some really interesting papers and essays and things on that topic. Okay. Yeah, and then we're going to Yahoo, I mentioned also has a look. Okay. So I think Danielle, hopefully I'm teaching space security the semester and she'd hopefully is going to speak for the class that I'll try to send you an email here and open it up. Many of our students, actually. Yeah, her cognitive really gives a really good time. I'm sorry, another question. I had debris as ownership still a problem with debris? It is. Yeah. So you own your thing indefinitely, even the pieces of it were to break up. So what did he don't like? I don't know. Yeah. That's definitely not right now. You basically I mean, depending what space lawyer You talk to you, but basically you can't clean up small debris because you don't know who it belongs to, so you can't get permission. I'm actually modify this row of deeper. You'd have to probably add something to the treaty or have a new international group. And the other thing you could do is like just do it. And probably no one is going to complain and then it kind of becomes the light yellow. I'm in LA, it's sort of thing. But I don't know, but it's so expensive to develop actually found and put in his face and never in are you willing to risk doing all of that? And then, you know, Russia, whoever is like actually not allowed. I think we maybe write it says, yeah, it's there and chunky. Is it ever possible to just invest? Yeah. So there's a crazy one, the Georgia Tech connection. And so there was a Georgia Tech satellite that was launched. Launch was supposed to launch on when the first on the first Space Force launch. And they never located it in space. Excuse for said it. Well, but they never were able to afford the thing on the Space Force, never picked it up with their instruments. And it's been this like big mystery. So there's something like I talk to students here in Baltimore like I could get in launch it. And my other two. Yeah, I don't know if they like malfunction, but you should. And why did they should've been able to detect it? They just never they never found it. And then there, there was a thing a number of years ago because now with the small satellites, they, they'll put up like a 100 at a time or succeeded Henry. There was something a couple of years ago when they put a 60 cell. It's at a time and they basically like some systems, like you'd like pushes them out so they separate. But this one I think basically like let them all go anywhere to clump and they do naturally spread out over time. But it was one of the earliest ones to do this, this big set. And because they were so close together, it's essentially like they couldn't separate which satellite was which. And so a bunch of the operators like never were able to connect satellites. And so they ended up essentially being lost because they, like you think they're probably tract like to breed. But they were, they never actually really turn them on and were scary. We have a question on like, hey, can you hear me? Yeah, I wanted to ask about starting. So I wanted to ask if standing is commercially viable. Because most of them people who don't have internet probably can't afford startling already and on. So if SpaceX goes bankrupt, because every bird reports media about how how their starship program it may, it could cause bankruptcy. What it means for the future commercialization of space, stars start. Spacex was bankrupt. What happens? Yeah. Well, okay, so all this with a grain of salt because I don't have like obviously access to the internal data or unhide that my understanding would be it's a private company if they go bankrupt, it's all gone. I don't think it's separate and it certainly is all bankrolled by by elan and by SpaceX. There's not I do not think it's set up as like a separate entity. And in fact, I think a lot of the reason Starlink exists is because they thought they could make more money with Starlink. That would then flow into like supporting the launch capability. But Starlink, you know, a lot of space X stuff is a little, you know, if you build it, they will come kind of mentality, right? And enter their credit. That turned out to be true. But I hope that with the Falcon nine and with the cruises them. And so I think it's the same with Starlink from everything that I've read and heard. And certainly like the pricing for Starlink does not cover their costs right now. So they, they charge and I will say I have it. So this part is based on real data because her husband was like, hey, we can get starlings, we do it and do the new space thing. Yes. It makes no sense. So let's say it goes to a $100 to get the antenna. But that antenna definitely cost me $200 at least. So they're working, I'm bringing down the cost, but for now they just heavily subsidize it. And so yeah, between that and they're still in beta are like I don't I do not think they are covering their costs on Starlink, but that's what they were for Falcon nine, few. And I think they are revenue positive. Well, I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Oh, that's a good question. So like in the event that they go bankrupt or just in general as a like, I don't know. So the thing I'm trying to think of as that company, Iridium came up one of the slides. They I think went bankrupt. They went bankrupt or almost bankrupt. And so they went through a process of deciding if they were going to sell off their satellites or if they were going to like deorbit all of them because I think at 1 they were, they were going to deorbit. They like 66 satellites that are in the orbit, all their satellites at that because the company was going out of business. And B also filed for bankruptcy. But they left all their satellites end and just got restructured, the UK audit and all that. So probably do something like that. They'd like sell off the assets though. And there's a lot, I mean, a lot of people think there's all these mega constellations communication companies, because I talk about space like Starlink. But Amazon Cooper is one and O3B as one. And most people think they're, there maybe will be one that survives, maybe too. So he says like a commercial capability. So there might be some consolidation at some point for those. Yeah. But the other side of it is like whether the US could take control during like a conflict. That's my first I thought you're asking. Even right now. Okay. Yeah. So right now, especially the US companies are like completely I'm at it. I'm not late. Space x gets most of their money. Pod, even like a planet is a small imaging satellites and the most revenue comes from like national constants organization and deity instead that she has money to buy imagery. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that and this is what happened historically. The US government used to have a rule called shutter, shutter control, where they're like basically two are in conflict or during a national security issue, if we tell you to turn off your satellite, you have to do it. But that's part of the devices. And in practice they never did that. But they did something called checkbook shutter control, which is they just bought all the images and they did it under like an exclusive license. And so yeah, they never had to be like, turned off and not allow their dislike. Well, but probably they do something like that. And like I said, those companies are very amount of money that's already there because Nestle, I said they're very amenable. I think your question is, I got to go back and I think it is that they still technically I mean, there's always like a national security clause in there. That time limit, say it's already posted. So less than cosmic again for joining us and a great discussion. Thank you so much.