Research Futures Space Access and New Opportunities

Good afternoon.

A very good afternoon everyone.

My name is Leila Shakuru and I'm professor of international law and director of the democratic citizenship theme of the University of Portsmouth.

So today we have another fascinating edition of our research Futures webinar with Professor Adam Amara who’s the director of The Institute of cosmology and gravitation Royal Society Wilson fellow as well.

The Institute being The Institute of the University of Portsmouth.

Obviously, we are delighted to welcome Adam who has an extremely impressive CV he’s receive his PhD from The Institute of astronomy of the University of Cambridge, then he did a postdoc at the cea in cycling France leading to the submission of June concept.

I'm sure he's going to say more about that then he worked in Switzerland.

He moved to eat age in Switzerland and he worked as a swicky price fellow before Promoted to the role of senior scientists and in 2019, we were particularly happy because he joined the University of Portsmouth as a professor and director of indeed the cosmology and gravitation Institute.

Adam today is going to talk us through a number of fascinating issues related to space as you could see from probably his first slide and I'm particularly interested because I think he's going to try to create link between his work and the work of the democratic citizenship theme addressing questions of democracy and citizenships in particular.

Thank you so much Adam, so he’s out for the dude before is use Thank you so much for the introduction and the invitation to be here.

It's great to talk about space and it’s great to frame things in a way beyond my day job.

Let me see that's like I'll start with where I'm comfortable though.

You know, I went into astronomy for a reason.

I think most people as we said earlier go through an astronaut or astronomy face and I still am very captured by astronomy and I find that.

Whenever I travel wherever I go in the world one thing that astronomy has is we all sit under the same sky and I find that I have very common conversations no matter where I am whether I’ve found myself in West Africa or Taiwan Hong Kong or orange Switzerland these conversations keep coming up and I think we are connected in our Humanity by a fascination of space.

And what that led to okay? Well that sort of late leads to if you want to do Pioneer and astronomy is you need two things to be under control.

You need to build a really Exquisite world-class instruments and really Exquisite world-class Hardware.

And so what I'm showing you here is the completed telescope on the left hand side.

This is a telescope called Euclid.

It's particularly close to my heart because when I move to cea as you said in sackley CRM to explore this Mission concept, so two of us came up with this idea of trying to design a space telescope for peering into the very early universe.

And at the time it was a crazy wacky idea of two people now as you can see on the left, it's a built spacecraft.

It was supposed to launch next year.

But this is an example where you see even in a bubble where what you care about is fundamental physics of the universe.

You cannot Escape human reality.

So as I said Euclid was supposed to launch next year.

It probablywill not launch next year and why isthat? Well, it was due to fly on a Russian rocket.

And as soon as Russia decided to invade Ukrainethat all went up and ofcourse in the scale of human catastrophes, thisis very very low, but it has meant that we've now moved wenow have to go for a different rocket.

And and everybody's shifting theirtechnology over wanting to get that satellite up and so there will bea delay in our program.

And so we're not separate fromthe work that you do in Democratic citizenship.

We'reimpacted by it nevertheless.

Once you've got fantastic instruments and the latest sort ofhardware for studying things fromspace the other thing you need whether you look up and downis a really deepunderstanding of how do you process data? Becausegetting this data is really expensiveas I said Euclid peoplehave spent 20 years a thousand people spend 20 years.

building working on that projectHow do you make the most out of the data it collectsand here what you end updeveloping is really Advanced data analytics skills.

And if we look around the world data analytics hasbecome embedded in every pathof Life everywhere from commercial activity throughto Scientific activities.

The latestdiscussions are always around machine learningartificial intelligenceAdvanced statistical methods.

So allof these things are now needed in pretty muchmost Endeavors and in astronomy, we've pushedsome of the areas pretty aggressively as Isaid to make the most of our data,So when we look forward to space activities,you've got to have those two hats building thelatest technology and havingthe data analysis methodology to beable to make the most out of it.

And so this ties in reallywell with what's happening in the country at apolitical level.

And so late last yearthe UK government released this theNational Space strategy andit is the first time that we have had asa nation a National Space strategy and the Spacestrategy is extremely ambitious.

And it calls for a series of things aroundunlocking growth in the spacesector.

collaboration International collaborationgrowing the UK as a science and technology superpower anddeveloping resilience and capabilityin our services and then it goes on to talk througha 10-point plan.

And this very ambitious new way of thinking about space is nowbeing rolled out.

So we're in the phase of figuring out.

Okay.

Now we know where we want to go.

How do we do it?And it's a very different posture because ifyou go back 20 years.

The I think the UK position was we do spacethrough the European Space Agency.

But other countries in particular France arethe space superpowers, they can do their ownspace program and they can do activities throughEaster.

And I think this is the UK deciding tobe ambitious itself, which is really excitingfor people like me.

This is what you dream about is isdoing space activities on all kinds of scales.

And so in response to the National Space strategy, youmight ask.

Okay.

Well, where is this space activitygoing to come from in the UK?And so like most things as soon as there's awish to go in the direction suddenly millionsof reports started coming out and I'vejust picked out a couple of things.

So on the left hand side, it'sthe it's a report from Bryce Techon where are the space companies andalso very similarly.

Where are the space jobsin the country?And what what is really interesting what most peopledon't know is the southeast and actuallyspecifically around where weare in Portsmouth Hampshire and Surrey.

We have more space companies than anywhere else and forspace jobs.

I think we're only second to London.

And so our region around Portsmouth is theengine of the UK space sectorand so an immediatething is obvious is that if we are tomeet this massive National ambition, we needto make sure that where we have space activities already thatwe make that engine work as effectively asit can be.

And so that's industry on the other hand.

You can ask.

Okay.

Well, where are the best universities for thissort of thing and a few weeks ago USA newsreleased their rankings for and hehad the category of space signs and here yousee the top 10 universities for space science Portsmouthis in the top 10.

So there we are at the bottom, butyou can see there's a good spread up and down the country.

Sowe have good universities all the way up and down the country butactually the university thatlinks closest to where the companiesare and where the space activity is is actually poisonousso we should do more in spaceand we should engage and take a an active leadingrole in helping the nation deliver a Space strategy.

You can go further into these reportsand look into details of what the companies around uscan do and this is a very busy slide.

Thankfullyit's recorded.

So you can pause and enjoy atyour leisure the take-home messages.

Notonly do we have a lot of companies around us, but thecompanies do all aspects ofspace.

So from for youknow, they do it we have what we call end-to-endcapabilities inside our region.

Which means that this region not only has a lot of space activities.

It's also has a special role.

It's effectivelya microcosm for the entire country becausewe have a little bit of everything and soif you want to develop new ideas try newstrategies, you should probably come and test them outin Hampshire and Surrey.

See that they work and then the ones that dowork you roll them out nationally.

So I think we do have animportant role to play in many many ways goingforward over this exciting decade ofspace activity.

To kind of boost that along we recently held thema meeting called mission space.

This was heldin early May and it was a brilliant meeting.

We had lots of activity lotsof enthusiasm.

We had a keynote speakersfrom NASA.

We had the head of the UKspace agency science program.

We hadDavid Willett who announced atin real time that he just become the advisor achair of the advisory panel to the UK space agency andwe had lots of leaders of these local companies and wehad a very interesting discussion about what it isthat we can do better and we can engage to make a strongerprogram and you see I've highlighteda few things.

There's a real desirein the region to work together.

There's a shortage of skills though.

They don't have enough people whoare trained in the skills that you would need to do space activities.

And that's a real shame because as we'lltalk about in a minute space impacts manyareas of life.

No matter what your areaof interest is.

There's probably a space component thatcould be useful but there's just not enoughpeople to know how to handle space data.

And that's really sad.

As I said earlier.

Most people go througha dinosaur astronaut face.

So somehow people areinterested and then we lose them and we have to figurewe have to figure out why.

There's some details about how the region can work together.

There's issues around National supply chain, butan important thingthat came up with you can have lots of Industry activities butuniversities, do you still have a special role they areanchor institutions and they are they havea a trusted partner statusand maybe two companies would have find harder timeworking with each other but going through University.

It's sometimeseasier.

So I think there is pressure on us.

To do our bit for the region.

And I'll just I just took out oneslide from a colleague from NASA JPL.

Who showed a collection ofmore science missionsand what you can see is we thinkabout once satellite every once and why but thereare satellites all over the place and all kinds of interesting sciencehappening.

So if you care about the sun many satellites havegone through to Target the sun.

If you careabout things outside of our solar system lots ofsatellites, but interestingly if you look at theEarth, there's a lot of interest aroundlooking at the Earth.

Which I'll talk about in a minute, but in particularI'll highlight.

Do you see the line? I've gotcursor this line here what thatseems to have an awful lot of satellites comparedto everywhere else.

That'sthe line around equator and that turnsout to be a very special region.

It's special becauseif you put a satellite at the right height onjust above the equator, it'll stay stillit'll always be above you it's called geostationary andgeostation is a very special because youknow where it's all going to be.

So if you want to send ita communication message, you know, it's always goingto be the same direction.

It's always going to be above you or slightly off andyou can receive a signalBut there's limited space up in space.

It's it's starting toget quite congested.

If we don't have good regulatory Frameworks, wewill just literally clog up space just as wedo any other natural resource and in particularthis line that runs along the Equator that cuts througha lot of countries that haven't hadaccess to space in the past.

It seemsa bit unfair that the area of spaceright above their heads would be clutteredup by the rich countries.

And if they rich countries don'tbother to clean up behind them.

I think that's areally unfair use of a globalresource that we have.

all right, soI particularly like space for astronomy reasonswhat other applications are there for space data.

I'll run through two-ish examplesand I'll rely on the work of a colleagueof mine here at the University of Portsmouth Professor Richardchew.

And the first example is using satellitedata to get ready andmake you a reduced the risk of disasters.

And so this was a map that Richard hastaken where he Maps out an island here Pacific island.

And then he overlays lotsof data.

You can see where the rivers are you cansee how high the land is you can see where theshoreline is and by building upthese layers using local datathe collect from the ground, but also satellite dataRichards able to build up arisk map.

And and where there are dangers aroundthe coast in red.

And in particular what you care aboutis areas of Geo riskwhere something geological is going to happen.

But if that happensin the middle of nowhere and there's nobody around you care abit less.

Well you really care about is where is there going tobe a natural disaster that hits people orinfrastructure things like that? And thisis what Richard calls pinch points.

So bringing all ofthis data together around this specific Island.

Richardis able to highlight points thatare of particular risk and then governance level.

Youcan look at these maps you can see how do thesecorrelate people, you know, are these poorer communitiesthat will not only are theygoing to be hit by a natural disaster and they also economicallynot so resilient and therefore can't deal withit.

And then I think you get a moral imperative becauseyou know ahead of time where these thingsare likely to cause the most damage and so what doyou do with this information? And how do you then go?ahead and effect changeanother version of this.

So if you move outside these islandsand you go further out you moveacross the coast and what you have is a relatively shallow waterand measuring the depth of the shallow wateris a practice called bathymetry.

And understanding the bathymetry the exact waythat the coast runs up comes up tomeet.

The island is really important and it'sreally important because it tells you thepotential you have for a tsunami.

And so what the tsunamis usually do is there's someeffect over here.

It causes water tocome in and depending on precisely how thethe water comes up how what the how thedepths changes the the tsunami can buildup to be quite big.

So again before Toonami happens,if you can map out the depth of water aroundyour region, you can mathematically model which placesare a greater risk and then you can do the same thing.

We talkedabout early age if that correlates to people infrastructurethat sort of thing and then you canknow ahead of time we need more resilience around thisarea.

sorry, so that's in theresilience andwe can Richard has also worked alot and new satellite data at the response end.

So oncea disaster has happened a stormhas gone through an area forexample satellite data becomes very useful forlooking for features looking for.

Landslide features looking for areas where Rivershave burst their Banks and seenwhere responders shouldgo to.

And in fact Richard has recently come back.

Ithink last year.

He helped their team in Mozambique withthe world food program and here that focusedon drones so we can see at the bottom is a helicopter droneand a fixed Wing drone.

And but they want to embed this also withsatellite technology.

And what happens here.

Is that when you arriveat a post disaster scene youYou you have a limited to every resources and so saythe helicopters you can either use thehelicopters to survey the land.

And then mount a rescue operation.

But then you're splitting your helicopter resource andwhat This brilliant teamat the world food program did was okay.

They've broughtin these much cheaper drones.

So they send the dronesout to do the aerial surveillance andthey they used amuch more precious helicopter time to go and rescue peopleand one of the one of the things that we'reinvolved in at the astronomy side is helping withthe data analysis thatcomes through so you get a large number ofimages and how can you consistently and andeffectively process thatdata to go and and help peopleon the ground make decisions about where they go.

So again, it's a it's a real world application.

Of the kind of Technologies you would get from satellites.

And then you can continue once once you go down this road.

Thereare many many things.

You can do just this morning.

Iwas a talk by a company alphys thatmonitors internally displacedpersons camps.

And so they have a particular interest in Afghanistan.

And what they do is they look a satellite data over time.

They've designed an algorithm that can lookfor the tents set up in theseIDP caps.

And simply by counting thenumber of tents.

They know the flow of idps inthe country and until last year.

Most ofthe flow was caused by drought and families.

So it gives them anidea of what was happening in real time andthey could feed that on to responders on the ground being veryuseful.

And of course I did we all have refugee camps ifthey cross over the Border you can do the same sort of monitoring andthe health of the refugee camps fairly straightforwardlywith satellite data.

There's also need you know,the sometimes you need more refugee camps becauseyou have a large inflow of people andtrying to map out good appropriate locationsthat are safe and soundcan be tricky in some very remoteregions.

And again, I think satellite applications have arelatively good role to play there.

Staying on the theme of idpsand refugees.

There's a border inbetween these two and there's usuallya lot of political pressure whether you let people across the border ornot and understanding the flows and pressures that thepeople feel and giving organizations likethe UN a better ability to understand what'shappening at the borders and some of these borders againare quite big and and remote and difficult toaccess and so that's useful information thatwe can derive from satellites.

moving away from thatwe all rely on food monitoring crops super important.

And as we you know,as we warm up and Destroy up the planet around us, we mightas well be able to track where the food is how this hashow the Farms are doing and heresatellite applications are extremely usefulfor monitoring crop Health monitoring theway pests come into the system understanding someof these weeds that can start to take over farms andextremely powerful lead downfrom space and again, especially forareas that are difficult to reach in any otherway.

Once you're very good at monitoring cropHealth anywhere in the world, even remote regions itenables things like microinsurance.

Sowe reach we did again led bymy colleague Richard Chu a recent study onoffering Insurance to smallfarmers in Colombia.

And so the idea is theseFarms are so small that most insurance companiesit it won't make sense for them to go out ifvalueate the state of their farm and give thema premium.

And then it also doesn't makesense in terms of overhead to evaluate theThe claim when it's made so for Farmer claims thatthere's been a problem that is sending somebody over to look at.

Itjust isn't isn't worth the cost.

But with satellite Technologies, whatwe explored was, can you set a premium simplybased on remote sensing data? So the farmertells you where they are you look at the satellite data youevaluate what you think the risks are and you automaticallygive them a premium.

So that's automating the thepremium side and then what you need to dois should something go wrong and thefarmer claims that their Farm has been devastated.

You canlook back at Satellite data and you can say indeed.

Yes,I can see this thing went through.

I can look at the thevegetation index for the crops.

I cansee that this Farm's crops have been destroyed.

I'll automaticallypay out the premium and by lowering thecost of delivering these Services suddenly youenable a a farmer ina fairly distant region to get access to something thatwe take for granted and the list continuesyou can monitor illegal activities in mind inforestry and and the listcontinues and that's simply on the monitoring side.

Let'snot forget.

The satellites also are incrediblygood at telling you where you are.

So anythingto do with position navigation andtiming to get you from one point.

anothersatellites are an incredible Lee importantembedded technology.

And also satellites are really important for communication.

So more and moreyou hear talk of having an internetthrough satellites where you can connect to the internet no matterwhere you are and and theneven in a place like Ukraine where youknow, they're infrastructure gets decimated, you know,people are offering to do connections throughsatellites.

So, you know, hugely importantthings are happening in the world based onsatellite Technologies.

And so yeah, just to leave itwith with this that with this incredible resourcethat we have up there.

It's a valuable natural commoditythat we have we're filling itall the time.

And so we need to think responsibly andmanage that space as well.

So I'll just leave it with conclusions.

So spaceenvironment is one of our precious naturalresources satellites enable us to lookdeep into the universe, but they also allow us to do alot of good here on Earth.

The key ingredients are learn how to build thingsthat are really really good and high-end technology and developsoftware to analyze thedata that's very precious that you've spent a lot of effort andcollecting.

These skills and these high-tech skills arein big demand.

Because there's an enormous skill Gap but on theother hand, it means that people that train for these areas canget good jobs and can have very happycareers.

And sothat's something that I think we should bear in mind.

What's really exciting at the moment is thatthe cost of getting things into space isgetting lower and lower and lower that means smaller companiescan think about putting stuff into space.

It meansuniversities can think about doing their own space experimentswithout needing massive government support, butit also means low-income countries get accessto space in a way that they didn't used to they neverhad before and so accessibility to this natural resourcesbecoming really important and bydoing that we enable all ofthese people to solve a wide array of problems.

Andthe question is I thinkfor discussion is as you lowerthe barrier to access as you broaden thecommunity of people that can make the most of this natural resource.

Howdo we grow that community and howdo we work together to make it as effective as possible?I'll stop there.

To learn thank you so much.

And I was really very interestingfascinating and also put in some simpleterms so that everybody could really understand very well what youwere talking about.

And as I sometimes say thisis a talent because this is technical not necessarily veryeasy to approach but you've made it very approachable.

So thanksvery much for that.

Well, I have plenty of questions.

Naturally.

There's a question already from one of our colleague Indians,but I'd like to ask my first question as asort of privilege as a chair, you know getting back toyou one of your first slides we see the Earth andwe see this line sort of crowded spacewhere all the satellites and different things are andyeah, and I remember wehad this sort of private conversation exactly this line that we seehere very crowded.

Private conversation about that and you explainedto me that actually these was somehow aboutabove a number of developing countries in Africa inparticular.

So I'd like to take your brain tosee how from your perspective not as a lawyer obviously,you know, International lawyers, we've studied space lawtogether with the law of the sea interestingly at the time.

I was told this way but not as a lawyer but as a scientists,what should take on theseHow could I put it maybe use of resources useof space use of sovereignty whatyou think about that? And what's the future you think?yeah, so I think that particular line the equatorial lineis is particularly a problematicbut actually the problem applies toall orbits all of our all ofits our problem and if you think aboutIf if two satellites hit each other.

They spew out a huge mess everywhereand that that huge mess contaminatesmany many orbits.

And so it's notonly a problem for that one line.

It's it's aproblem for the whole Space ecosystem.

Andso yeah, I think justlike we're starting to learn here.

You can't throw your garbagejust on the street.

You just can't do that.

That's thething.

You might have done in Victorian England.

Idon't know I imagine, you know, but you can'tthrow stuff out just into the street.

We need you needto think carefully about it.

And now we all recycleright we put garbage in the trash and wewe recycle as much as we can and thesame is going to have to be true of space whenever youput anything up.

You need an end-of-life plan that Dorbits your spacecraft gets it out ofthe way and and then leave spacefor somebody else and that that bit atthe end.

That's where legislation needs tocome in and enforce it.

Yeah, Ithink anybody that throws a satellite up into space without beingable to move it out of the way.

So it doesn't hit anotherthing another satellite or has aclear plan for how to get it out of the way but atmosphere.

I think he's been irresponsible.

That's reallyinteresting because I suppose that everybody in geodesian.

She'spretty much well the right to environment wehave in portsmic number of programs aroundthe ocean or plastic in the ocean for instance, butspace is some hard to distance probably sowe don't really see to us our environment.

So oneof the things you've said clearly and you raise someawareness that it's clearly our environment as well, isn't it?Absolutely our environment?Suffers from the same tragedy ofthe commons that any environment that we share together.

It maybe even worth because it's up there and we don't think about it, but itis a precious commodity and we shouldbe very very careful about how we treat it and asit I think it needs to be as irresponsible toput a spacecraft in spacewithout dealing with the consequences as it isnowadays just to empty your rubbish ontothe street.

Nobody would stand for that things.

Actually.

Exactly.

Excellent.

So the firstquestion from this what is a typical set imageresolution and refresh rate against costswhere can find where can I find such information? Sothere are many many satellites.

Theyhave all kinds of resolution somego down to 30 meterrental 30 centimeter resolution.

They tendto be commercial companies where you have to pay for them.

SoifWell, we can I can send you a list and thenthat tends to be free data outthere an easy place to go to to see just tonsof free available data is the Google Earth enginethe Google Earth engine has ingested satellitedata from for example a centralSentinel satellites.

They tend to be much higher much muchlower resolution.

So around 10meters 20 meters depending on the satellitethere you have so we have resolution outthere from tens of meters all the way through tosub meter resolution.

A lot of it isfree go to the Google Earth engine some ofit you have to pay for even thecommercial ones though.

They make exceptions forresearch projects.

So if you have a specific research project inmind, you can get in touch with some ofthese companies and they'll often give you a small targeted pieceof data the refresh rate depend againon each satellite and each network, butyou can get coverage every few days.

What's a refresh rate actually?Where does it mean? I think I'm guessing whatthey mean is.

How often do you see the same regionof the ground? That's right.

So thatif the satellite orbits, it doesn't look at the same place every timeso when is the next time you'llget an image of that area? And again everyfew days is is typical.

Interesting, I should say one of the things I'm tryingto do here in Portsmith is promote theidea of designing your own space missions.

So it wasgas, right so Gus if there's a specific wavelength thatyou want or a specific spatial resolution thatyou need or a specific.

So, it's Cadence rightthe refresh rate the specific Cadenceyou need maybe if it's notout there we can design a mission and make the case that weshould apply it.

All right, that's interesting.

So Adam, let's imagine that Iwant to launch my own space mission.

Not that you ideasto monitor some sort of Human Rights related abuses,you know where I'm going.

So, how shouldI do not do we have regulation in the UK or Icould as an individual well launchmy satellites somewhere.

Well what you'll do, so this is exactly what we'rein the middle of creating.

So we had the directorof the space agency come to Portsmouth two weeksago.

And had a really great discussion with him.

What we're pitching to him is the idea of Portsmouth hostingwhat's called a Foundry ora space incubator and the idea is somebody hasan idea of a thing they want to do in space but presumably, youknow, most peopledon't have the technical expertise to design a spacemission.

I don't know, you know, I don't know a lot about the thermalproperties of structures.

I don't know if you do Layla but youknow, I need help right? And so what we'll dois anybody who has an idea of what they want to do.

Wewill fill a room with scientists and engineersand we will design that missionfor you.

And then and then depending onwhat the outcome of that will advise youon where to go to.

Get funding to have it built.

And are part of that.

You'll you'll you'll needto understand the regulatory things.

But we can we we shouldif we're successful here in Portsmouth be ableto help you go from your idea.

to a satellite in spaceAgain, it very very interesting and there were fascinating in andquite a well exhilarating to see thatwe are in the top 10 of the world.

Really that's about what theUK.

Well the UK.

All right.

Ithought you see my my mind is racing.

I thought it was the word and inthe even better the top 10 ofthe UK for sure that's excellent in any case so but tell me the costs.

Whatare we talking about?Depends on how big you want to go.

So at thebig end billion pounds right Euclid isprobably a billion pound experiment.

Butwhat's really exciting is itwhat's happening at small end and so recently astandard has come out around something calleda cubesat.

So this is a satellite that's 10centimeters by 10 centimeters by Center 10 centimeters.

And these tubes can be quite cheap.

They can beyou depends.

There's there's a shop ifyou if you want to build your own this Cube sack shop.

comyou go there you buy your components.

So at the level of tens of thousands ofpounds, you can build your own satellite.

And you can launch it for about 60,000 pounds.

So ifif you really wanted to at the cheap end you can getto I don't know a couple hundred thousand pounds for a satellite.

Really interesting.

So it relates to the ideaof access access to space and space technologyand indeed, you know this sort of observation.

Let'ssay so do you think the fact that it's less costlyat than it was in the past.

Is it goingto be away for developing countries to reclaim somehowtheir rise and their territories they've lost against youknow, well be good players.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And in my enable a lot of these, youknow technology LeapFrog thingsthat use often seeI think the internet might be particularly exciting.

Youknow, I have fiber optic cables that come intomy home, right and so I've got really fast internet but getting fiberoptic cables installed when you don't have infrastructure, somaybe ifyou can lower access you can just leapfrock thatdon't pick up all the roads to put down fiber opticsget your internet.

From a TaylorMade satellitethat you've been able to launch because the costs arelower but launch costs can even go downto zero we at thismeeting a couple of weeks ago.

We atthe University were being offered Freelancers becausea commercial satellite thatneeds needs a lot of space by the launcher,but then it has little pockets little gapsthen they don't have any useful.

And soif we come along and give them a particular idea andsay hey, can you take this along with you? They'll basically doit for free.

So, you know, the access hasbecome a lot less of an issue.

Hmm super interesting Adam.

Thankyou so much.

We have a related question from Richard would callingthat limited ideal space on bythe states below it help ormake matters work one might think thatthe less wealthy States below would be glad ofthe Tax and Revenue possibilities.

Even if they would needa friendly space fairing state to enforce forpay presumably that spaceThis feels like the plot of some dystopian sciencefiction, but might not be better than the sofar tragedy of the common for which their studentslittle realistic and possible cure lawyers askinglike Leila's idea of Human Rightsabuses spotting satellites.

Yeah, the problem is sovereignty ends above a certainheight, right? So nobody owns andI don't remember you.

You must rememberthat.

Yeah a little bit.

If I may interrupt you've been and again, I'ma space lose specialist, but I remember from my years ofsitting that asobone University and it was taught withthe law of the sea.

So it's quite common interms of how it was made in the60s, you know, very like post economization mindsetand also New Frontier typeof you know, so the idea is that we have acommon space.

So there is a certain limit that thestate owned so to speak and then you have likefor to see you have a special economic zones, you see certain distanceand then it's free.

So probably Adam sorry I interruptyou, but that's what you wanted to say that the further up you good indeed.

There's a number I don't remember 10kilometers, whatever there's a number andabove that so A sovereignty and and so yeahstates do not own the satellite spaceabove them.

So they yeah at the moment theycan't charge for anything.

Mmm.

We send andState and all thatregulating that better or not at all.

Um, yeah, I think there are so there's interesting thingsin the UK about who regulates these things.

I thinkthey're responsibilities have recently shifted.

I don'tparticipate a lot in thoseregulatory regularly.

Yeah, II focus on the technical side,but it's good to know roughly what's going on and Ithink it's around this idea of responsibility andI think for exampleeven around insuranceIf if you're oneof these Tech billionaires and there are two in theworld that want to launch thousands of satellites.

Are they allowed to put something in spacethat they can't maneuver? Hmm, and thenit'll just do what it's doing.

And then if it'sgonna crash into your spacecraft, it's your responsibilityto move out of its way.

I don'tknow it's complicated thing.

It is very complicated.

But you know what, itseems to me that because of the tech and the cost the fact thatit's less costliest before and it's going to be more popular.

The regulationsbit is going to come faster than we think becauseit's going to be very much needed and probably through anew explain that very well this environment or awareness thing.

Absolutely.

Yeah, that's cool.

Another question.

I have in mind and ofcourse you'll forgive me because it relates to democratic citizenship.

Butwe talked about access.

We talked somehow aboutbehavior and citizenship.

You know, how do we behave inthe environment Etc? What about space education?Because I think it's quite fascinating it.

It shouldbe taught to to everybody it is to some extent at school,but you know relatively like manner, right? Oh, absolutely.

So asI said right at the beginningmy impression and maybe I'm biased becausepeople are just nice to me when I'm there in person, but myimpression isWherever you go, no matter how far away fromcivilization you are you will find somebody.

You know that likes to look up at the sky and likesto talk about it and you just can't get away fromit people love space science, Ithink in general and so yeah using thatas a vector to drive technology is really importantSouth Africa has been very good for example innot so much space sign, but they've usedradio astronomy.

Um, they've really latched onto this idea called the squarekilometer array and using thisagain.

It's a billion pound experiment as away of growing stem interestand growing their technology education inall sectors.

So again, it'sthis leverage in this interest in astronomy to grow stem.

When it comes to space education, there's it.

I talkedabout cubesats.

There's an even more exciting thing calleda cancer which is even smaller.

And what you can do with a cancer is you can they're socheap that you can get students to build them.

You know most universities.

And then again you can get them to fly for free so you can givestudents.

And quite young students very easyaccess to something that can go up doa little experiment and because it's cheap.

It doesn't matterwhat it is.

And so you can educate practical skills aswell that will become important for the bigger ones again, veryvery interesting and some sortof international.

Well, Idon't know my question might seem a bit funny.

He's there some sortof international solidarity for space educationlike programs that we have sometimes inauthor disciplines to yeah, make surethat the level is a bit harmonious everywhere.

And I'm not aware of any but thereare a couple of organizations.

I myself spent asummer at the International Space University, which isa brilliant brilliant thing because it coversall aspects of space.

So you come in I came inas a physicist I learned about.

Yeah, it's the bitsabout around International Space law.

I learned thatISU and then you learn engineering you learnall kinds of other things and what I assu does areally good job of is having a verydiverse pool of students.

So theyreally pull students from all over the world.

They're very proud of their theirdiverse range.

So there are organizations likethat that try to create andFoster a global community in space, but I'mnot aware of specific standards aroundspace education.

Mmm, really interesting.

So Adamthat was fascinating.

I'm conscious oftime.

I think we have to bring that to Clues.

But thank you so muchfor making that so easy to understand so approachable.

I think we are entitled Thethe program our space our futures something like that.

So it's very much like that our space our future so it'sup to us now that we're interested what she said to sortof grasp and embed the realityof space and make sure that the University ofFort Smith is going to look she's a satellite prettysoon.

I agree.

I agree again.

The messages space isnot for us nerds.

It's for everybody.

So you needto claim your own.

Absolutely.

Thank you so so much Adam.

There wasfascinating everybody you remember that the discussionis recorded.

And so it's going to be available ona research features our our websitesunder the banner of the University of Portsmouth, andI'd like to conclude in thanking mytheme in particular and Barnaby fortheir support.

Thank you so much everybody for yourkind.

Well listening and questions andthank you so much again Adam for your great personality.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye everyone.

See you very soon.