Uma Brugman (8:31)

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Maria Varmazas (9:02)

Today's guests are Aerospace Corporation's Uma Brugman, who is the Executive Director of the Space Safety Institute, and Brian Weeden from the center for Space Policy and Strategy. We're talking about the hot off the presses 2024 Space Safety Compendium, which highlights high priority technical and policy considerations for the future sustainability of space operations.

Uma Brugman (9:29)

I'm Uma Brugman. I am the Executive Director of Aerospace's Space Safety Institute. We released the first edition of the Space Safety Compendium and this year when we went back and looked at it, we incorporated feedback from industry and government reviewers. So we had several sessions with the Government. We had several sessions with industry and took their feedback and incorporated that. The whole reason behind releasing this edition is to put forth our recommendations and observations on important safety issues. One thing I'll introduce is that we brought together in this edition cislunar safety. That was one area that we hadn't really talked about as much. And as more and more people go to the Moon, there's an opportunity here for us to avoid the challenges that we have in the Earth orbit. So that's one of the areas that we made changes in. And the other area that I want to quickly point out is that when we talk about space operations, we've had a chance to observe what Large Constellation operators are doing. And I want to say that they're doing an excellent job of avoiding collisions, minimizing creation of debris. And so that's something that we talk about a little bit in this edition that we didn't in the last one.

Maria Varmazas (11:06)

Fantastic. Brian, I want to turn to you. A lot of the recommendations, I'm sure, have lean a lot on policy. And last two years there's been a lot of work in policy, or at least a lot of discussion. Maybe not things haven't gone as far as people would like, but things are being worked on. I'm very curious about the policy recommendations that are in this 2024 compendium. Especially maybe in comparison to where we were two years ago.

Brian Weeden (11:33)

Yeah, no, it's a great question and it's something to keep in mind. Because a lot of what we have in here relating to those policy level discussions. I'll say first and foremost, this document is not a policy document. The goal was to put together more technical operational recommendations for best practices. But they are absolutely rooted in a lot of the policy questions. So to back up a little bit, several levels, as many people know, we have this growing participation in space from many more countries and many more companies, rapid growth in the number of space objects, and lots of questions about what is the best governance framework for how those activities will be undertaken. We have this core set of international treaties that lay out very broad principles for how space activities should be conducted. And those same treaties also say the onus is on the states to be responsible for their own national space activities, including those of the private sectors. And there's broad agreement on some international norms when it comes to things like orbital debris mitigation or, you know, how to best provide for the long term sustainability space activities. But beyond that, there's not a lot of clarity on things, you know, at the national level, states are Pretty much free to kind of implement those broad principles and norms how they see fit. We see a lot of innovation from states in terms of national proposals for various policy measures or, you know, ways to improve debris mitigation. And then we've also seen a lot of private sector proposals over the last several years. I've sort of lost track of how many different groups of think tanks, academics or companies or various other places have put forward sort of their proposals for best practices or standards or various recommendations. So that's sort of the context that this is going into. And I think that, you know, if people are looking for, we're going to get to one set of rules and one entity in charge. We're quite away from that. Right. There was an interesting document put out by the office Space Commerce earlier this year that sort of recognized, you know, that the global vision they see for space traffic coordination, space traffic management, is there's going to be multiple different entities that are all putting out recommendations or who are, you know, having different sets of analyses on conjunctions or close approaches. And the question is, how do those different hubs work together? How do they exchange data? So that, honestly, is sort of the biggest sort of policy level recommendation we have in here, is the need to establish mechanisms for international coordination and cooperation between all the different stakeholders, public and private, within the US and internationally. That's one of the biggest missing pieces that we see for taking the next step on many of this individual space safety issues we see.

Maria Varmazas (14:38)

So diving into sort of the areas of the space safety issues. Uma, I'll go back to you for this one. Can you walk me through just broadly what those focus areas are for the SSI and sort of how that was gone through in this compendium?

Uma Brugman (14:53)

So I'll start with the easiest one, human spaceflight safety. As more and more humans are going out to space, we think of those suborbital spaceflights we're looking at, what measures do we need to take, what needs to be in place, what are the technical hard challenges? For example, if there was an issue with having to rescue a human in space, do we have the capability or what do we need to have in place? Things like that. So that's what human spaceflight safety discusses. We've got launch and reentry safety, and that's pretty straightforward. What do we need to have in place so that we have safe launches? And then when you're reentering, how do you come in safely without creating any additional debris or having problems having any collisions? We talk about space Situational awareness, and that's pretty straightforward. We're looking at space debris. Where is it? What are the things that are around you when you're launching, when you are operating in space? And that space operations is about safely operating. Once you are through launch and you are in space, what do you need to do to safely operate? And we discuss things like active debris removal. What's needed to do that so that you can safely operate? Then we have Cyber and Spectrum. And this is again a very new and emerging area. Cyber's been around. But cyber in space, what can happen? What kind of incidents could you see? What are the mitigations available? We talk about supply chain and things of that nature. Supply chain risk management becomes a big piece of our compendium this time. And then finally we talked about cislunar space. We're talking about having an architecture on the moon that's similar to what we have on the Earth. What are some safe disposal options near the moon? How do we figure out what can we do around the Moon to keep it from creating the problems that we do have around the Earth? We've heard that if there is debris in the cis lunar space debris can last a thousand years. So how do you avoid that? How do you make sure that you are monitoring any kind of debris that's out there? So those are the six different areas.

Maria Varmazas (17:39)

I'm curious, when you think back on this great effort, and this is a question for both of you, are there any points that particularly stand out to you, maybe that were either surprising or something that you want to make sure that people don't miss within this incredible piece of work? Something that just really stands out to you. And Brian, since I haven't heard from you in a bit, I'll go to you first.

Brian Weeden (18:00)

Sure. I'll start with two. One, on the topic of space situation where space operations, as Uma noted, five, ten years ago, when people were thinking about these large constellations of several thousand satellites coming out of the pipeline, there was a lot of concern about whether we're going to have all these crashes and lots of more space debris. One of the surprising things looking back is we have gone from a couple thousand operational satellites to more than 10,000 active satellites. And we're not seeing crashes all the time. The companies that are operating the constellations are doing a very good job of avoiding collisions. And there's a lot of lessons learned from the procedures they've put in place, from the things we have done, both sort of on the technology innovation side as well as on the organizational Cooperation, engagement, side to prevent this. So that's one of the things sort of that surprising in a positive way. But of course then the question is what as we continue to scale that up past 10,000 to maybe 20, 30, 40,000 and more, and there's more constellations coming line, can we continue that growth? Are we going to continue to be able to find, you know, that way to operate safely and overcome the additional challenges that are coming? That's sort of the, you know, the good news on what's happened the last few years and sort of a question of well, we still have some challenges ahead of us. We need to make sure we look at the others. I'll just pick up something you mentioned we have in place right now for Earth orbit. A pretty robust set of guidelines for how to mitigate the creation of orbital debris and dispose of it and sort of make sure it doesn't pose a long term problem. We are just the beginning of thinking about what that looks like for cislunar space and lunar orbit. And you know, some people might think well it's still pretty early, we're heading up there. No, there's actually stuff up there and there's actually missions in lunar orbit that are already doing conjunction assessments to try and avoid collisions. And the one thing we, we discovered as we dug into this research is we can't just cut and paste the solutions from Earth orbit because the lunar environment is radically different. There is no atmosphere in which you could that a clean stuff out of lunar orbit. You can't just dispose of the atmosphere on the moon. Things are going to come in really hard when they re enter because I don't think to slow them down.

Maria Varmazas (20:24)

That's right.

Brian Weeden (20:27)

That hints at where we are and just thinking about this problem and it's going to be different, it's going to be a different set of recommendations and there's going to need to be a process both to figure those out and get everyone on board with those.

Uma Brugman (20:41)

One of the areas that we delved a little bit deeper this time is the in space rescue capability gap. So as more humans start going into space, we think this is now is the time to start thinking about pursuing rescue capabilities. So we've been flagging the need to talk about space rescue for a while. And we're working with rand, RAND Corporation, they have been frequent collaborators with us on this issue. We are planning to develop a technical blueprint or roadmap for developing rescue capabilities. And so we'll be publishing that. So stay tuned. It's coming to a major conference this summer. But that's an area we talk about in the compendium. Let's develop and implement a future proof safety framework. Let's look at what gaps that exist right now and let's address that as a community. There are, you know, let's talk about common docking systems for spacecraft. So if two satellites are next to each other right now, they may not be able to dock. They may not be able to because there's a gap there. There's also a gap in interoperability. So let's talk about those. So this is. Now is the time to get ahead of that and get the community talking about it. So that's something we talked about and that really stood out for me in this compendium.

Maria Varmazas (22:22)

I would love to get your wrap up thoughts. Uma, why don't you go first? Anything you want to leave our audience with before we conclude today?

Uma Brugman (22:30)

I think the biggest takeaway from the compendium is really to, to understand the technical challenges, the policy challenges that we have and understand that we need a whole of space approach. We need everybody's help to solve these problems. And so we need to come together as a community and look through these issues. And there's more challenges than what we've addressed here. This by no means is the compendium comprehensive, but we want the community to look at these and start thinking about how to work collaboratively and come together to solve these problems.

Maria Varmazas (23:14)

Thank you. And Brian, same question to you. Any wrap up thoughts?

Brian Weeden (23:16)

Yeah, I'll follow up sort of a little bit more of what Uma just said and go back to this coordination. I think no one entity is going to have the final answer in all this. No one entity's in charge of all of this. There's again as we talked at the very beginning, a growing group of both countries and companies. Lots of diversity in terms of how they're approaching it, in terms of level expertise. There's a lot of work that needs to be done. More on the collaboration coordination part of it. I mentioned that earlier, but I'll just sort of foot stomp it again. This time we really need to think about what mechanisms exist to enable that coordination and cooperation because that's really what it's going to come down to. And you know, we hope that this Space Safety Compendium update sort of helps advance some of these questions in the community. We're not going to say that this is the end all be all of things. We hope is sort of the next step in getting that coordination, getting sort of a better sense across the whole community of where we should be headed and what are some of the challenges and some of the solutions we have to address some of those challenges.

Maria Varmazas (24:37)

We'll be right back. Welcome back. Anyone working in the space industry knows that there's a lot of parallels between space launches and car racing. The unique engineering, the speeds, g forces to the aerodynamics. So it'll probably come as no surprise that race car drivers are also attracted to the idea of human spaceflight. Case in point, Formula One race car driver Lewis Hamilton has just finished his last season with Mercedes, and on his first week off the racetrack, he's been training for a new adventure. The seven time world champion has undergone flight training for astronauts. He was put through the same training as was used to prepare the Inspiration 4 and Polaris dawn crew for commercial spaceflight missions. And during the flight, Lewis experienced a maximum of 7 and a half GS. GS, which is more than astronauts typically experience on Ascent. Formula One drivers can experience up to five GS when cornering at high speeds. So the flight was a little more strenuous than a typical day on the track. Lewis was pictured wearing a unique race suit featuring a dedicated space mission patch with his starting number 44. Why space? Well, why not space? Right? Here's what he had to say.

Uma Brugman (25:53)

As a kid, a couple of things that I wanted to be. It was either an astronaut or a racing driver. My love of space has only grown since I was a kid and I was just always fascinated about the moon landings. I've watched online so many of the of the launches. I'm fascinated with what's out there.

Maria Varmazas (26:12)

We're pretty sure that Lewis Hamilton will be heading to space in the near future after he declared that he cannot wait to get his wings. And we're pretty sure he won't be the last racing driver to look to space after their career on the track. That's it for team minus for December 17, 2024. Brought to you by N2K CyberWire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes@space.n2k. We're privileged that N2K and podcasts like T Minus are part of the daily routine of many of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector, from the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This episode was produced by Alice Carus. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. Remixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iban. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilby is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Vermazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.