SPEAKER_01 0:05

Please welcome Professor Victoria Banks.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

It was the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there. The children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of sugar plums danced in their heads when out of the lawn. There cry there came such a clatter I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter. Away to the window I flew like a flash, tore open the shutters, and threw up the sash. When what to my wondering eyes did appear? But a satellite re-entering Earth's atmosphere. I am so sorry. Sincere apologies to Clement Clark Moore and all of those tiny children who love that poem so much. But when I and many of you were children, there was only one thing that a sight like this could mean. Well, I was a tiny child in the late 70s, so of course, based on Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, it was Martian invasion. But for many of you, it would have been the idea that Santa's sleigh was coming on the 24th of December to deliver your presence. That has, of course, all changed, and it's amazing how quickly we've got used to this idea of seeing these trains of satellites in the sky. Now, does anybody recognize what this particular location might be with that TV tower? Ah, that's a very good shout out. Yeah, Moscow. Um no, it's Kyiv. It's Kyiv in Ukraine. That's the Kyiv TV tower. Um it's only 2019, in fact, that we started to see SpaceX launching Starlink satellites, and this is a a train of Starlink satellites over Ukraine. But as of June 2026, that network now consists of approximately 10 and a half thousand satellites in low Earth orbit. They're communicating with user terminals and gateway ground stations that connect that constellation of satellites to terrestrial internet infrastructure. So let's have a look at some of these in action, and this is a fantastic visualization provided for these Starlink trains. You can see that that's just one satellite that's coming through, but we can hone into Santa's sleigh there, and we can see a train of them. So what I need to know now, Chris, is mechanically, how is this possible for Starlink now to account for approximately 75% of all satellites in low Earth orbit?

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Yeah, so it's because they own the cheapest way to get there. So Musk's Starlink, because of the designers who were employed and the risks that he was willing to take, have basically made it much cheaper to get to low Earth orbit. So the Falcon rockets in particular, which people need to remember, came really close to failing. The first three Starlink launches failed, and the fourth one was put together by spare parts. And there's this amazing story of them flying in the hold of a cargo ship, cargo ship to the then Pacific island where they're going to launch from, holding the thing down and betting the entire company's future on this. But they succeeded, and they have this really cheap passport to space. So for them, there's this cyclical economy thing. So they can fill, they can sell as many commercial slots as they want, but they fill the rest of the rocket with Starlinks. Starlink then gets to populate low Earth orbit like this and thus provide a reliable service for those who can afford it. And that's an important point maybe we'll come back to. And then Starlink then funds the whole business. So they've now got to the point where they don't need to take any other passengers. So they can start profits from Starlink fund launching more satellites. And this is in Musk's original conception, this is how he gets to Mars. So this is the business model which he thinks will earn him enough money to go to Mars. Now that's rubbish, but it has meant that we've suddenly got this population of satellites. It is not just them, of course, there are other constellations going up. The price of launch has got cheaper, and so we're seeing this explosion in satellite technology just above our heads. And there's a reason it's in low Earth orbit, is it's cheaper to get to. So we don't go as high up as, say, the Hubble Space Telescope or something like that. This is basically the edge of space that's being filled.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

And you mentioned about the other constellations. I think we could see just in that visualization, you know, there's Amazon, there's Web One, there's other folks doing this, other tech billionaires. And I think that's quite an interesting intersection.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

But also one web, which the UK government owns about a third of as well. So we're in this game as well.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Um and you mentioned earlier about um in-flight um internet. I also hate this. I used to work for Facebook. And one of the nice things about going over to California was that you had eight hours where no one could contact you and you could actually do what you wanted to do. Those days are gone. Starlink, of course, is providing um that kind of service for numerous airlines.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Yeah, and for rescue, search and rescue as well. So this is a capability we didn't have before. The original rhetoric, it seems to have gone away now. When when Musk started talking about this, he talked about internet for everyone, right? This is you're supposed to imagine a remote community in Africa that doesn't have wide internet connecting via Starlink. Now that doesn't actually work because the density, even though we've got this density of satellites, there's a limit to how many people in one say square mile can connect, and it's a few hundred, something like that. And so this doesn't work for communities, but if you're one of the hundred richest people in that community, or if you're a traveller on a plane going overhead, then this is the solution, and that's that's now what it's.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

And we're going to talk in a little while about you know what the solutions could be for people who are a bit too remote and can't afford being, you know, one of those well, there's 12 million subscribers to the consumer arm of Starlink, isn't there, as of um June this year. But among those, of course, are the citizens and the government of Ukraine since the Russian invasion in 2022. What happened very shortly after the Russian invasion was that via SATS, which was one of the main providers of internet services in the country, um, was knocked out, was disabled in the country. And so the Ukrainian government requested access to Starlink, and they actually directly requested that to Elon Musk over Twitter. Um so um so it's now used by Ukrainian consumers, and you can see um Vladimir and Vitali Klitschko um proudly accepting those Starlink dishes, those kits back in 2022. But of course, it's also used by the government and by the military. Um it connects combat drones, it connects weapons coordination systems, and that's used to attack Russian positions on Russian soil. Um, and that has drawn some really heavy criticism from the Kremlin on several occasions. So you can see how this consumer technology, internet connection, you know, what we see as quite often being a separate thing from space is now becoming so heavily politicized. Now, to be fair, we see that outside of space as well. We see that in terms of internet regulation, in terms of what is permissible behavior and content, that differs from country to country.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

And also the blurring of the technologies as well. So one of the reasons that we're seeing these satellites in space is people have got used to using commercial technology. So you used to have to, if you were launching a satellite, you would send battle-hard and space-ready technology, which was often 10 to 20 years behind consumer tech, because by the time you've tested it and made sure that it works in space, um, then you know that takes a while. Now, because launch is cheap, um, you can launch GoPros as a camera, you can launch consumer technology and hope it works. And if not, well, you just launch another one. So we're seeing that spread. Even um when NASA landed its last rover on Mars, the engineering cameras that sent back spectacular photos of the descent were just commercial um cameras bolted on to a space industry standard. So this blurring of technology between military, um, government, and civilian is happening all over the place.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Yeah, and digital internet connectivity, telecoms connectivity being used also as a political football. So back in 2024, um the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk had been um in regular contact with Vladimir Putin. I get the impression he's been in regular contact for quite a few years with Vladimir Putin.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Possibly on Twitter.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

Possibly on Twitter now, X. Um, and Putin asked Musk not to activate Starlink in Taiwan. And he did that. He was intervening on behalf of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. So you can see how this becomes part of trade, part of foreign policy in a way that, you know, we might be tempted to think, at least before the advent of artificial intelligence, or what we now need to call superintelligence, according to President Trump. You know, before then, this idea that we have a domestic internet, well, of course, that's a nonsense because we have to have global rules about how the internet works. We are rapidly finding that we need to have global rules for artificial intelligence. I think what's quite interesting though is that we already have rules for outer space, don't we?

SPEAKER_01 10:18

We we sort of have a weird mix of rules. So there's the Outer Space Treaty, which dates back to sort of the beginnings of the space age, which says that space can't be used for commercial purposes. But um so this is so this is odd. So it's it it's a treaty that that everyone agrees is in force, but it's adhered to by the governments, and it's taken to mean things like you couldn't mine the moon, for example, except that there are companies planning to do that. So this this this agreement exists, the framework for management exists. What actually happens in practice is that you, if you want to put a satellite in orbit, you obey the laws of the place you launch from, and the only people you need permission from is the place that you launch from. So Starlink, which now launches from the US, only needs US governmental approval to launch. They don't need to consult other operators, they don't need to consult other space agencies, they don't need to let the rest of the world know which orbits they're planning to use. And that feels quite internet-y as well, right? You know, they the server being in a place is what does it mean?

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Domestic jurisdiction in the first instance. And I and I think, I mean, you will know the numbers better than I do, but my understanding is that as of 2022, SpaceX was given approval to launch what was it further 30,000?

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Uh no, 30,000 a year, so it was about up to 300,000. The Chinese have approved about 1.5 million, the Europeans have approved about 70,000. Now, whether we'll ever get anywhere near these numbers, I don't know, but there's a arms race going on to get as many satellites approved and launched because regulation may come. Yeah. And the idea is that if you've already got your satellites up there, then Then you're accepted. Should say, by the way, we're just on a light note, I one of the great things that happened in the last couple of years, which excited the people who worry about international treaties in space, was there was the first crime in space, or I guess the first detected crime in space. That we know of. That we know of. Yes, somebody on the International Space Station, uh NASA Astronaut accessed her ex's bank account and transferred some money out of it. Um, and this ended up in US courts. And space lawyers were extremely excited because you can imagine, you know, is that the law of the place you launched from? Was she sitting in the European model when she act module when she accessed the where were they passing over? And sadly the case was settled out of court. So we we still don't have any precedent.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

You just got me thinking about lawyers in space, which is like the most boring science fiction series you can think of, except for maybe accountants in space.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

We I think we should make lawyers in space. I think this would be all those all those sharp suits and a terrible commute. Anyway, carry on.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

Yes, exactly. Um, so what are we talking about? We're talking about political considerations to our own use of the internet. And we saw just yesterday the Deputy Prime Minister in Poland reporting that a Polish Starlink centre had been subject to sabotage, it's been subject to an arson attack, and he's laid that at the door of Russia, deliberately trying to disconnect Ukraine from internet access. And on Wednesday, you may have heard on the news that the UK Defence Minister Wes Streeting emphasized our own dependence on these satellites we mentioned about in flight internet, but also banking relies on it. GPS, energy supply, weather forecasting, all of our mobile communications. And you may also have heard the head of the RAF at the same conference saying that we are, we have developed and we are actively using satellite jamming technology.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Which is a breach of the Outer Space Treaty. Right. So I don't think they knew that. Or at least the I I'm still confused by why I I'd sort of suspected this was happening, but why you'd say you were doing that seems very confusing to me.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Well, okay. Other than conspiracy theory alert.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Right.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

But at the same time that our Prime Minister is also in the UN Security Council saying Russia has been targeting all of these countries with disinformation. Um we're reminding people that we have the capability to jam other countries.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Yes, I guess it's a state, it's become a status thing. The US has a new branch of the military, Space Force, which Trump established.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

Um hasn't it got like a Star Treky logo?

SPEAKER_01 14:36

It's got a Star Treky logo. The uniforms are disturbing the 1940s, and um, this is true, they are currently looking for a song. Uh because every branch you may not know this, every branch of the US military has its own song, and genuinely online there is a call to submit songs for the US. Oh, come on, it's got to be flashed. Milt? Um Milt's on it, good. Um but the point is the like whether I don't think the US Space Force is doing anything that wasn't being done by the Air Force before monitoring satellites, keeping an eye on them, and so on. But the I think you're right that it's a status thing, it's uh it's establishing presence and showing that you're thinking about these things.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

And I think it's fair to say that Russia has been known to be doing this since 2019.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

But I'm really, really looking forward to that song being the symphony of the Jovian moon, surely.

SPEAKER_01 15:24

Three and a half hours long on parade every morning. Um but uh yeah, I mean that the we should say, I think, that this connection between space technology and and military things and national uh interest is not new. Jodrell Bank, when it was built, um, was one and a half million um 1960 pounds over budget, which was a huge national scandal. And then they realized that it was the only thing capable of tracking not just Sputnik, which could be tracked by an amateur radio receiver, but the missile that launched Sputnik, Jodrel could uh pick up. And it was the only thing in the West at the time that could track that. And suddenly the overspend went away, and we now know through records that are uncovered and released in the last couple of years, that there was a shadow team of RAF operators on site at Jodrol uh throughout the 60s until military listing stations were set up, ready to take control of the telescope. We don't know whether they ever did, but in the event of a crisis, they would be able to take over and use it as military infrastructure. Um there's a nice story that one of the things, one of the things in the documents is that very few people, the director Bernard Lovell and a couple of other people knew about this shadow team, um, but otherwise officially no one knew. And they had a delegation of visiting Russian scientists to Jodrell, and the secretary in charge of allocating officers put them next to the secret team of military officers. And so we've got loads of paperwork on soundproofing, um trying to work out which walls they were able to talk through.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

Yeah, that's deep cover. And that's why in intelligence operations we have a clear desk policy. Right. Right. Um so we're going to talk about dual-purpose technology a little bit more in a second, but I think for me, what I find really difficult now is trying to disentangle communications tech from space tech. They're critical to each other, and in some cases are viewed politically and diplomatically as one and the same thing. Um, and that leads also into, we mentioned the Outer Space Treaty, but things like accidental near-misses, because space is so busy. Um, if there is an accidental near-miss, an accidental collision, who do you appeal to? Well, this is um uh an incident in 2021 when Chinese authorities had to lodge a complaint with the United Nations because they alleged that their space station, the um Changong, I think it is, isn't it, their space station, um, had to perform evasive manoeuvres to avoid all of those Starlink satellites. And in this document, the Chinese delegates said that this continuous manoeuvring of Starlink satellites posed a risk of collision, a risk to their national security. Um, and they cited two particular close encounters, pardon the kind of science fiction pun, in July and October of that year, which constituted dangers to the life and health of their astronauts. So for me, this really identifies that shift in where the power lies, because who was responsible for that? Was it the US government or was it the richest man in the world who is Elon Musk who owns SpaceX? The only mechanism here was to say that the United States was responsible and to appeal through the outer space.

SPEAKER_01 18:48

But there is no air traffic control here. So there's no one, if you're operating a satellite, there is no one who will call you and tell you that there's a potential collision happening. You could subscribe to a commercial service who might do that for you. And if you're an operator in good standing, you may choose to broadcast that information about your satellite, but there's no requirement to do either of those things. And so, you know, the best catalogue of stuff in space is maintained by a retired astrophysicist called Jonathan McDowell, who's just moved to Bromley. Um, and uh that is our sense that's a club of technological innovation. Well, he's well, he's also bringing his collection of stuff, which is going to be an amazing place to visit, but it's one person, is the point, um, who has the best civilian catalogue. And so people email him and ask him, you know, is there anything else on this orbit we should be looking for?

SPEAKER_00 19:37

The good thing is that unlike air traffic control, and we've seen how vulnerable that can be to glitches in the last year.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

Jonathan's good.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Jonathan is not responsible for it all working, which is which is quite a nice uh thought. I don't really want all of that put on one particular person. Now, we were talking also about um, you know, getting to those remote parts of the world. When I was working at Facebook in 2016, one of the very last things I did when I was working there, um, because I was partly responsible for all the unannounced visits from government employees to Facebook facilities. Um and you may not know this.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

You you you mean because they wanted this feels spy-like? Unannounced visitors from government.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

Oh, yeah, we had loads of them.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

Okay. Fine.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

Don't I can't remember if I've signed a non-disclosure agreement, so I think we'll just leave it at that. I should probably check that. Um, you may not know this, but back in 2016, Bridgewater in Somerset was a hub of technological innovation. I don't know if it still is. It's it's been a decade since I've been down there. Yes, anyway, carry on. It's great. Um, but um in 2016, Facebook was building a huge flying kite, a huge solar-powered drone called Aquila. I still have a sticker on my laptop that commemorates when they were building this thing. And it was huge, it filled an entire aircraft hangar. And the I, you know, the idea behind this is that it would go up in the air for hours, days at a time, and it would deliver the internet wireless connectivity to parts of the world that weren't plugged into broadband, weren't plugged into mobile networks. And some of you may remember that there was this thing um developed by Google called Project Loon, which was an unfortunate name in hindsight. Um, but it was a huge hot air balloon that would do exactly the same thing, and I think it was used in um disaster zones, earthquakes, etc., in the Caribbean. Well, this has all been kind of put by the wayside because of these things, which are Pico satellites. This is the Picasso Pico satellite, um, which was launched in 2020 to conduct primarily Earth observation as I understand it. And it performed reentry back in April 2024. Now that was just the length of Of a school ruler 30 centimeters long. And it's made up of three 10 centimeter CubeSats.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

There's these modular designs that started off with CubeSats, which are essentially your Starlink, but which made sort of university lab scale things. And now, yeah, these are tabletop satellites that are cheap to launch. You can throw them out of a rocket while you're doing something else.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

And my fun fact about that, when I was digging into it for this particular session, is that the two guys that came up with this idea, one was a professor at Stanford, the other was a professor at California Polytechnic, it was in the 2000s, it was in the heyday of the craze for beanie babies. And the idea is that you could fit a beanie baby inside a CubeSat, hence it's 10 centimetres cubed. Now, Nano and Pico satellites, you can see why they would be the obvious choice to connect smart devices, remote sensors to the internet, so all of that part of the big massive internet of things that I've talked about in my Gresham lectures. Sensors, you know, contacting each other machine to machine, reporting data from very, very remote areas without human intervention. And in large groups or swarms, they can act like mobile phone towers in space. So they can improve broadband and data coverage. So that's why we don't really need that big flying kite or that big hot air balloon anymore.

SPEAKER_01 23:28

But of course, you do end up with lots of these things in Earth orbit, and that's why we get we've talked a bit about the problems of collisions. But you also have problems like, well, for an astronomer, these get in the way of our observations, so they hinder our ability to find asteroids that might hit the Earth, for example. But there's also a pollution aspect. So when satellites de-orbit, they tend to be brought down. If they're brought down under their own control, they aim for the great garbage patch in the middle of the Pacific, which is where people put large satellites, or they're just allowed to burn up in the atmosphere. And we've always ignored the environmental impacts of that because when it was a few satellites a year, perhaps there's some justification in assuming it won't make any difference. Now, and particularly with things like Starlink, where they're designed to last maybe five years, because you can always launch some new ones, you know, planned obsolescence in space. So we're now depositing heavy metals into the upper atmosphere in significant enough quantities that there are models by serious astro astro uh um serious chemists who study the upper atmosphere, um, where we think perhaps we might do things like reverse the closing of the ozone hole, which was established in the 80s, because of heavy metals changing how the upper atmosphere works.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

Okay, so there's going to be more of this stuff. There's already loads of this stuff, there's going to be more of this stuff. You mentioned in passing about um missions to Mars potentially being a bit of a non- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

We don't know how to get there cheaply yet.

SPEAKER_00 24:57

So Okay, so why are we building an internet for it?

SPEAKER_01 25:00

Oh, because getting robots there is easy.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

Right.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

So so yeah, there's this idea of this interplanetary internet that's interplanetary internet, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

Some very, very serious people involved in it, including Vince Cerf, who, as many of you will know, were worked on the original ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet, and very influential for Google's early developments. Um, this is the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, or Danuri, which is a lovely name, um, launched in August 2022, and on its way to the moon, it twice demonstrated space internet. It sent photo and video files, and like any good Korean Pathfinder lunar orbiter, one of the files that it transmitted was a video for dynamite by the K-pop group BTS. Um it transmitted it back to Earth, which I am reliably informed is well over 1.2 million kilometres away.

SPEAKER_01 25:53

That's true. The sad thing about it was that BTS, of course, are best known for a song they did about Pluto being sad that it's not a planet anymore. And they should have used that.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

Which I didn't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:02

Yeah, no, it's I quoted it in my Gresham lecture about Pluto. So apparently it's been seen a lot on the internet, that bit. Um, but what's interesting about this is I think it's it's another idea of shared resource because the thing that makes this more difficult than doing the internet on ground is that things move. You are in orbit around the moon. Uh the moon is moving around the earth and so on. And so you can't always have a direct sight line to any particular thing. So the idea here is that satellites would share information. You have a sort of just-in-time almost telegram message passing.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

I was I was gonna say, so it is it's a little bit like the terrestrial internet, right? Which you have relays.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Yeah, except extending outwards and shared between different so this is collaboration. So we already have this at Mars where the rovers will talk to anything that's orbiting. So the European Mars Express rover might pick up Mars Express orbiter might pick up a message from the American rover and pass that on and and and so on. So there's this shared uh sort of experience. The question is how that works. If people want to go back to the moon, we're seeing more private missions to the moon, Israeli, Korean, Chinese, Indian, American uh missions to explore the moon, partly as a drive to exploit it. How they plug into this network that was built for scientific research is kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

Right, and also it makes me think of the walled gardens that we have in some countries on the internet where, you know, if you are in North Korea, if you are in China, you can't get access to you can't, if you're in Australia and you're under 16, you shouldn't have access to social media, exactly. Um, that you can, you know, not reach certain services, but at the same time, the internet was developed as a common good, it has a common backbone, and it works on the principle of packet switching, which is you do just go to the next hop in the chain, and your message gets passed along.

SPEAKER_01 27:54

Yeah. Yeah. It's fun to see it deployed. People are doing GPS. There's a European project to do GPS for the moon as well, so that if you land a private rover, you can pick up on navigation from above, which is kind of I think they're a little away from doing that, but that's quite but an astronomer's critique, please, on um Starlink's proposal that they're gonna have a constellation of Mars link satellites. Well, you need somebody to talk to. So so Musk what Musk is on record as saying that he wants to die on Mars but not on arrival, which I think is possibly the funniest thing he's ever said. Um but um he he's clearly thinking about people going to Mars, and if you do that, then you need the infrastructure to support that. Um the truth is that his rocket's very good at getting to low Earth orbit, but he hasn't worked out a cheap way to get beyond that. So he's involved in the return to the moon, but the plan is complex and relies on new technology that so far isn't working. So I think we're a while away from having to worry about Mars. We are seeing more missions there, but we're still on the sort of 10 to 20 active missions at the most, and so they can talk to each other in a private network rather than needing this big Martian system. The moon's a bit different, I think. There are plans to put people back on the moon. You'll remember the Artemis mission that sent people around the back of the moon. Um in theory, in the next couple of years, likely in the next decade. And at that point, I think you do need a network of communication satellites. Friends of mine are racing at the minute to put radio telescopes on the far side of the moon. It's the quietest place in the solar system because it's hidden from us. And so, if you want to do radio astronomy at any frequency that's near anything that's used by the technology we're talking about, you need to be on the far side of the moon. The trouble is you need to get there, we need to develop technology to get there cheaply. And as soon as we do that, it will become radio loud. So we think there might be a window of maybe the next five years where we can do radio astronomy from there, get a map of the universe before humanity spreads out and makes it a radio loud environment.

SPEAKER_00 29:56

I mean, whether we get to Mars or not, whether we get back onto the moon or not, I mean, we can't avoid the fact that the prospect is for even more satellites and so even more.

SPEAKER_01 30:08

And more space junk as well, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:10

Yeah, absolutely. Um, so I was really intrigued by this programme that's been suggested by the European Space Agency. Um, but they've also come up with um what I thought, I thought I'd have I've heard of this before somewhere, this idea of zero debris by 2030. That does sound familiar, doesn't it, from somewhere. I mean it's a great idea. And so they have a zero debris charter, which all of the European Union states have signed up for.

SPEAKER_01 30:37

All of the European Space Agency sites, which is not quite the same. Right, still.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

That's a really, really important um distinction. And I think um New Zealand signed up for it.

SPEAKER_01 30:48

Yeah, Canada as well, yeah. So basically everyone who doesn't have tens of thousands of satellites is Right.

SPEAKER_00 30:54

So that and that's another really important distinction, I think. So not US, um, not Russia, not China, not India, um, and not Starlink.

SPEAKER_01 31:05

No, indeed, which acts like a nation stay here. Well, you should say what's going on on the screen here. This is a forthcoming mission, this will launch next year, and it's going to use what's called the space claw to pick up a defunct satellite and then deliberately deorbit it. So the idea here is that if this was proven technology, and there are various companies, there's a company called Astroscale, that have demonstrated the maneuverability you need to do this, then we could go and clean up after ourselves. Um, though in a slight irony, they've just had to change the mission. So the original target satellite got hit by something. And so now they're worried there might be debris, so they can't go near it, so they're going to a different satellite. But it does give you some sense that there's an urgency here. And one mission next year isn't going to make much of a difference.

SPEAKER_00 31:49

And talking of getting hit by something, there are of course alternatives to the space claw, which is of course to blow them up.

SPEAKER_01 31:56

The trouble is then you get more bits, and these bits are moving at 17,000 kilometres an hour or something like that. So a cloud of debris is just as much a threat to a spacecraft or to a space station as an individual one.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

When we were talking about dual-purpose technology, so in November 2021, a lot happened in 2021, didn't it, with collisions and near misses and things like that. We had the 2,000 kilo uh Russian satellite Cosmos 1408 that was destroyed in an anti-satellite weapon test. By the Russians. By the Russians.

SPEAKER_01 32:30

India's done the same thing, and NASA have done, oh not NASA, the Americans have done the same thing. So each of those tests added a few million bits of space junk to the catalogue, uh, which is causing headaches for Jonathan. Uh, but also makes this avoidance. And so the astronauts on the space station, for example, went through a phase a few months ago where they had to take shelter most days because the station was passing near to a debris field.

SPEAKER_00 32:54

And and for that Cosmos 1408, I think Starlink reported that it had to perform 1600, 1700 um collision maneuvers, collision avoidance maneuvers, just because of those bits of debris.

SPEAKER_01 33:10

Bad idea. Don't blow your satellites up. If you learn two things to do, space is big, don't blow up your satellites. We've got a few minutes left.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

I mean, I I wanted to make sure we sort of ended on a somewhat cheerful note. Or at least. Yeah, you're twenty your your people are 20 or 30 years into regulating the web.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:29

How's it going? And are there lessons that we can learn about? Because we're just at the beginning of the R.

SPEAKER_00 33:33

So I think international consensus is really important. Now, curiously, um, when we started trying to regulate the internet and establish consensus over permitted behavior, permitted operations in cyberspace, et cetera, one of the first places we looked was the Outer Space Treaty.

SPEAKER_01 33:48

Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:49

This idea that space is a common good, cyberspace is a common good. Now, of course, that has been significantly challenged in the last 20 or 30 years. But what it does give us is a little bit of a precedent for what we do with AI. That, you know, we know we can achieve international consensus. We sometimes have to water down the terms so that everybody can get on the same page. Um, but you've seen, you know, in the UN just this week that, you know, people do understand that we need to regulate AI, President Trump aside. Um, so I so I think there is something that perhaps we can learn from that and the progress that we've made in the last 20, 30 years about how we regulate all of this. I mean, you might have seen on this visualization, we were showing uh the the payloads and the rocket bodies, and now we've added the debris in.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

Right, yeah, it's a mess.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

And I think the very fact that in Leo labs you can have what's the view from the Azores.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

Right.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

This is how, to me, I didn't realize that this is how the night sky really looks. Yeah. Um, and it's it's quite an extraordinary thing. What we now need, of course, is international consensus about how we're gonna keep it clean.

SPEAKER_01 35:03

Um, this is what we see with our large telescopes.

SPEAKER_00 35:07

It is absolutely astounding to me.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

Yeah, it's a problem. But I think you're right. I think it it's this challenge that uh your world and mine are both facing is that we've got these new global commons, we've got these shared resources, whether it's access to the internet or whether it's low Earth orbit. Um, the challenge is really how we politically deal with that before it gets grabbed by whoever's actually.

SPEAKER_00 35:27

Because this is critical infrastructure that we have in space now, this is our critical communications and information infrastructure for down back here on Earth. Um, I think if we go the wrong way, we're going back to the reality of the fictional Star Wars that we had as kids, you know, when you were growing up in the 80s, and um, you know, um Reagan was talking about the Star Wars uh deterrent in space. And um, you know, here we are with that as a reality, but also the environmental responsibility of that that we perhaps hadn't envisaged because we were prior preoccupied with the national security and the you know the foreign policy duplications.

SPEAKER_01 36:10

Exactly. Well, look, that will lead somewhat into our last discussion of the day, but before that, please join me in thanking the wonderful Victoria Banks.

SPEAKER_00 36:17

Thank you. Thank you, Matthew.