Space Sustainability with Steve Wozniak, & Guests

How can we keep space safe? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic-environmentalist co-host Matt Winning learn about the space industry and how we can keep debris out of orbit with aerospace engineers Jenna Tiwana and Danielle Wood, with words from Steve Wozniak.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, recording live at the Summit for Space Sustainability in London. It's an entire program devoted to space sustainability. And I can't do this on my own. I gotta bring in a co-host who's part of the DNA of StarTalk, a professional stand-up comedian. And who do we have here? Matt Winning.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, pleasure to be with you here. It's good to be in London, a city that you can't ever see any stars in. So I've missed most of them my entire life.

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so Matt is not only a professional stand-up comedian from Scotland.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's also an expert on environmental causes. And in fact, let me get your full CV description. You are an environmental research fellow.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At University College London.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And have you written a book on the subject? Hot Mess.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What on earth can we do about climate change?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Yep, that is the name of the book. It's a comedy book.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you birthed this during COVID?

• 1:13Speaker 01

  I did. I sat in a room for a year while I had a, like a baby. I don't know if you've heard of them. I had a baby. And, and there was COVID, so I couldn't leave the house. And I sat in a room and wrote a book about, I think the world's first comedy book about climate change.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we'll find out where that goes in a moment. But let me introduce our aerospace engineer panelist, all right? Up first, we've got Jenna Tewana. So you have an aerospace engineer background, but also some business chops, right? So this is with iSpace, a Japanese company?

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, iSpace is a lunar exploration company headquartered in Tokyo, but has European and American offices. And really, we have a, have a view to...

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Connect the moon and the earth as an ecosystem, and I will leave it at that for now.

• 2:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK, I'm loving it. Loving it there. We'll come back to you. And we also have Danielle Wood, an aerospace engineer from MIT. Danielle, welcome. Yes.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Pleased to be here with you.

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Assistant professor of aerospace engineering at MIT, and also director of MIT's space-enabled program. And we'll also thank our sponsors, Privateer Space, and also, of course, Omega Watches. Some of you might not know that Omega was the first watch on the moon in the Apollo program, and they earned that spot. They did an experiment where they bought all the fancy, expensive Swiss watches, put them in a black box, and shake them, and bake them, and accelerated them, and checked in on the end. They opened the boxes to see who still kept time, and Omega did it best. So, as I understand it, Omega earned that place in the history of space exploration. We thank them publicly for this. So, yes.

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I'd like to begin this program with a five-minute clip of a conversation I had with Steve Wozniak. OK, you've heard of him. He, of course, co-founded a company that they were going to make oranges, and then they changed it. Instead, they started making apples. So, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, co-founders of Apple Computer. So, why do I have this conversation with Steve Wozniak? Because he's active in this space. See what I did there? He cares about space sustainability. And in fact, he's one of the founding members of Privateer. So let's join us in that clip.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Woz, you're engaged in this enterprise called Privateer, which is all about space. But when people think about space, we're thinking, OK, what rocket are you launching? And is it going to be suborbital or orbital? Are you going to go to Mars? Are you going to terraform? And none of that is in your portfolio. So, could you please explain to me? What are you doing in space that no one else is doing?

• 4:00Speaker 04

  First of all, you know, I like yourself, get, you know, dozen pitches a day, join our operation, our company, lend your name to it, whatever. And it's just, I'm only one person. I do not live in a big like, kind of I have a team world and all that, I'm a company. So I take on very, very few of these, and this one was one I took on largely because of my total, most respect for my best friend Alex Fielding, our CEO. What we started up for was based around Alex, myself, and Maripa Ja, a professor at UT Austin. He has been an environmentalist about space. And he has been so concerned about, you know, what's going on and where we're going in space, and especially this idea of junk.

• 4:44Speaker 04

  And we want to be, starting out, it's like you've got to know what's there before you can deal with anything. And we want to be a good mapping organization, but we want, more than that, we want to form standards and interoperate with other people that have satellites up in space, that have good, useful information for those of us on Earth, and we want to share it and sort of have the standard ways of representing, you know, where things are. And first of all, you've got to know where things are to avoid collisions.

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is what you're doing then, creating a landscape, I realize you should call it a space scape? Am I allowed? Is that such a, does that word exist yet? The natural evolution of a landscape would be a space scape. You're creating a space scape on which future participants in space can make intelligent decisions collaboratively if necessary, so that everyone can play in the same sandbox.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  That is, that's a very good way to say it. Yes, exactly.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this word sustainability, which is a buzzword today in so many sectors. We've never heard it used before with regard to space. Could you tell me what that means in space?

• 5:57Speaker 04

  Well, you know, it's things are growing out of control, out of regulation. And what's going up, uh, it's growing exponentially. The number of launches, the number of, of things that we're putting up in, especially near orbit, near earth orbit. And we just want to, you know, have a, uh, an environment where it doesn't become too dangerous to launch the satellites that are so key to our humanness.

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I, in, in some ways it's kind of a happy problem to have because it's saying, I mean, when you consider 60 years ago, there was one satellite in orbit or two. And now we have countless thousands, countable thousands, but the fact that within 60 years, it's like.

• 6:37Speaker 04

  Neil, look what we got from that. Look what we got from that. All of Silicon Valley, I was fortunate to live there and we had a space race going on. And the space race Lockheed Martin moved into Sunnyvale and Intel started up in Santa Clara. And the need for chips low, it, it was so, every gram cost so much money to launch into space back in those days that, oh my gosh, if you could make six transistors on one little piece of silicon instead of one piece, six times less the weight. And so we, a lot of great things that humans have now, including our entire digital world, really grew out of that effort to, um, to basically get into space. So.

• 7:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, Waz, that's a very underappreciated fact about modern technology and how, you know, if it, if it only ever stayed in your living room, why make it any smaller than the furniture that was your radio from the 1930s, right? If someone says, I want to put this technology in space. Oh my gosh, Silicon Valley, get to work. Well, what I'm delighted to learn, uh, not only about Privateer, but that you and your ambitions and your following, which is huge and your legacy are all being offered to this mission statement. And, uh, you are here at the beginning of something that I'd like to think, um, will

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  be properly regulated going forward so that space won't, won't be a scary place to visit. It should be a delight.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  That's for myself. I, I would not risk my legacy of doing a lot of good things, you know, in my life, would not risk it on, you know, company that wasn't thinking the same way.

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Danielle, let me come straight to you. Given your professional profile, what does sustainability mean to you? Because we know, at least from terrestrial sustainability, with the environment, that everyone has a sort of different sense of what that means. So I just want to make sure we don't have to be on the same page, but maybe we're all in the same book. So what are the pages in this playbook of sustainability?

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Thanks so much, Neil. We are in an important era in human relationship to space. Humans are having the ability now to use technology in a way that's letting us influence what happens in the space environment in ways we've never seen before. Part of that is the number of physical objects we put in space. And part of it is the way we change the environment, whether it's in orbit around the Earth or on the moon. So you can think about it historically and think about the number of objects we put in space. And also, what happens at the end of the mission of a satellite? My first training is in satellite design. So as a satellite designer, as an aerospace engineer at MIT, no one asked me, "Make sure at the end of the mission of this satellite that you take care to throw out your trash." They just said, "Make it work." But space sustainability means that as satellite designers and operators and regulators,

• 9:27Speaker 03

  we check to see that at the end of the operational use of a satellite to monitor the weather or to make sure we have communication systems, that we make sure that the next generation of satellites and those in many years to come can still come. So space sustainability means ensuring that we can keep space a safe, operational place for many generations.

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That makes so much sense. Did no one think about that for 50 years? "Let's just make a satellite and just when it stops working, just leave it up there." I mean, whose thinking was that?

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Well, there's some physics to keep in mind, right? There's a couple of good things. So one, if you work on a satellite, let's think about where the space station is, about 400 kilometers, 250 miles above the Earth. If you drop a satellite from there, which so far people do, it's not going to be in space too long, fortunately. Because there is a nice system where there's a convenient set of particles that are at the top of the atmosphere. You've got your charged particles, you've got your molecules. So these particles can provide some friction if you're low enough in the altitude. But as you go higher and higher, you have less and less, you move into a true vacuum.

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what could you have done for a satellite that was above where you have your air molecules and ionized particles to slow it down and have it re-entered?

• 10:30Speaker 03

  This is a great question. You use this phrase, "slow it down," the question of deceleration, right? So one question is, are designers of satellites being told you must ensure that you have fuel that's going to give you the option to de-orbit?

• 10:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are they? Is that happening?

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Right. I'd say it's not happening enough, meaning there's been both either regulations at the national level or best practices saying it's important to get your satellite out of space within 25 years. Now, the question is, is that enforced by national governments? And also, are there technical challenges that make it hard to do it?

• 10:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, regulation is a missing dimension here.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  It's there, but it needs to be changed and improved.

• 11:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, you're environment dude?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm a very much down-to-earth sort of environment dude.

• 11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so sustainability to you, who thinks about Earth problems, what does it mean to you?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  I think it's, to me, sustainability is kind of like gymnastics, right? In the sense that it's very much about balance, and also I like doing it on my high horse while wearing spandex. To me, sustainability is basically just thinking beyond today and yourself to think about who's indirectly affected by these things. Think about who's affected by this in space and time, you know, space and time without space in the Earth or space. And yeah, so it's sort of long-term thinking, really.

• 11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so before I get back to you here, I just, I just, I just want to, he's talking about how it affects different people. So, does satellite technology, or the existence of satellites, affect different people in different ways on Earth?

• 11:59Speaker 03

  For my PhD, I traveled a number of countries in Africa, as well as some teams in the East and Southeast Asia, and I asked people, "Why does your country want to have a space program?" And all over the world, everywhere I went, every country wants to have the ability to use satellites for national mapping of the environment, making sure they can track floods and riddles after earthquakes, making sure they can have communications as they need it. And right now, there's not equal benefits in countries around the world on how they use space technology, but it's possible to get there, especially if we keep asking, you know, how countries are going to train their next generation of engineers to design and operate satellites.

• 12:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Jenna, what does space sustainability mean to you, one who sees beyond the moon?

• 12:41Speaker 02

  So I think it can span a lot of things, really. But sustainability, whether it is space, whether it's business, it's really about, as Matt said, thinking about the long-term mindset, right? So not focusing on short-term gains at the expense of your long-term gains either. So it's really, you know, looking to the future and thinking how you can do things with a longer-term view. And one thing I want to mention is that space by nature is not homogeneous. So everyone's not going together. There are some countries that are really emerging. There are some companies that are, you know, have been in space a lot longer. And so we, our definition of sustainability, whatever that is,

• 13:25Speaker 02

  needs to be sustainable for, yes, the space frag nations now, but also the ones that are yet to come, right? So some people are really at the first early stages of their exciting space journey. And we need to make sure sustainability means for them, not only for developed nations too.

• 13:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Matt, to do your job, you need satellite data. Yep. Satellites are so important to look at climate change. Okay, so you're in a balancing point here because you want as many satellites as you can get up there to help you on Earth. Yet we're trying to regulate how many it might ultimately be. Is there some point of instability there? Maybe we'll get there. We'll fix the Earth, but space will be like, yeah, we can't go there anymore. We've ruined it. Right, but you can't fix the Earth if you don't have the satellite data to help. Exactly. And too many satellites interferes with the satellite environment. Chicken and egg, isn't it?

• 14:32Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 14:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, tell me about, both of you have a very long view, by the way, and I'm totally impressed with your dual background of aerospace engineering and business.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, right, because without that, without the other piece of this puzzle, there is no meaningful industry that you can look to.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  And both sides need to talk to each other, and including lawyers, and including artists, and really, everyone.

• 15:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It has to include lawyers?

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry to burst that, but with a space sustainability conference, I think we need lawyers, man.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Space lawyer. There's a film there somewhere.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, take me back to the moon and cis lunar space. That's what it's called, right?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 15:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space between Earth and the moon. Are there any solutions to this problem beyond the three traditional Earth orbits? You know, Leo, Mio, and Gio? Can we just dump garbage on the moon or somewhere else?

• 15:46Speaker 02

  I mean, this is part of the problem, because technically, right now, we should be mindful, but there is nothing telling you you can't. And, you know, we shouldn't. And this is exactly why we need to talk about it, because with, you know, with Earth orbits, we're at this point where it's retrospective. We're trying to fix. We know it's a problem. At the moon, we're at the stage where we're not there yet. So, we can do something about it now.

• 16:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, we can prefix problems that haven't arisen.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, we can be proactive rather than reactive. And that's very rare, where you get that instance to play that role and be in this point of time. And so, there should be more moon discussion.

• 16:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. When I think of the table that people need to sit around to resolve this as we go forward, you know, you're gonna have Earth and environmental person? Certainly, you're gonna have business people, aerospace engineers, satellite designers, the physics engineering of that? You gotta pay attention there? Is there someone else you think who should be at this table?

• 16:44Speaker 03

  I wanna channel my geologist friends, who would tell me, the reason we wanna dump a bunch of trash on the moon is because the moon is this beautiful, pristine place, where there's not a heavy atmosphere, a very limited atmosphere. So, what we have is this amazing record of when rocks come through our solar system and like land on the moon.

• 17:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The record is there forever.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  If we don't mess it up, if we don't dump all our trash there.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So no dumping trash on the moon.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  So we can enjoy this record, right? It's all this great history.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  But what if you set up like a recycling facility on the moon? Would that be good? I mean, that's a business idea.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. And this is it, right? It's we need to be rather than just one way of we're going and can't survive the lunar night. So hey ho, on we go. We need to we need to be able to use what's up there to to create this this kind of circular economy. And it's really difficult and no one's cracked it, but at least we're talking about it.

• 17:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So what about other cultures around the world? Do they have seats at the table on this?

• 17:40Speaker 03

  You know, I spent a long time during the pandemic asking this question. And the chance like you wrote a book. I had conversations with indigenous scholars and people who do research on anticolonial issues to ask the question.

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anticolonial, wow.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Anticolonial. I sat and listened for hours and you can join it because it's all available to you online. We recorded it. We sat and listened on Zoom. Indigenous elders talk about the fact that many cultures, we'll start with those in the North American region, consider not just a physical earth, but also the moon and parts of space as part of their sacred heritage, a place where they have responsibility to care. And there's an interesting story that's sad, but also a lesson for us. In the 1990s, we lost one of our astronomers, somebody who we wanted to honor. And NASA was.

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who, who?

• 18:27Speaker 03

  Ah, yes, I'm just gonna have a mental. I'll come back to it.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that your secret way of saying I forgot the person's name?

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Thank you for finding my mistakes. It's excellent. This is Shoemaker. So we lost Shoemaker. And NASA wanted to put the ashes on the moon.

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so yeah, Eugene Shoemaker.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, just a quick background on him.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 18:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was one of the early geologists to identify that the Berengar Crater in Arizona was in fact of meteoric origin.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is one of the best preserved craters on Earth's surface. For all the reasons cited, most of Earth's surface would look like the moon were it not for erosion and all the other terrestrial forces that erased the history of these collisions. He was one of the first to recognize that it was an impact crater. And in fact, he was slated to be the geologist to fly on Apollo 17. And I think they found some kind of heart murmur with him, and so they sent another geologist instead. But he and his wife Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy were big asteroid hunters. And they discovered many, many comets and asteroids. One of them, they gifted to me in my name. So I actually have an asteroid, 13123 Tyson, discovered by Shoemaker and Levy. So when he died, they said, "Let's send the boy to the moon."

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so is that what they did?

• 19:41Speaker 03

  They did. And of course, you know, there's a beautiful story that he couldn't go personally. And because of that, the family really wanted to honor him. So this was done, and it was done through a lander, but-

• 19:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not through a lander?

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Uh, done through a lander.

• 19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so it landed, so it didn't smash on the moon?

• 19:54Speaker 03

  No, one of the goals was for the ashes to be on a safe mission.

• 19:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want the ashes to burn up? They're already burned up.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  They were safely interred.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, fine.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  But the next step of the story is a public letter written by the president of the Navajo Nation in the US, whose name's Albert Hale, who says, "We understand that this is done to honor this important astronomer and scientist, but I wish that you had asked for consultation on this, because many native communities, ours in particular, but others, hold the moon as sacred. And objects that represent death actually violate our understanding of what's sacred on the moon. I want to give appreciation to a student of mine named Alvin Harvey, who's also from the Navajo Nation, who's done studies on this and given me the knowledge I have out of it. Just to say that it's a conversation worth having to say, if there's cultural differences in how we view what it means to honor someone on the moon,

• 20:47Speaker 03

  at least doing it publicly is a great way to start.

• 20:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's the opposite of colonialism. There it is. When I think of environments and stability and access points, they're also these sort of magic places in a two-body orbiting system. The Lagrange points, where the net force of gravity and centrifugal forces balance out. And we put the James Webb Space Telescope in one of them. So it's like a million miles opposite the direction of the sun. And when you put a satellite there, it kind of hangs out without requiring much sustaining, much in the matter of fuel to sustain its way. So it's a balance point. And so is this a factor in any of the conversation about sustainability at all? Because there's kind of magic points in space. I mean, I'd like to know maybe if they can be exploited in some clever way.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  I think it's both a strength and weakness. Because one question is, are we going to end up seeing a lot of popularity in those sites? Probably so. I think it's going to make sense as people are asking, what ways do you want to sort of have systems working on the moon? Ask the question, how do you have logistics to make sure you can provide facilities? And one could be to have some facilities operating around Lagrange points. And the question is, how do we share them?

• 21:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because any other place is just unstable and will fall in, have to orbit and track it, track where it is. So I bet they're going to be very attractive going forward in the future.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and because of that, they should be seen as a finite resource and they should be thought about sustainably and how we can operate in this sustainably. Like, for sure, they should be seen as finite, in my opinion.

• 22:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and so there are multiple Lagrange points. There's Earth-Moon Lagrange points, there's five of them. And Earth-Sun Lagrange points, another five of them. So for anything that orbits, you can find these five spots. And they're very cool, and they even collect debris. So, for example, the Sun-Jupiter Lagrange points, right? These are, they're places in front of Jupiter and behind it in its orbit. And they just collect meteors there. And yeah, so it's been suggested that in one of these places, you could just put all of your engineering materials. If you wanted to build something, just leave it there. It's like your storage closet, because it's not going to fall to any place else. So maybe this should be considered. You're a moon person, put it out there.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  I'm not a Sun-Jupiter person, though. But no, I think that makes sense. And you know, I think it's all about also transferring lessons learned, right? So as we learn to work in an environment which is heavily cluttered and Leo and how we kind of navigate away from debris, that technology, that thinking can be used to, if we do want to operate in these Lagrange points with lots of meteorites, how to navigate that field. So really, it's just about bridging the lessons learned in space and a lot of different fronts.

• 23:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK, so something we haven't directly addressed. Satellites that were on purpose put there and maybe lived out their useful life. So what about debris? The fact that three satellites, last I checked, have been destroyed in orbit by different countries. But in any case, it is itself polluting the environment, making all activities dangerous. So I'm just wondering, what solutions do you have to clean up the debris? Three sentences, what are you gonna do?

• 23:49Speaker 03

  First, I'll just say that countries need to commit to no more anti-satellite tests. That's just needed. We need to have that be a global sense of peer pressure across all countries. That's a geopolitical solution.

• 24:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, the anti-satellite test? That's euphemism for, let me blow my satellite into a zillion pieces.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Well said, we should clarify what we mean. So these are tests where Country A says, I'm gonna blow up my own satellite to prove that if I needed to, I could blow up yours. But I'm not gonna do that right now.

• 24:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, they don't say, I'm just gonna blow up our own satellite just to see if we can do it. No, no, no, they want you to watch as they do it.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you better be paying attention. I mean, it's, yeah, it seems like a very childish thing to do as a sort of threat. It's like, I'm just gonna punch myself in the face. And I hope you guys are paying attention because I could punch you in the face too, but my face is gonna be too sore for me to do that. I'm gonna have to use the money to, you know, fix my face. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know if that really works.

• 24:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there's a difference between knocking out a satellite in low Earth orbit and in a higher Earth orbit, right? So what's that? I mean, don't all the particles just fall back out and burn up?

• 24:59Speaker 02

  I mean, I think you should all stand.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Again, it depends on some physics. We gotta see what altitude you have. We also wanna ask, you know, how popular the altitude is where the original satellite was, right? And where else is between the original satellite and all the pieces that needs to come down?

• 25:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, cuz I saw the movie Gravity.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 25:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which should have been called Zero Gravity, cuz it was all in Zero Gravity. But in that movie, they showed this catastrophic failure of all satellites. Because one satellite was blown to bits, and each of those bits moving at 18,000 miles an hour? Sorry, I'm American. What's that in?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Miles, we're in the UK.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Miles, we're in the UK, it's okay. UK invented miles, yeah, fine. So we're 18,000 miles an hour. These are now debris moving 18,000 miles an hour. They can take out other satellites. And in that film, if you haven't seen it, the movie Gravity, you gotta get out more, by the way. Just saying, okay? It portrays a total satellite collapse of the entire system, which was named after Tesla. It's the Kessler.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  So I love Sandra Bullock and I loved Gravity. I just have to note that the Hubble is not at the same altitude as the International Space Station, for those who paid.

• 26:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so Sandra Bullock, her character, she just decides to go fix the Hubble telescope. Yeah, but they're like hundreds of miles apart in altitude. Plus, she's a medical doctor. So I wanted her to keep her hands off my telescope. As an astrophysicist, I don't bust into her operating room and say, "Open-heart surgery? I got this. I'm an astrophysicist, right?" No.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  So I think the movie had a good message, but maybe, you know, some of the physics was simplified. But the point, of course, is that, you know, we do wanna ask, you know, how other planets are affected by the breakup of one satellite, that's what I'm saying.

• 26:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm just asking, what do you do about the debris? Y'all don't have those solutions yet. Oh, oh, you got, Matt's got solutions?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  No, I'm gonna have to bring up another movie right now. Because one of the best and most atrocious movies you will ever see is about satellites in space trying to solve climate change. It's called Geostorm.

• 27:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the lead actor was from Scotland, and so is Matt. Okay.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Well, he lives in Los Angeles, and his house burned down due to fires in Los Angeles. And he still lives there and doesn't live in our hometown anymore because it's better to live somewhere that's on fire than where I come from.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Where I'm from, just outside Glasgow, it went up for the UK City of Culture 2020 and lost to Coventry, which gets a laugh in the room. It's the equivalent of going up for an Academy Award and losing to Gerard Butler. Anyway, the point is, the, the, um, it's about, he, he invents a satellite that controls the climate and it fixes climate change. And then some terrorists hijack that satellite, yeah? And start messing with the climate and there's storms and stuff. And the only guy that can solve it is Gerard Butler. He goes into space. Turns out it was the Vice President that controlled it. So I've given away the spoilers there.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  But point is, one of the greatest films of all time and really don't spend your time watching it is GeoStorm, it's about satellites, climate change, you know?

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting. So this is a, this is not a let's clean things up solution. That's like, let's fix things with what we call geoengineering.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Geoengineering, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which again, I mean, we're not going to get agreement.

• 28:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I joke about this, you know? We have acid rain and so what's the solution? Let's give everyone acid rain proof umbrellas, you know?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  I mean, some people would say, yes, people that sell acid, that invent acid rain proof umbrellas would be like, yeah, we've got a solution here for you guys.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  But that's back to the question we were talking about, which is, you know, do we reduce face debris by like creating less debris or by trying to clean out the debris that's already there? I think we need to do both. And some of the ideas people have for cleaning out the debris that's there are to send another satellite that can hopefully go grab it, whether it's, you know, through a hook or through a forceful docking. So I think one question I have is, as we build new satellites, can we design them to be serviced? So they can actually be ready.

• 29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if I set up a satellite, they can sweep up debris? And I can send a satellite to sweep up your satellite?

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. It is a question that, another beautiful question.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  It's like bowls. It's like you're trying to knock the other bowl out of the thing. Do you have that game in the US? Bowls? You mean, like, I don't even know what you mean. Is bocce ball, what is that? I'm like.

• 29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Curling.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Curling, yeah, exactly. It's like curling, but, but, but in space, space curling.

• 29:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space, space curling, new Olympic sport.

• 29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're gonna have to slowly land this plane that we're flying now. But let me get some sort of reflections on this. What do we have to learn so far that we can take with us? A bit of wisdom. I don't even wanna call it advice, just a little bit of wisdom going forward for all parties at the table. What should we be doing?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  So I think for, for me, you know, being in a company that's sending things to the moon, and as Danielle rightly mentioned, we shouldn't be dumping things. The fact that if I worked on a terrestrial company, I would know what regulations I operate under.

• 30:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Under terrestrial company?

• 30:34Speaker 02

  What? It's eye space, it's not a terrestrial.

• 30:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Say that now.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Terrestrial company.

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Terrestrial company.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  So if I worked for a terrestrial company.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everyone today works in a terrestrial company.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Well, if you go into the, yeah, if you enter the moon on space, and I would say, no, you're going to, you're working for a space company.

• 30:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I got it.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I, if I worked for a terrestrial company, every time I say that now, I'm gonna think of you. If I worked for a terrestrial company, I would know what regulations I need to operate under, what assessments I need to do to make sure I'm compliant, go find my handbook, make sure, whatever, whatever.

• 31:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, all of those compliances were written, you know, we've got lawyers in the room, were written because something went wrong.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every line in a contract, in a document, was not known prior to the problem that caused the line to be written in the first place.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  But this is it. For the moon, we know that we need to be delicate. We know that. So we need to, as I'm in business development, people approach me saying, I wanna take this payload to the moon. I have no assessment, I have nothing I can pick up and be like, hey, this is gonna, should we, shouldn't we, this is the, this is the analysis, this is the, nothing. No regulations that are very translatable to the day-to-day. For me, the best thing we can do is normalize that, bring that in. And it's very unusual for a company wanting to be regulated, but it needs to be because we have, we should have responsibility and accountability for what we send up there. It is all of our moons.

• 32:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That said, when it runs its useful life, we have fuel to de-orbit it, or for it to self-destruct, or disappear, or whatever is the magic future physics that could affect the health of the satellite.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And tell me about this Eagle document you co-authored. What's that about?

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so as part of this Space Generation Advisory Council led by Antonina Salmeri, which is a space lawyer, actually.

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that on your business card? Space lawyer? That's badass. That works.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  So it was meant to put together a perspective on lunar governance from the younger generation. So right now lunar governance is very fragmented. We saw that. We went and spoke to lots of different actors playing in the industry that has a view. And we tried to put together the young person's perspective on what we want to see in the world. And that is, the output of that was a lunar governance charter building upon the Outer Space Treaty. So we're not trying to recreate the wheel. We're trying to build into something implementable.

• 33:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Outer Space Treaty, if you haven't read it, it's an interesting document from, I think, 1967, somewhere around there.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is it. I can't pick it up and know what to do from the Outer Space Treaty in my day-to-day job.

• 33:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I recommend you read it. It's just a fascinating attempt to think about the future, realizing that space was being born in that decade.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's for states, for public sector. So private needs its own thing.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so Danielle, just give me some reflective thoughts about where we should go in the future.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  I'm really excited to announce that at this conference, we are opening up and launching tomorrow an important initiative called the Space Sustainability Rating.

• 33:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, who's "we"?

• 33:46Speaker 03

  "We" is a group of organizations that have come together in a consortium led by the World Economic Forum, including MIT, UT Austin, a company called Price Tech, the European Space Agency. And we're really excited to have the EPL Space Center, EPL Space Center, which is in Switzerland.

• 34:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does EPL stand for?

• 34:03Speaker 03

  EPL, if I can do my French. My French isn't great, but it's the Equipo Technique Federal des Lusanes.

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  And in English it would just be, you know, it's definitely university in the sun. But they are going to lead this initiative with the support of our design team. We actually do have Specifically for the Earth orbit and for Earth orbit in general, a set of guidelines which are the actions that any space operator can take and to help reduce space to recreation and to help avoid collisions. And so it's a long list of options for the design phase, the operations phase and the end of life for practices that can help. And we're asking companies to voluntarily get rated, to pay to get rated and to announce the rating to the world to say how close they are to matching these ideal practices.

• 34:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is like the Leeds rating on a building.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Definitely inspiring.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And even though the government didn't require it, it becomes a sort of a voluntary thing. And then the public is trained to look for that on building. They might move their business into it or just live there.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  You can walk into a building and say, this owner of this building chose to pay a little extra money to have the green practices for Earth. And so now, since we're not terrestrial companies, we're asking for companies to do the same thing. Both companies and governments can get rated.

• 35:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I can say that for every Leeds building I've been in, I've noticed the air smells cleaner. And that makes me wonder, what the hell am I breathing?

• 35:17Speaker 03

  And now you'll notice that your satellite data smells cleaner because it's going to compensate SSR rated emission.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, yeah, you want satellites to help you monitor what's happening on Earth. So you are the enemy.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, we want satellites, but we just want you to also, yeah, just clean up your satellites after yourselves when you possibly can. But we need it, we need, so satellites look at greenhouse gas emissions, which, you know, methane emissions. We can now look at what's happening across the entire world and a bunch of oil and gas companies are leaking methane here and there. We can spot that, we can look at, you know, what's happening in your satellite.

• 35:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what he's saying is Scottish for methane.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Methane, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not like you had some new element, yeah, okay.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. We're going to talk about aluminum in a minute.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  Oh, god.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  I'll give you minium.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  Aluminum.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Let's not get into it. So it's incredibly important. One reason is that methane is

• 36:17Speaker 01

  a short-lived greenhouse gas. Did you say the word gas? Yeah, cool. I mean, you actually call what you put in your car's gas, which is nonsense because it's a liquid. Anyway.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gasoline.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Okay. Should have thought of that, shouldn't you?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  So yeah, we look, methane is a short-lived gas. So actually, you know, CO2 is sort of the main gas that we emit that's causing climate change. Methane causes more in the short term.

• 36:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, it's short-lived because it's highly reactive, right? With other things in the environment, whereas CO2 is a pretty stable molecule.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some people think we need to focus more on CO2, others think we need to focus more on methane, but you know, the gas is always greener on the other side. That's one of the worst jokes you'll ever hear about climate change, but very accurate.

• 37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, totally accurate. But you still want your satellite data, but you're with everyone. We're not going to believe we're going to stop launching satellites. We just have to manage that going forward.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, it's helping there, you know, more satellites are helping there, but yeah, as we, you know, we need to be forward-thinking about what are the issues going to be caused in space because of it.

• 37:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I just want to say thank you, panel, for those observations. And I want to share with you what I would call a cosmic perspective on all this. It's not a new problem that technology and engineering forces operate on our civilization in ways that make life better. And we only later learn what kinds of constrictions it has placed on our health and our wealth and our security, and all of those matter in space, of course. So I'd rather view this not as some dire problem, but as a natural course of evolution of what happens when you become better at something than you had ever imagined. And so now you deal with it.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm delighted to see and learn that not only is such a conference as this something that's happening now, not in 10 years, because imagine if this conference were held 50 years ago, when we first started using plastic in major ways for food containers and other applications. Just imagine at the time. What we did with plastic, we used it once, threw it away. Where does it go? Nobody thought about that. Okay, it works its way into the oceans. And now, last I read, the fish we eat are, what, 50% plastic? So, no one was thinking about this at the dawn of that era. But the fact that it did happen that way, I think, has informed

• 38:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  how responsible we need to be going forward. And so, in that way, it's kind of a silver lining to our shortsightedness on the past. But it's only a silver lining. In fact, we can look to the past and learn from it, so that our descendants can be proud of what we have bequeathed them, rather than embarrassed by what we have left behind. So that's a cosmic perspective for this sustainability conference. Thank you all. And special thanks to our sponsors, Privateer and Omega Watches. To everyone, keep looking up.