Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for coming. I've always been fascinated with the notion of space and looking at the stars. Looking at them up in the sky. It's not just decoration in a way. It's information moving towards us with the speed of light. That's why I make project like these. Inspired by the starry nights of the famous Van Gogh painting, a bicycle path which charges at daytime and glows at night. These are public space projects you can go to which combine a practical agenda and a poetic agenda at the same time. If we can have some music. So that was about the stars. But today we talk about space and the space waste which is out there right now. What can we learn from planet Earth if we want to make new things happen in space? What are the problems and what are the potentials? And I'll talk about the future the coming 50 to 60 years. But before we dive into that I want to start with the history. I want to start with Kennedy. I want to start in 1962. Not because it's easy but because it's hard. And they were on a mission to go to the moon. And this was euphoria. We had the Jetsons as cartoons. We built Concorde. There was a real notion of moving forward. Weirdly enough this is 60 years later. This is not an undiscovered Jackson Pollock. This is the current space waste which is floating around our universe. So this is our precious Earth. And this is all the junk around it. More than 8.1 million kilo of it. It started in 1957. Launch of Sputnik Apollo. Pieces of satellites and missiles started to collide. Creating this layer of junk around our Earth. So somehow we're not satisfied ruining our planet Earth. We sort of keep on persuading that mission outside our Earth. This is shocking for somebody like me. It's almost obscene. And even Kessler the famous space expert calculated that if we continue like this, which we will, there will be so much junk around our Earth. It's called the Kessler effect that basically we're sort of trapped. Everything we launch creates more collisions, more particles, more collisions, etc, etc, etc. So we have so much stuff around it that we cannot launch more new missiles. Then what happened in the coming 25 to 30 years? So we will be here in Davos and Dalian in 25 years and saying, OK, good news we found life outside planet Earth. Bad news we can't get there. OK, that is not the mission and the session I think we should have. So we launched Spaceways Lab, collaboration with ASA, the European Space Agency, because it's a big problem. These particles, although they're very tiny and you think they're very, very far away, like 2,000, 20,000 kilometers, why should we care? Well, because a very tiny particle, if it hits an existing satellite, it's like a bomb, 27,000 kilometers per hour. So it's a threat to our day-to-day communication, our satellites, our GPS, our 5G. If we continue like this, no more Facebook, no more World Economic Forum.org, no more Facebook. So although, you know, that's what I like about it. On one hand it's very abstract and on the other it's very personal. It's our communication, it's our intimacy and it's one of the most environmental concerns of our time. OK, so how do we fix a big problem? OK, very simple. Phase one, creating awareness, making sure that people know about it. Phase two, fixing the problem with technology. But also phase three, upcycle it, add a new value to it, give a new meaning to it, so we don't make the same mistake again and again. So we started to collect information of 29,000 particles larger than 10 centimeters. And we know exactly where they are, how they are named and the exact position above our head. And in order to sort of create a larger awareness for people, we started to visualize this with these huge lines of light above your head, showing real-time the spaceways where it is above you. So thousands of particles like these are floating around our planet Earth. Each one has its own name, its history.  What can we do with it? 8,000 people at the opening of the Space Waste Lab creating awareness, scanning, thinking, revealing. And inside we did an exhibition about the history and the future of space waste. A lot of people came and were actually interested. And I have it here, this is really cool. We got a real piece of space waste from one of the astronauts from the Hubble telescope in 1990, who was doing maintenance and sort of drifted away and he captured this. This is priceless. And this is very interesting. So we looked at this and realized that there's 8.1 million kilo of space junk. But maybe we can also see it as an ingredient. What would you build with 8.1 million kilo of Lego blocks? That was sort of the question we asked here. You can maybe show it around. Don't drop it, please. So we got 2,000 students, high school kids and experts from ESA and NASA working together and asking what can we do with it? How can we upcycle it? Many ideas came in. This is in Dutch, collect the space waste and put it into a black hole. Maybe, maybe not. Or here we need to build a wall from space waste and make the aliens pay for it, make space clean again. It's not me, it's not me. No comment. But the real solution, most likely everybody agrees, lays here. Cube satellites, mini-satellites, quite affordable. You can attach a net to it.  There it goes. Hapa, we have it. Not fully proven yet, but the most feasible as we speak. So we have a satellite, a net, and that is a way to capture it. Then we had a problem. Nobody cared. Nobody likes to clean up.  You're like, yeah, whatever mom, I want to have popcorn, I want to watch television. Cleaning up is not fun. And this is, ladies and gentlemen, where the role of design came in. I'm not smarter than ESA or Airbus or NASA. I'm not because they're really, really smart. But what I can do is create a new link, design a new value. So we started to look at that. And for example, question, if we capture it with the net, can we use it to 3D print houses on the moon? This is already on the agenda of NASA to do this. Why are we shipping very expensive material from the earth all the way up? Just capture what is there and 3D print it. It's creating a new type of architecture, a new type of geometry. Or here maybe a bit. Or here maybe a bit. It's this one. Once we have the net in a safe and controlled way, and it hits the earth atmosphere, what happens then, it burns. Yes, very good. So waste is light. That's interesting. Can we create artificial shooting stars as a replacement for fireworks? And apparently, yes we can. So this is what we're working on now, right now, to go to countries. For example, the Netherlands is spending 70 million euro on traditional fireworks. It's very polluting. People lose their eyes. Whole villages are burned to the ground. We find it very normal. A lot of cities in China are already banding fireworks because of air pollution, due by spending 8.1 million euros, I think, per year. So basically what we're saying is you're already spending the money on fireworks. Let's spend it on this.  And at the same time, you clean up space. That is sort of the mission we're on with the Space Waste Lab. And that is the way I think we should think to take something which is a problem and turn it to a potential. It's not necessarily easy. And it requires some linking thinking between creativity and engineering. But I think this is the only way to move forward. We're not going to make it with the existing way of thinking. So ladies and gentlemen, to conclude, that's how I would love to see space. A space to explore, a space to learn, a space to make mistakes. But also a space where we learn from the mistakes from planet Earth, try to be the best, to try to improve, and try to find a new harmony between economical progress and humanity. Thank you so much. Yes. Thank you. I hope you'll bear with us for just a couple of minutes. Behind me, they're going to put a couple of chairs for the panel discussion we're about to have. But while we're waiting for them to do that, didn't you kind of love this idea of... I liked it. I liked it because Dan, being an artist, also, to me, struck me as art with his words, too. This idea of a practical and poetic agenda. Wouldn't that be nice if we could do more with technology that was so practical and poetic? I love the notion of the undiscovered Jackson Pollock, but not really. That's not what it was. It was waste around the planet. Could we actually take this waste and do something else with it? It could be useful or even lovely, but I'm thinking about fireworks. I'm thinking about fireworks because where I come from, we'll be having fireworks a little later this week. Okay, I think we're just about there. Can I ask the panelists to please join me up at the stage? And I'll introduce you when we get there. And Dan, you as well, please. Please. And I love this backdrop, too, by the way. Thank you. Now we've had some beautiful visual flights at Fancy, and we're going to talk a little bit about some of the technological realities there, perhaps some of the business potentials there, perhaps some other perspectives on what we might do or might not be able to do. And I thought, because everybody hasn't met you yet, Dan, I hope you don't mind. If I ask, maybe I'll go from all the way out, and if you don't mind, Dirk Carsten Hoek is the Chief Executive Officer Airbus Defense and Space in Germany, and also one of our young global leaders. And then I'd like to introduce Sarah Ben-Yusuf Al-Amiri, Minister of State for Advanced Sciences of the United Arab Emirates, and also a young global leader. Could I ask you both just, you know, some initial impressions. First, please tell us a bit about your work and what you normally do around space and research and technologies related to that. And maybe after you share that, if you wouldn't mind sharing some initial impressions. They just first up. Good morning, everybody. So just first, I don't know if you can hear me or not. It seems a little quiet. It seems quiet. Okay. I hope this is better. Yes. Perfect. So just to start off, I've started in the space sector in the UAE very early on with the development of the capabilities for developing satellites in the UAE, about almost 11 years ago. I'm the science lead on the Emirates Mars mission. That's sort of the other hat that I wear next to the federal level development of science and technology for the UAE. We're using the space sector as a catalyst for the development of talent and for reshaping the way we utilize talent in the sciences and engineering to start doing design and development. And it's one of the cornerstones of moving towards a more diversified post-oil economy. Just as an initial impression and what I really liked about what you just showcased from an artist's perspective is it looked at space and space debris from an angle that was what do we do with the waste and it wasn't imposing. So a lot of things that I think we hear in the sector is imposing regulations when it comes to adding propulsion systems onto satellites and so on. Those inhibit creativity because the more guidelines you put to development and design the more inhibiting it is to designers and developers for spacecrafts. And I really like the angles that you put and you expanded the utilization of space debris expanded how we approach utilizing space. And this is a topic that we need to take multiple perspectives from people from different sectors and people from different areas to be imposed and included within this discussion. Yeah, we work in a company that is around 40,000 people working with space products. We produce everything from telecommunications satellites, Earth navigation satellites, Earth observation satellites and we also look of course at space debris and the net is one of our daughter companies we were the first one to successfully be able to collect space debris. We look at other topics also how we can support these kind of initiative. We have an R&D project called Space Tuck. The idea was to create a satellite with a robot arm and it was one of the structures. One of the ideas was behind it to do 3D printing in space then construct any kind of structure and also to take it with the Space Tuck from the Leo into the Geo also to look at refueling satellites because the lifetime of a satellite is mostly defined by the fuel capacity so extend the lifetime of modules in order to enhance the capabilities of a satellite and the other topic would be to collect space debris with the robot arm and bring it down deorbit it or burn it many things that you had in your videos we were looking at but the question is who pays for it so every school and university now launching micro nano satellites they have no obligation to deorbit they have no obligation to burn it so this will not as you said it's not sustainable no one could continue like that and we discussed in another circle of big space companies what could be incentive because at the end it's all about incentives how can you incentivize companies to do further development on that and this could be like whoever launches something has to pay a certain amount into pool which will be then used could be based on kilos could be based on how urgent it is there's a lot of incentives that could be placed in order to make sure that companies like ours invest billions of euros into the development of these kind of things another thing we do is on education we have created a stem center in Munich where we found out that in order to collect enough talents for the future especially also on the female side and you look at kids between 6 and 12 and they're not biased so if you teach kids on coding it's equally cool for girls and boys and so we do this two times a week I train them on coding and about space and it was quite cool I was running into one of the classes and I'm talking to a 9 year old girl and she was like so what are you doing about space debris really that's good so I think it's about already also changing the mindset it's a different mindset beautiful I love that actually and I love the power of art to inspire us to think and I love that idea of everybody pays a share to solve a problem that we all collectively have created I'd like to come back to the debris just for a minute or two more just for understanding for folks in the room you just use the terms and it relates down to what you were showing which is pathways that waste travels so waste travels in certain paths maybe you all saw that maybe each of you if you like speak to that you think space is really big so it's everywhere but they're sort of highways sort of heights which have the perfect angle for satellites etc etc new word every week so that's the Leo that's the altitude and therefore the junk is always low earth when we look at Leo we talk mostly about Leo constellations for telecommunication this is somewhere between 400 and 1200 km I don't know if you saw we launched our first 6 satellites of our one web adventure in February and they are at 1200 km they will be in the next two years we will launch 648 satellites in the Leo constellation in order to provide telecommunication service also if you want to be in an aircraft crossing at Atlantic instead of having just BA you can just download your emails having high speed internet access these kind of things but it's getting busy and how high are these debris highways how far off the ground 220,000 km something like that more or less and mostly so satellites are getting downscaled before telecom satellites used to be at Geo so that's geostationary orbit large satellites that operated for 10 to 15 years and relatively stay there for decades at least 15 years they stay there for decades even after decommissioning it and we see a large trend towards getting smaller satellites that get more things done and their lifetime is shorter and the purpose from that is that you can have the technologies continuously updated because the larger ones are very expensive and very hard to maintain not a lot of companies invest in maintenance of those assets and with that trend you see the low earth orbit becoming more and more congested and you understand that it's not only the space debris of the satellites that go up there it's the vehicles that take them up there that also remain in orbit that you don't have contact with and are not able to utilize to bring it down so we are going to continue seeing more congestion in low earth orbit and I think your rendering showed that it's very congested in the area that we really need to use for most of the assets that need to go to space so that our daily lives could be in the same way that we're currently living in there's nobody here that lives without some form of attachment to an asset in space be it from the data, be it from the communication be it from any angle any point of your day you're attached to something in space and they're vital the way we do things today we can't survive without them and exactly and the question I would love to ask and maybe to answer today is like how can we not repeat the sort of mistakes or lessons that we've learned on planet Earth and I think that's the beauty of art and design or creativity what you mentioned as well and you as well is that if we can't imagine how we want the future to look like we won't get there and then we figure a way how to make it happen and it becomes a vicious cycle as you said because in the past as you said it needed four years and several hundred million euro to create a geostation or satellite now we can, for one web we can produce two a day really? so it is changing and if we don't do anything about it we will definitely run into problems because as I said the life cycle of a satellite do manoeuvres to avoid collision you reduce the lifetime of a satellite and this happens more and more so how would you fix space waste? yeah I said now how would you like if you look at this and the conversations you had already and we're having now what do you think is sort of a roadmap for a sustainable space as I said we should start with whoever launches something should pay a tax in order either be obliged to the orbit or pay a tax to a pool and the ensuring that the space degree is covered is what we already and shooting stars question though from having an obligation to deorbit because the beauty of where we've gotten to today and the access that we're opening up to emerging nations when it comes to having space assets has never been has never been a point across the last few decades that space has existed now more than ever more countries could own those assets and the data that they require to run things as business as usual and at a time when we want to ensure parity across the board regardless of income of the countries we need to be able to ensure that access to space is still there and deorbitting costs a lot it increases the size so it takes us the other way that we've gone down increase the size of the spacecraft and something important that you spoke about but something else that we need to invest in is battery technologies because that's usually the first thing that would die out in a spacecraft investing in smaller more effective battery technologies that could be operated for a longer amount of time in space and that would allow us to use those small satellites that have a shorter lifespan and utilize it for a longer period of time just so people are understanding what we're talking about what sizes are we talking about the geosatellites could be several tons they are like a room size room size but the cubes satellites are like these the one web satellite is 160 kilo fridge size and then you have microsatellites nanosatellites any size you want I ordered one you can order the line the smallest satellites is a 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter across cubesat and it sends a beep back and while we're on this sorry while we're on this I got excited when you're deorbitating something that's very large I remember Skylab that's how old I am but how do you even begin to it's expensive but how does one do that use the propulsion and point it down and if you didn't do that how long would they naturally take to deorbit could be seconds really really long inside I didn't know the exact time but we will everything we launch we also either take down or burn so that there are no remains in the orbit but you talked about 29,000 objects bigger than 10 centimeters we talked about a million objects below 10 centimeters but they're too small to track but they're still lethal so one more question what is this effect what is this effect when there's a certain amount up there and then what happens so if you were trying to send a new satellite up there on a on a vehicle what would happen to it but Dan explained it already so Kessler is a space scientist who was actually one of the first with his team of course to calculate that if we continue like this in a couple of years in the coming 25 to 30 years there's so much junk which creates so much collisions when we launch more collisions etc so then we are at the point of no return so there's so much junk that everything we launch will become part of the trash again etc etc and that was sort of a shock I think in the space world they were like like we're sort of trapped we have this sort of layer of junk around our earth I spoke with him via Skype and he asked him like how do you feel to discover like this world disaster because basically that's what it is and he was very sort of he's a mathematician he's sort of calm and he's like yeah that's the reality and everybody sort of agrees but I think from a personal perspective I think it's crazy that we accept that as a reality so the need of urgency to fix it so we have to generate a different perspective and a different attitude of collaboration so in a way it's not a technological constraint or a money constraint but a creativity constraint that we have to fix a perspective change that makes it fascinating for me so I'd like to talk a little bit about how we've recognized this situation and what we are doing in terms of regulatory frameworks in terms of government discussions discussions can you all update us on that a bit what are you seeing now so we see discussions happening on space sustainability I think in the Global Future Councils here in WEF is one of the places that this is being discussed and different recommendations are there I'll talk about I'll reiterate what to caution when it comes to those regulations and let's look at them from the perspective of how can we make access to space better by removing some of the space junk that exists there but let's not make access to space difficult because we want to make it better and this is a very important point when regulations come into perspective and when development comes into perspective and we are at a very important time when it comes to the development of satellites and like you said it's about previously satellites took years upon years of design and development now they are becoming more reproducible because it's becoming more affordable and because of that we need to understand that we can impose over a stringent guidelines that inhibit this development and something we need to look at is reuse how could we reuse a lot of the parts that get you to space but how can we reuse the things that are currently in space that's one the second one is the value proposition of space debris what do we do with the space debris that's out there how's the cost effective and I like the idea of paying a small sort of fee to deorbit rather than and I like to again stress on the amount of small because you don't want to inhibit people going into this you don't want to inhibit getting a value out of it when we're talking about a space economy we're talking about a space economy that has a private sector that is not entirely dependent on government spending because we can't sustain space for further decades with further government spending we need to allow for private companies to come out one because it enables access to the data that comes from those space assets that helps in various developments it helps in urban planning it helps in natural disasters it helps in communication where infrastructure for communication does not exist it gives us the basics of life as we know it today and we need to caution from having regulations that inhibit that just because we want to solve the problem of space debris and any regulatory framework needs to have those various perspectives in play and in place in order for us to continue thinking about how do we make space access continuous for the next generations to come and how could we enable technologies for space access again for generations to come nothing to add I think that was definitely going in the direction we also look at because we believe we need access to space and I think having access to space and having access to space and having access to space will be crucial for all nations in the future I think looking at science I think what we know about earth a lot of that we know because we are in space and we can see from space towards the earth we monitor wind speeds we monitor CO2 emissions we monitor air quality we can measure sea levels so a lot of we work on agriculture monitoring different areas in order to optimize fertilizing irrigation so a lot of what we know about the earth we know because we are in space so we have to continue that and I think as you said it cannot be done only institutional and government it has to be also private sector supported but it also has to be clear we cannot continue congesting the space as we do and we have to have some rules we don't want to prohibit people from exploring space but everyone should be clear that we cannot do the same as we did on earth as you said in space so I want to give the audience a chance to ask questions in a minute but I'm going to ask you one more so they can think of it I was reflecting on the idea of capturing this debris so we talked about deorbitating big pieces but little pieces there's a lot of little pieces nets other things that are used for capturing and perhaps reusing I don't know if it's getting the material together for 3D or additive manufacturing or what but I would love to hear what's going on there are a lot of ideas and a lot of prototypes but nothing has been sort of 100% proven yet as far as I know but also that's because that's what they say there's no real market for the child as well cleaning up is not fun so I think guidelines and rules are important to sort of set a standard but I think it's also about what you were mentioning like maybe we can reuse it or upcycle it then it gets a value and then you get an incentive for change so I think we have to sort of plug into this hyper pragmatic attitude that a lot of space people have I think there's no technical solution for the 29,000 pieces yet you see collecting 29,000 pieces with a net will take ages you have a lot of shooting stars so there's no perfect solution yet so the net is tested it works the robot arm we have invested our own money in the early development phase but going towards prototyping so this we currently discuss with a couple of nations in Europe but again without incentivization it will be difficult to explore that further so we need definitely some kind of new rules and regulation framework that incentivize these kind of R&D work or a couple of our satellites are being hit and Europe has no Facebook for five days and then we fix it in one week most likely it's just we had a space asset that's been out up for five years and we've gotten a warning once in that five years and the warning was they were relatively far enough that you didn't need to action anything so just it's not so bad as the pictures would and the renderings would actually depict but it's getting worse and like you said we will get to a point where operating a satellite is very difficult and you need to use more fuel power if you do have propulsion on your satellites to be able to maneuver them so you don't collide I think it's a good point that space is still large this makes me wonder how far apart the average distances between pieces of junk but I don't know they go 27,000 kilometers per hour so it's hard to imagine in the end and what you said what if and sort of create a new vision how we want a sustainable space that's what we should focus on in my opinion so I hope you've gotten a feel for the flavor of some of the things that our experts here can talk to you about I know there's a microphone in the room is there anybody who would like to ask a question I see a gentleman right in front of me here and please say who you are when you ask your question I'm the CEO of Curl Analytics Data Analytics My name is Shivram CEO of Curl Analytics Data Analytics Company I have two questions one is can you build satellites and rockets in such a way that there is less space debris in the sense can we launch them with less debris that they break less once their life has expired when their battery runs out it works but do you have to send one system of satellite or net to capture one debris that is one large debris or is it like one net can capture one then they should have a propulsion system and so on so I wanted to understand more about that I didn't catch all of it the last question was the multiple purpose of the net I think that's what I said we don't have a perfect solution yet we don't have enough debris to reuse and collect and then bring it down and de-orbit it in a sustainable manner this is something we still have to look at that's why the net is working for big pieces and I'm sure it will do the job but in order to collect 29000 and beyond we need other more sustainable solution for mass collection which are not available yet and on de-orbitting or burning I'll repeat it is there a way we can launch satellites or build them to reduce the amount of debris they release in the first place I think this is what the design is but the problem is once the satellite gets hit by any kind of other material you create little pieces of debris again so hitting and this is what the Kessler effect is about hitting pieces you create always they hit again they create hundreds of pieces and thousands of pieces so the problem is that already now the space is pretty much congested by millions of pieces below 10 centimeters and they become like missiles 27000 so this couldn't be used also on purpose creating debris on purpose if you want to destabilize a nation you take out the Earth observation satellite the telecommunication satellite you go back into the world you don't want to see so you can create debris on purpose it becomes quite I like your question because when you design a new satellite and you think about what if we would reuse it to 3D print or to create something and you would include that in the design of how you make a satellite it would look and behave in a completely different way right now there's a lot of toxic battery liquids I mean it's beautiful so I think if you change the mental map of what it should be you start redesigning it as well and I think that's a big step the problem is you need the solar arrays and they already are very sensitive true true true I'm not saying it's easy but I think you should design it full circle not just in a linear way but in a circular way that's I think where it starts there's a question over on the this side of the room and I think it opens up a lot of minds my name is Nikhil Malhotra I'm the Global Head of Innovation for Tech Mahindra and this talk has been going around in a lot of circles in India as well yesterday there was a maybe a couple of months back a seven year old told me why don't we do asteroid mining these days so these questions have started coming in from kids my question to you guys is how do you democratize all of this effort how do you tell it to the the world where there's a race now for private firms it started up a Lunar X price it was started about five years ago which essentially involved private firms building rockets sending out satellites in the space with no or less government funding but how does all of this talk that you do over here or all of this information gets democratized in a world where you get a lot of these ideas so that's my question I think you said it already because access to space the price per kilo has reduced so dramatically the access to space so that it becomes everybody's problem and everybody's solution that's a good question that's a really good question I think as you said no one likes to clean up so the problem is it will still take a lot of education and efforts of all nations involved in order to create a sense of urgency that is needed in order to start going into action mode it's a lot of discussions not a lot of solutions so I fully agree we need to step up as governments as the institution and as private sector but I don't see it in the next month it will be quite quite some time necessary in order to get there so probably I'll go back to what you said with regards when we start having an actual problem there that's when the solution will come out this is when I think that's when you start cleaning up and it's unfortunate that that's the case but it's understandable when you're talking about priorities and development priorities and right now the priority is getting cheaper access to space and that's the reality of the current state of the business including the private sector that's currently up and coming and we're at a transition point where the governments across the world are supporting the development of these the smaller private sector companies that are then going to access the space and it's still the burden of development and the burden of risk taking is still on usually government spending across the board in different countries and that's why you see a lot of these companies that are actually profitable a lot of them are profitable because of government contracts that are guaranteed to them for development so we're at a state where the space economy is starting to evolve we're not there yet for problems such as space junk and what do we do with it to be addressed from a private sector perspective I think we all have a right for a clean space everybody has the right for a clean space everybody, every country every nation, every person but we also have everybody has a role in the clean space so right and role they have this beautiful weird relationship having conversations like these helps us to sort of define that what we do know is how it doesn't work and so it starts with top-down guidelines or rules setting a new standard but it also requires a more creative attitude make new connections between things that we haven't thought of before so we are forced to be creative again whether we like it or not we don't really have a clear answer to your question but it's a really good question other questions that people might have I think if you would have the FIFA World Cup transmission be interrupted I think that might and suddenly people would realize there is a set of is it like with the cyber security topic if you, five years ago when you went to company to talk about cyber security they were like nothing has happened so they only start investing once they hit the wall and this is the same as here we need probably a demonstration how important space assets are to today's life before there is a wake-up call would you ever go to space? personally? do you have plans? I'm just curious because this is your topic if I'm allowed to ask please we produced the European service model for Orion which is part of the Orion mission for NASA to go into space and the second module is supposed to carry humans again so probably one day it's not that far away and if it would be possible not to lose one or two years but go for a short mission and otherwise my family would not be so happy ministry would you like to go up? I wouldn't say no to going out to space me too I'm always thinking about the astronauts like when they go up they didn't look at the moon but they looked at the Earth Earth-gazing they looked for hours at this beautiful marble and everybody who came back most of the astronauts who came back became actually fighters for sustainability promoters of sustainability we have to redesign renegotiate our way with Planet Earth so maybe part of creating the awareness of saving Planet Earth is just bringing a lot of people up looking at the world in a new way and then bring them down again maybe that mental map will help to face our great challenges just better understanding just on that topic of how do you sustain Earth just understanding how our neighbors the planets around us are such harsh environments for life for sure and looking at planets that could have at some point had life and have evolved and changed into into planets that can't sustain life as we know it is very important to understanding the need to one, sustaining Earth and two, sustaining the space around Earth absolutely there's another question from the same gentleman I just wanted to comment on that I think technology can solve a lot of that problem we can probably have people go into space in virtual reality and probably showcase the sustainable effect of the planet as well as the other things so you can probably do that sitting over here you don't need to go to space to do that maybe one in the back of the room thank you for the session Muhammad Musa here Deepin AI in Silicon Valley what do you think is the top opportunities for technology entrepreneurs in the space ecosystem where are the biggest pain points and big markets that people should focus on to compete that for some reason it was marked here what are the top opportunities where should entrepreneurs focus on opportunities in the space ecosystem both technology and platform access opportunities that have big pain points and high impact usually when people look at space they think that a space developer is someone like Airbus Defense and Space here Spacecraft from scratch which is not the case there is a lot of subsystems and components that go into satellites they are usually procured from companies that just develop that one component and there is a lot of opportunities to optimize various modules that exist within satellites that don't have a large burden for companies to start in and it's just developing the right component of space verified and we have there is a lot of opportunity there because a lot of companies that exist are legacy companies that have existed for decades and have been using legacy technology that they are just developing incrementally and we are at a certain point where we would love to see components that are not from your typical line of components that have been developed for 15, 20 years heritage was important at a certain point so heritage is how much a component has been used in space because the cost of access to space is lower the cost of satellites is lower now the appetite of taking less heritage for components is getting better and the risk that is associated with it is reducing and the typical design and development processes that go into it that require for example dual redundancy two of everything across the board and components that have been verified for hours upon hours upon years of use in space is no longer becoming the case and you are able to evolve that and we have a case of doing it even on a mission that is going to another planet that has a higher risk so on the Emirates Mars mission we actually looked at every different and every design process and questioned why it was there why are we designing in this way is it something that we are doing just because it's a norm or is it something that we are doing because it's a need and it's these discussions with various large developers that will enable new tech startups to feed into the process of development so I think the realm is open not only for the developers of small satellites that our typical developers work on in the past you see our people were trained with the slogan first time right because once you launch it has to work you have no way of doing corrections so our people were trained for perfection and especially because you have a four years building time you want to make sure that there is no mistake afterwards you can ensure the risk but if you after four years have a launch problem or some kind of problem of the satellite going into orbit to the right position you lose a customer because a customer needs a product and he has built a business model and if he has to wait another four years to get another satellite it's a serious problem so our people were trained first time right and you only can ensure first phase the vibration during launch so this is something that's not trivial so that's why we of course were trained to have really experienced suppliers but as you said now looking at one web satellite producing two a day being able to launch very quickly again it is a different ballgame you can do mistakes you can have a reduction of risk for your customer the cost changes also the supply chain and you look at companies like Rocket Labs quite oppressive they went from New Zealand to US to get started but he built up a supply chain in New Zealand they have never done anything in space before but now they were trained what they have to do in order to be space system suppliers and now they have a supply chain in New Zealand didn't exist before this is more an observation what I noticed is when I zoom out and I look at the old missiles and satellites when I go to Houston in NASA they are very linear very tall and then it's interesting as space economy is sort of evolving it becomes more biology they look like spiderwebs they look like jellyfishes they look like origami so I think it's as a designer it's very interesting to look at how space is evolving and how it's becoming more fluid so in a way it's becoming more natural or more organic in that way the way it looks like and behaves and I think that's a good thing if we want to create a sustainable space future I think we might have time for one or two more I see a gentleman in the back Good morning Sam Donald just to Dan's point earlier basically he said we have the right to clean space in today's world a lot of us have the right to clean cities and there are environmental agencies which regulate waste disposal and so on and so forth a lot of mega cities are imposing CO2 and emission tax as well which is unfortunately a bit too late in the day I'm just wondering with the jurisdiction around space being different how practical is it for whereby there is a regulation around fee structure for cleaning space and so on assuming cleaning space technology become affordable with time rules guidelines today we don't have any rules in this regard so of course it would be good to start early to discuss it as you said on one side you don't want to stop to the innovation because I think innovation will drive the knowledge that we also need here on earth but I think if we don't start early with some kind of rules of regulation we will create as you said also earlier we create a big mess in space as well so I think to find the right balance in regulation and on the other hand side driving innovation this will be the critical issue do we have a perfect solution for that not at all a lot of discussions ongoing and I think the web is also driving a couple of discussions between the big and smaller companies institutions, governments but I think we are still far away from the perfect solution just to understand that it's not sustained so the drive for this is we need more assets in space to better understand cleaner earth and better understand the climate change that is happening here that is very important to different countries that they are able to better understand the changes in the climate that is affecting them as cities as in countries and so on so it's very important to stress the right balance when it comes to regulations and guidelines I think I would take the parallel with the plastic in the ocean on one end you need like Brussels for example abandoning certain type of plastic or the plastic straws but you also need more like startups like my fellow Dutchman Boyan with his ocean cleanup harvesting and capturing the plastic in the ocean which is more bottom up I think you need both if you only rely on regulation we might be sitting here for the coming 10, 15, 20 years it should happen but it takes some time so you need the sort of bottom up tickling and that's the project I showed are hoping to do that to put it on the agenda to make it part of a new standard and they meet in the middle that's when you create impact so you need both and I think again the fact that we're having this conversation and what you mentioned to having this diversity of different countries and different stakeholders being engaged there's 2,000 students we did workshop with the ideas they came up with were not that far off towards engaging with space and only then we will create a real solution and the solution can come outside the space sector and that's very important to stress because solutions to plastics in the ocean didn't come from plastic producers exactly that's a good comment a solution can come from outside space and the more we talk about this the more people hear about this and the more dialogue they have across their various networks regardless of the sectors a solution that is economically viable that could be used as an analogy to what's currently happening so I think there we have it I'm sorry I think we could talk much longer and that would be just lovely a practical and a poetic agenda to put the topic of space debris and other ways we can all benefit from space back here on earth I think we've had a great conversation today I hope you'll join me in thanking our great panelists thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you for your call


Okay, we're back live here in Strata Conference. So we're here at siliconangle.tv, the cube, where we go out and talk to Horace Got The Signal. And we want to extract that from the noise and share that with you. This is our flagship telecast. I'm joined with my co-host Dave Vellante. And we're here with Mark Smith, who I met on Twitter because he had the epic tweet yesterday with some great data.  Welcome to the cube. This is where we broadcast live. Step a little closer to the microphone so you can see you there. So Mark, tell us a couple of things. One, who you are, what you do, and some of the research you're working on. And we will jump into some of the commentary. Great. Well, thanks. It's good to be here. I'm Mark Smith. I am a sociologist. And I work with an organization called the Social Media Research Foundation. We're a not-for-profit at smrfoundation.org. Our motto is open tools, open data, and open scholarship. We're trying to be a browser for social networks. So we have released a tool. And it is called NodeXL, the network overview discovery and exploration add-in for Excel. It basically lets anybody who can now make a pie chart make a network diagram. And network diagrams are important because they are the shape of the social web. As I like and link and reply and mention to other people, I form a network with them. And this is a way of visualizing it. So last night, I tweeted about the data that we had collected, people who were tweeting about Stratocomps and the connections among them. And that image went out. And you can actually see something about the shape of the crowd. So our goal is to actually document how does social media really work. Well, I'm really impressed. First of all, I was on the list, which got my attention because it's the vanity of the bloggers. Seeds their name on the list. But seriously, this is something that we're really passionate about. We also believe Dave's firm, our research side of the business, is we don't charge for any of our content. It's all freak, data, knowledge. So we love your mission. We want to promote that. So we'll continue to promote your work. But more importantly, the social networks are about the future, the interactions, the collaboration. And Stratocomps is about big data. But there's all kinds of different conversations you heard us talking about, the business market, $50 billion. But there's really a change the world mentality going on here. You mentioned scholarship. We have a group we're developing called Silicon Academy. And you see Khan Academy, knowledge is free, data is free. But as the crowd consumes the data, it creates crowd behavior that can be measured. So what you're doing is doing that. So what kind of measurement are you seeing that you're able to do with the big data? And how are you creating it so that you don't have to be a PhD to parse through all that? That's very much part of our mission. We recognize that if you are a coder, there are a lot of really great tools out there for getting a network, analyzing a network, visualizing it. And if you're not a coder, there aren't. And I'm not a coder. And so I am interested in helping those people who can currently make a pie chart get to a social network data set, analyze it, visualize it, find an insight in it, and communicate it to someone else. And to do that with, at the moment, a completely free and open tool that we think will catalyze scholarship. Today we have seen, 2011 was the year of the crowd, we see the power of groups of people coming together. More people are gathering online than ever gather in any of the public squares around the planet. We want to see those crowds, and if you go to our website at nodexlgraphgallery.org, you will actually see snapshots, pictures, we would argue, pictures of the crowd. But these are crowds that are gathering in cyberspace. And so we think that documenting the variety of crowds. What are the different shapes of crowds that can form? And we have found differences in the shapes of these crowds. How many people are on your team? There are about 14 people associated with the Social Media Research Foundation. And who are you guys based out of? Belmont, California is our headquarters, but we are very virtual. We have attracted remarkable talent from around the planet. So we have people at the Oxford Internet Institute, like Bernie Hogan, or main leaders of the information visualization world, like Ben Schneiderman, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Many talented people have gathered under the banner of the Social Media Research Foundation, all making contributions to make these tools and the data available. So I've got a graph up from nodexlgraphgallery.org. Tell us what we're looking at here. Mark, I don't know if you can bring, if you had a chance of bringing that up. I'm just sharing with Mark the first thumbnail. Right. So I think this one is the map of the word Big Data being used in Twitter. So if your viewers can see this, all of the squares there, those are profile photos from Twitter. And everybody who is on this map recently said the word Big Data, a topic I think we're all interested in. If you scroll down a little bit, it'll tell you what the first date and the last date of this was. And we'll see that it was from the 26th to the 27th. It's about a day and some of traffic. So this is about 1,500 tweets. And all of the people who tweeted the word Big Data, many of them followed each other. Some of them in fact replied to each other. And what we do is we analyze all those connections. And we do this in a spreadsheet on your desktop. You can go and grab this data and then grind it up. And to your point, do that with a single button, a one button analysis process. You hit the automate button. It just does this. It gives you that. And what you're seeing are the green arcs are I follow you. And if you look very closely, you'll see very rarely there are blue arcs. And the blue arcs are the I actually replied to you. And so we're also seeing that the different profile photos are a variable size. That indicates follower count. And one of the key insights of network theory is that follower count is not necessarily equal importance in a community. Yes, we know. We know. We're horrible, but we're you. So that's what the map is showing you. It also shows me that up in the lower right hand corner, there are all those people who are isolated. They don't have any connections. And that's both a good thing and a bad thing. They need some help. They need to be brought into the community of the communities of their interests, not necessarily forced in to that. So what data are you driving on Twitter fire hose? Or is it just API data? That's the Twitter API. We also import data from Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, email, the World Wide Web, GraphML, CSV, TXT. If you have data and you can get it into Excel. Can we come and hang out at your place in Belmont? Oh, yeah. That's awesome. Well, we're totally into this. We have our own little project called CrowdSpots, which is something that we, because we're in the media business, we're into the crowd behavior. Because if you can understand the crowd, you can do things for them. Help people from the outer range get to find someone to collaborate with. So it's really, really important. So I want to talk to you about the scholarship aspect. So one thing that's really close to my passion thinking is the notion, if someone's out on the long tail distribution of the world, they're not on the A list, so to speak, as I say, in the head of the tail, but just want to connect. People have choices. It's not so much they belong to one community. The crowd is people have multiple realities in virtual space. So they don't know where to go. There's no place to figure out where to find things. So how does your algorithm help people discover either like minds? I'm interested in art today. I'm interested in this and tomorrow. How do you discover people? One of the nice things about the tool is that it will dredge up all the hashtags that are being mentioned within keyword community. So we really start with a query. We say, give me all the people and all their tweets who have mentioned a particular term. That brings us a community. That may be the first thing you're interested in. We then can do what you could call a snowball sample. This is where you start with one term and you move out from there finding related terms. And the highly ranked terms that are associated with the term you like may, in fact, be of interest. The people who are highly ranked in the topics you care about may be interested in other things that you also share the interest of. So it is possible to move through the network and pivot both on topic and on person to discover new ideas, new interesting sources of information. So your tool is putting it into Excel format, which is what the common person, the real world person would use, right? Or a Google spreadsheet or something, but really Excel, not Google spreadsheet. At the moment, Excel. Currently Microsoft Excel, which is okay. That's mature that people use that. So how do you get that to be usable in the sense of I'm a user, I just subscribe to the tool, is it open source? That's right. How do you guys handle the distribution of the code? Right, the code is free and open. The tool is free and open. You can find us on the web. Just use your favorite find quality search engine product to look for the word node N-O-D-E-X-L, node Excel. At nodexl.codeplex.com, you'll find our download site. You download the zip file, you unzip it, you run the setup, and when you restart Excel, you're going to find that there's a whole new ribbon, a whole new menu in the ribbon. And it has all the tools you need to do one of these kinds of maps. It has an import menu, and it says, what kind of data do you want? Do you want Twitter data? Do you want YouTube data, Flickr, Facebook, whatever it is? You configure that, it gets the data for you. You have to press one more button. Okay, so how do you guys engage with people who want to throw money at you, like rich philanthropists?  We are, we are. And you got, how many people now? 14 people. And you got some data centers. We know how much that costs, all the power to run those servers. So how do you guys engage when you guys do fundraising? Do you guys sell the apps? And if people want to distribute your app as part of, say we want to do Silicon Academy and share the data and share the knowledge, how would we do that? Would we have to subscribe to it? Is it a GPL license? Is it? We're like BSD. It's actually the Microsoft Public License, the MPL, but it resembles the BSD, which means that it is okay for commercial derivative work use. That's right. Derivable use, that's it. So it's yours. It's basically, you know, we're very dedicated to the idea that we are contributing to the commons. And we are not drawing a line between commercial and non-commercial use. We are simply giving it away. It's free as in speech, free as in beer. It's free as in Shakespeare. So how would you engage with us? We do training. We do workshops. We have members who do consulting. And of course, we invite support. If you find that this is a tool that is valuable to you, if the research that comes from the use of this tool is valuable to you, we welcome your support. Do you have a staff that's just shaking down trees and stuff like that? I wish we did, no. But we will tweet about it. So smrfoundation.org is a website they can go to, right? That's right. Mark at smrfoundation.org, email Mark, great guy. I'm so glad I found you in the virtual space because this is a really cool and a really important tool. And again, the notion of scholarship really means knowledge and discovery because relationships lead to good things.  Small question. Okay, how is big data changing society in the world? First of all, I would say that there are a lot of patterns that have been difficult to discover previously because the data wasn't there and we're going to find those patterns. And some of them are surprising. And there are going to be opportunities to exploit those patterns. And whoever races to the top of the big data mountain first is going to be able to see the vista that you can see from the top of that mountain.  What I think we're going to see as a social scientist, I think what we will see is actually see society. We're going to see the behavior of billions of people interacting trillions of times a day in a way that we have only perceived personally. And so we are going to get a satellite view of human society. It's a great opportunity for the social sciences. It's a challenging opportunity for human societies. It is going to give insight that is so powerful to some people that I think there are all sorts of social issues and conflicts. What are some examples of what people are doing with your tool set? Right. Today, people often use it in research, pointing at social movements, topics, issues, conflicts, looking at the shape of the communities that have formed underneath it. We're doing research, for example, looking at how people talked about the state of the union in Twitter to see that, in fact, two or three subgroups formed and that they had very little connection to each other. And so one finding we're getting from the tool is that social media allows people to talk to each other but that doesn't mean that they do. And in fact, what we're seeing is that, rather than a public space where people engage, what we're seeing are echo chambers. We're seeing the bifurcation of the community and people staying within their community. One of those findings is that the URLs mentioned in one cluster never appear in the other cluster. So you're not seeing peer communities form. You're seeing the communities hang out in isolation. Isolated, gated communities. Interesting. Cyberspace gated communities. So let me ask you a social question. This is more of a theoretical, but yet practically you're measuring, you talk about virtual space. In public face-to-face communication, commitment's interesting. You know when someone's not looking at you or talking with you. But with chat and online synchronous capture of data, you kind of don't know the commitment of the person. And we saw things like Second Life and other societies out there where you actually be moving around in these forums. Is there any implication around this impact to the relationships with this nature of communication where you kind of got this passive presence? So, I mean, this is kind of a tough one to answer. Sociology may have an answer for you. Just up the road, not far from here, the revered sociologist, Mark Grandaveter, wrote a paper in 1972. And the paper was called The Strength of Weak Ties. And so I think what many people have argued about social media is that it helps you cultivate weak ties, but not necessarily strong ties. And the sociologist Barry Wellman at the University of Toronto has actually measured how large your strong tie community is and whether it's changed over time. And he finds it hasn't changed over time. That there's about 10 or 12 people that you know very well that you call on a regular basis. They're your strong relationships. I think the critique of social media is that it grows large volumes of weak ties and presents them as if they were strong ties. And if you think that your Facebook friends are really your friends, then that's an issue. On the other hand, Grandaveter's paper says that there is strength in weak ties. And that's because they are cheap. You can have lots of them. And in aggregate, they have more weight than you would grant any individual. So the person that you only remember because you see them once a year at a conference is a weak tie, but it's also likely that that's the person who has news for you that your friends don't know. So what are the implications of big data and social networking? I think it's going to be that we get to grow these weak ties and get value from them. But it hasn't changed how many strong ties we can actually maintain. What have you learned in your work thus far? First of all, the work is phenomenal. Mark A. Smith is doing some great work, pioneering some of the most cutting edge issues in sociology and also data. What have you found and learned in the process, good, bad, and ugly? Well, and to connect that to your question, what are people doing with it? I think what we're finding is that groups in social media are not all the same. They come in flavors. There are genres. There are types. And you can see on the Graph Gallery site, not Excel Graph Gallery, you can see those Twitter crowds that are clearly a customer service relationship. There's an account in the center and it's got all these tendrils going out. But the tendrils don't connect at the edges. It's a hub and spokes. And that's a shape. And we can actually look at the crowd and go, aha, you're Dell listens or Dell cares or you're Virgin America. You're these people who are engaged in this transaction. Creating noise. I mean, customer service, one hopes. Creating a lifeboat possibly or being a friend for someone, a weak tie. Getting a connection to the resolution path for some company. Versus, let's say you look at the Strata Conference. The Strata Conference has almost no isolates. That's another insight. What we're finding is that brands, public topics, have large numbers of people who are not connected to anybody else. It's actually an indication that you are a brand. A brand means that two people can say the same word and have no probability of connection to each other. And so if you look at something like Strata Conference, almost everybody is connected to somebody else who also says Strata Conference. That means that this conference is an in-group. It's another way to put it in a more positive way. It's a community, but it's not a community. It has gravity. That's right. It's got density, actually. We actually call it density. That's right. It's a star cluster. It's like, you know, the Milky Way. That's right. We're tight. Are people finding ways to engage with these clusters of communities without spamming them? Right, right. And that's one of the techniques that you can use the tool for. You can find out who are these people in the linch pin positions. People call them influencers. I actually prefer to refer to them as simply being in strategic locations. And if you think about strategic locations rather than merely influence, then it could be that the isolates are actually in strategic locations. For new customer acquisition, isolates have actually said your name, but don't know anybody who also says your name. They are rich sources for new customer acquisition. On the other hand, let's just say you're trying to change an entrenched belief. You really need to go after the hubs. You need to go after these people at the center of the clusters. Yeah, so the isolates could be beach-headed, unmeasured, uninstrumented environment. So you could have an isolate out there that looks alone, but really it's just no one's seen that documented yet. So I'm underneath that isolate could be a community. Could be. Or these are people who've just started to mention your product or your brand and you want to bring them into the fold versus the people who are obviously really passionate about your product and brand already and that they're at the center of some of these clusters. And the way in which you engage with those individuals wherever they are is directly, just through, for instance, Twitter. I guess that's true. I mean, how do you do it without spamming? And the answer is you actually form a relationship and a conversation. If this is a person talking about your brand that intensely and you work for the brand, you have something in common. Reach out to them. That's right. Engage commonalities. That's right. We both share an interest in the brand. Let's talk about the brand. You're interested in the ideas and news about the product. I'm going to send you that information. I'm going to form a connection with you. What these tools do is reduce the population of the likely people that you need to engage with from 1500 to 15 because they are the people at the points of gatekeeping. They're at the branching points of the network. So it makes it manageable. So in the old days, in the old days, you have to email people and you help you code a landing page. You run some Google AdWords. Actually, not the old way. That's how people do it today. So in the new way, you have these communities formed. So no one likes someone to walk into their poker game or their clubhouse and start spamming people, right? So if you got, say, a big cluster of people, a million people, how do you engage them? How do you get them to engage you? Do you just, do you have to be active? Is it this notion of presence? Is that what you're saying? How would you advise someone? How would you advise me and say, how would I engage people? Those are all good points. And you don't really just want to show up with your commercial in the middle of the poker game. It's true. But I'll note, sociology tells us something interesting about this notion of engagement and that is the populations tend not to be a million. That they're actually mostly small groups. That if you think about any particular niche topic of interest, if it's beanie babies or playing racquetball or jogging, that the population of people who talk about that is not millions. And that the leading people who talk about that is not even hundreds, it's dozens. It's the loose ties thing. It's aggregation of little pockets within the central gravity density. And there's going to be a few people who are at the center and the right way to engage them is pretty much the way that I think we've learned how to, let's say at a conference, meet somebody new. Which is, you may start by following them. You might retweet them occasionally. You might start saying things that they actually find substantively interesting. At which point a relationship forms quite naturally. Or do what we do, put content in front of them and see if they generate content that is worth it. If they kick the content out or not. That's a good signal. All right, John, listen, we have to run Mark, Smith, fantastic interview. And your Twitter handle is, is it Mark A. Smith or Mark? Mark with a C, underscore Smith. Okay, Mark underscore Smith at Twitter handle at mark underscore Smith. Thanks for coming and joining us. Great to meet you online. And then face to face, virtual connection. Now a new tie, new relationship. We'll be talking a lot about your company and we'll certainly try to make a visit. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.