WEBVTT

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I am an astrodynamicist --

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you know, like that guy Rich Purnell
in the movie "The Martian" --

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and it's my job to study and predict
motion of objects in space.

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Currently we track about one percent
of hazardous objects on orbit --

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hazardous to services like location,

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agriculture,

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banking,

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television and communications

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and soon --

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very soon --

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even the internet itself.

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Now these services are not protected
from roughly half a million objects

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the size of a speck of paint
all the way to a school bus in size.

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A speck of paint,

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traveling at the right speed,

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impacting one of these objects,

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could render it absolutely useless.

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But we can't track things
as a small as a speck of paint.

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We can only track things
as small as say, a smartphone.

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So of this half million objects
that we should be concerned about,

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we can only track
about 26,000 of these objects,

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and of these 26,000,

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only 2,000 actually work.

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Everything else is garbage.

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That's a lot of garbage.

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To make things a little bit worse,

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most of what we launch into orbit
never comes back.

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We send the satellite in orbit,

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it stops working,

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it runs out of fuel,

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and we send something else up ...

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and then we send up something else ...

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and then something else.

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And every once in a while,

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two of these things
will collide with each other

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or one of these things will explode

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or even worse,

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somebody might just happen to destroy
one of their satellites on orbit,

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and this generates many, many more pieces,

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most of which also never come back.

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Now these things are not
just randomly scattered in orbit.

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It turns out that given
the curvature of space-time,

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their ideal locations --

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where we put some of these satellites --

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think of these as space highways.

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Very much like highways on Earth,

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these space highways can only take up
a maximum capacity of traffic

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to sustain space-safe operations.

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Unlike highways on Earth,

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there are actually no space-traffic rules.

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None whatsoever, OK?

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Wow.

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What could possibly go wrong with that?

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(Laughter)

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Now, what would be really nice

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is if we had something
like a space-traffic map,

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like a Waze for space that I could look up

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and see what the current
traffic conditions are in space,

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maybe even predict these.

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The problem with that, however,

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is that ask five different people,

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"What's going on in orbit?

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Where are things going?"

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and you're probably going to get
10 different answers.

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Why is that?

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It's because information about things
on orbit is not commonly shared either.

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So what if we had a globally accessible,

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open and transparent,
space-traffic information system

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that can inform the public
of where everything is located

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to try to keep space safe and sustainable.

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And what if the system could be used

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to form evidence-based
norms of behavior --

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these space-traffic rules?

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So I developed AstroGraph,

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the world's first crowdsourced,
space-traffic monitoring system

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at the University of Texas at Austin.

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AstroGraph combines multiple sources
of information from around the globe --

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government, industry and academia --

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and represents this in a common framework
that anybody can access today.

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Here you can see 26,000 objects
orbiting the Earth,

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multiple opinions

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and it gets updated in near real time.

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But back to my problem
of space-traffic map:

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what if you only had information
from the US government?

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Well, in that case, that's what
your space-traffic map would look like.

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But what do the Russians think?

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That looks significantly different.

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Who's right?

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Who's wrong?

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What should I believe?

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What could I trust?

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This is part of the issue.

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In the absence of this framework


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to monitor space-actor behavior,

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to monitor activity in space --

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where these objects are located --

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to reconcile these inconsistencies

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and make this knowledge commonplace,

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we actually risk losing the ability

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to use space for humanity's benefit.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause and cheers)