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I am an astrodynamicist --

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

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

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

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hazardous to services like location,

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agriculture, banking,

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television and communications,

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and soon -- very soon --

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even the internet itself.

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Now these services are not protected[br]from, roughly, half a million objects

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the size of a speck of paint

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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[br]as small as a speck of paint.

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

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

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we can only track[br]about 26,000 of these objects,

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and of these 26,000,[br]only 2,000 actually work.

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Everything else

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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[br]never comes back.

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We send the satellite in orbit,

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it stops working, 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[br]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[br]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[br]just randomly scattered in orbit.

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It turns out that given[br]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[br]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[br]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[br]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[br]10 different answers.

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Why is that?

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It's because information about things[br]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[br]space-traffic information system

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that can inform the public[br]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[br]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,[br]space-traffic monitoring system

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at the University of Texas at Austin.

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AstroGraph combines multiple sources[br]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[br]that anybody can access today.

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Here, you can see 26,000 objects[br]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[br]of space-traffic map:

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what if you only had information[br]from the US government?

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Well, in that case, that's what[br]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? 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[br]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)