This Week in Space 194 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
 

Tariq Malik [00:00:00]:
Coming up on this week in space, NASA's Artemis II moon rocket is on the launch pad. The crew 11 astronauts speak out on their medical evacuation. And is the Outer Space Treaty obsolete? How can we update it? Eli Sandler of Harvard's Kennedy School is here to tell the tale. Check it out.

TWiT.tv [00:00:19]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

TWiT.tv [00:00:24]:
This is TWiT.

Rod Pyle [00:00:27]:
This is this Week in space, episode number 194, recorded on January 23, 2026. Cops in space. Hello, and welcome to another episode of this Week in Space, the Cops in Space edition. And we'll explain what that means in a little bit. I'm Rod Pyle, editor in chief, Bad Aster magazine, and I'm here with the spam in the canned man Tarek Malik himself of Space.com. everybody stand up and cheer. Yay.

Tariq Malik [00:00:55]:
I thought about singing the Cops theme song, but I thought probably not the kind of cops we're going to be talking about today.

Rod Pyle [00:01:01]:
Probably not.

Tariq Malik [00:01:01]:
What you going to do, Rob? What you going to someday?

Rod Pyle [00:01:05]:
This week we're going to be speaking. Speaking of that, we're going to be speaking with Eli Sandler, who's a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School to discuss the Outer space treaty of 1967 and why it needs updating and a possible pathway to accomplishing that to the relative satisfaction of the evolved space faring parties. And you are a regular listen to the show so you know who they are. But before we start, please, as I always say, don't forget to do us a solid. Make sure to like, subscribe, punch whatever buttons you can to make us famous because we need your love and we want more listeners. More, more, more listeners all the time.

Tariq Malik [00:01:39]:
More.

Rod Pyle [00:01:39]:
And now, in a very quick way to lose listeners, I have a space joke from Matt McCormick.

Tariq Malik [00:01:44]:
Matt. Oh, we got new songs.

Rod Pyle [00:01:50]:
Tarik.

Tariq Malik [00:01:51]:
Yes, Rudd?

Rod Pyle [00:01:51]:
Did you hear why the asteroid broke up with her boyfriend?

Tariq Malik [00:01:54]:
No, I didn't hear what happened.

Rod Pyle [00:01:56]:
He was taking her for granted. I don't think you can have granite asteroids, but good one, good one. Now, I've heard that some people think we have rocks in our heads when it's joke time of this show. But you can help. And people have been falling down on this one by sending us your best worst or most indifferent space joke at Twistwit tv. We'll read it on the air and mention your name. So you could either take the credit or the blame for it as appropriate, because otherwise we got all the blame. And now on to headline news.

Tariq Malik [00:02:33]:
Headline news. I almost missed.

Rod Pyle [00:02:39]:
I feel like I have a brain tumor. And you do that because it displaces the audio on the live feed.

Tariq Malik [00:02:44]:
But I, I almost, I think I missed it. I think I felt late. That one felt late for me. So we'll see.

Rod Pyle [00:02:50]:
Oh, we'll see.

Tariq Malik [00:02:51]:
All right.

Rod Pyle [00:02:52]:
So at long last, the Artemis 2 moon rockets on the launch pad. It's on the pad kind of ready to go. We have launch windows from early February to early to mid April.

Tariq Malik [00:03:04]:
May have launched apparently every month, according to NASA. We have Launchpad. We have launched windows, pardon me, every single month, NASA says, but just for different amounts of days. In February, the window is from February 6th to February 10th. And that is what they're on the pad there for. And as of this week, so this all happened actually right after our last episode recording. It was last weekend as we're recording this one here on the 17th, they rolled the rocket out to the pad. It took 12 hours.

Tariq Malik [00:03:34]:
Our writer, Josh Dinner was there, very, very excited to see the crew was on hand as well, the Artemis 2 crew to watch the rocket get out there. They said that they were ready to go whenever NASA's ready to go. And that is the question because this week they spent a good amount of time hooking up all the hoses and fluid lines and testing and whatnot to, to get. We've got, if you're watching the stream, we've got the time lapse of the, the rocket rolling into the pad right now. But, but the big, I guess the proof is in the fueling pudding, because on February 2, as of right now, NASA wants to do a fueling test, a full wet dress rehearsal to see if all systems are still go for launch. That's not very much time between that test and the opening of the window. So it seems extremely, extremely tight. But NASA doesn't want to give up an opportunity if they don't have to.

Tariq Malik [00:04:28]:
So they seem committed to at least trying to make a go out of it. And that means that in the next month, Rod, maybe, maybe we're to the moon and back. I don't know. I don't know. It seems very, very tight. But then if they can't do it in February, they can do it again in March, again in, and then so on and so forth. The number of days per month varies because of orbital issues and whatnot.

Rod Pyle [00:04:52]:
Well, for those of us who sat through weeks at a time waiting for a shuttle launch because of hydrogen leaks, although all the systems are brand new on this, this rocket and the pad, that could mean a long wait. So we'll have to see. And as I recall all the launch windows are in the dark. Correct. Or either in the evening or early early morning before.

Tariq Malik [00:05:12]:
You know, I actually have not looked at that specifically as to the timing of them. It would not surprise me though if that's the case because why not, why not launch your big mission under a cover of darkness?

Rod Pyle [00:05:22]:
And, and just for those who are watching the video, we had a clip of the, the rollout of the rocket, of the SLS rocket on the crawler, which is headed to the launch complex itself. And fun fact, when NASA built the crawler way back in the 60s for the Apollo program. So these things are coming up.

Tariq Malik [00:05:39]:
Saturn 5 rocket.

Rod Pyle [00:05:41]:
Yeah. They realized you couldn't run that thing on pavement without destroying it. So they got a very specific kind. I think it's Mississippi river rock.

Tariq Malik [00:05:51]:
Yeah, they're river stones.

Rod Pyle [00:05:53]:
If you go look at it, they're round smooth stones. Billions of billions and billions of them that line that roadway for the crawler because that's what worked best. So hey, nice analog solution for century. Century.

Tariq Malik [00:06:04]:
And it crushes. So the stack is £11 million. It's the Guinness World Records of like the heaviest load that's been transported. But, and, and it, it pulverizes those rocks. They have to lay a new bed for every rollout from.

Rod Pyle [00:06:20]:
Kidding.

Tariq Malik [00:06:21]:
Now it's four miles, top speed of one mile an hour. That's max. Slower on the curves as well as on the, on the, on the ramp up to the pad itself. And this is that Pad 39B. Very interesting history there because Pad 39B, its first launch. Apollo 10, another dress rehearsal for a moon landing.

Rod Pyle [00:06:38]:
And so that's the only Apollo launch with 39B.

Tariq Malik [00:06:42]:
Also Skylab from 39B. 2. So historic bits there.

Rod Pyle [00:06:46]:
So Skylab and 39B shortly before the crew launch from 39A and a Saturn 1B using that weird looking Milso thing. All right.

Tariq Malik [00:06:57]:
Yeah, yep.

Rod Pyle [00:06:58]:
Crew 11 astronauts. We've talked about this before. Medical evacuation for the space station. They came back safe and sound, as far as we could tell. We still don't know who had what, but.

Tariq Malik [00:07:08]:
And we're not gonna know. They made that pretty clear to the media this week.

Rod Pyle [00:07:12]:
They said there's a golden lining or a silver lining, I guess, to this, to this occurrence.

Tariq Malik [00:07:18]:
Yeah, so. So the, the astronauts of Crew 11, you know, came back and they, they reached Houston, I think as we were recording our last show, which was last Friday. They reached Houston about a day after they, they, they splashed down. They know, they stayed overnight at a hospital, got some treatment for whoever the afflicted crew member was. And now Xena Card, Mike Fink, the pilot and community ua, and Oleg. Oh, I'm going to get it wrong. Oleg Platinov got it so, had a press conference at the Johnson Space center where they basically said that they're all feeling okay, that they're in good health for now. They're not.

Tariq Malik [00:08:00]:
They drew a very clear line that they're not going to say who was affected by whatever medical issue it was or what the medical issue it was at all. What with the exception of the fact that apparently an ultrasound device, which they've had on the space station for a long time, they use it for science experiments as well as for medical diagnostics, was a very key tool for whatever the issue was. And there are a lot of headlines championing the, the ultrasound device and how, how amazing it was as a tool for this, this issue. But that silver lining that you mentioned, Rod, it was the fact that they were able to deal with the situation in a favorable way like that. They, they handled it. It didn't get to the, to the, the point of a life threatening issue. And to Mike Fink and Xena Cardman, they felt that that is really promising for plans to, you know, have a permanent base on the moon to send astronauts to Mars. Being able to address a lot of this.

Tariq Malik [00:08:56]:
Of course those are much further away. Your options for evacuation are much more limited. But it was, I guess, a bit of a good, a good demonstration that there are plans in place to do this. They follow those procedures and it all worked out apparently fine.

Rod Pyle [00:09:11]:
Well, my experience, my last experience with ultrasound was when my 30 year old son was still in utero. And of course they, they do their checks with ultrasound so you can see that everything's okay. And we were doing that and the text said, do you want to know your child's gender? And we said, no, we want it to be a surprise. And true to his behavior ever since then, at that very moment he rolled over in there and we saw the equipment and we knew we were gonna have a son. So that's, that's what I know about ultrasound. Probably more than anybody needed to know. And apologies, Connor, I added you.

Tariq Malik [00:09:45]:
I missed the first one for Zadie. I missed it. I only got there for the second one, so. Oh. Always a prize made. Never.

Rod Pyle [00:09:51]:
You're gonna Pay for that, Mr. Workaholic. Okay. Earth was just hit by the strongest solar radiation storm in over 20 years. Yeah, Flare, slash, mass. Well, there's, it's weird, there's like three or four different tables for how we measure it, the strength at the sun, this, you know, what, how strong it is when it hits the magnetosphere and blah, blah, blah. But if I remember correctly, this was an X class, which is the top tier, right?

Tariq Malik [00:10:16]:
Yeah. There was an X class solar flare on January 18th as we're recording this that unleashed a massive wave of high energy particles from the sun and then they reached Earth basically like over, I think around Monday, ish, as a recording. So on the, what is that, the 20th. And so not since October of 2003 where we had the historic Halloween solar storms have we seen a solar radiation environment of what we saw here. You know, NOAA has this classification level of solar radiation storms that ranges from S1, which is minor, to S5, which is extreme. And, and this, this event reached S4 levels on their, on their scale. So not the max level like, like the one in 2003 was. That one actually was an X27 flare that they think stopped being registered because the machines couldn't go any higher.

Tariq Malik [00:11:10]:
You know, they couldn't measure anymore. So, but, but, but still very, very significant. Also it wasn't strong enough to have ground effects, you know, for the particles to reach all the way to the Earth's surface. A lot of these things they got, you know, they get absorbed by our atmosphere. That's why we have an ozone layer. It's. Well it's not why we have one. It's just we're lucky that we have an ozone layer to have it.

Tariq Malik [00:11:31]:
But, and apparently the astronauts on the space station and China's astronauts on Tiangong were not at any risk, which was interesting because usually a radiation storm of the strength you would think that they might have to do some sort of sheltering in place, but we didn't hear any reports about that. So, so that was interesting to see and not a lot of interference, although you would expect that there could be outages from radio blackouts in that of a thing. But you know, a good reminder that we might be in the downswing of the current solar weather cycle, but the sun is still ready to pack a punch right now.

Rod Pyle [00:12:07]:
So do you know if anybody has ever estimated what rating we would have given the carrington event in 1859?

Tariq Malik [00:12:18]:
No, and actually it was, it was definitely on the level of the 20, the 2003, if not stronger than that storm. And, and I think it was the ACE probe is the one that registered the X27 thing. But the meter just like that was it like the meter didn't go any higher. It could have been a lot stronger than that. We won't know the character of it.

Rod Pyle [00:12:37]:
I mean, you gotta love the stories, you know, telegraph lines catching on fire, telegraph operators jumping back from their telegraph key because they were getting these huge arcs off to their hands. And even when they disconnected their batteries, they were still able to send signals because there was so much energy being absorbed by these wires.

Tariq Malik [00:12:57]:
I'm sure that there are estimates that are out there and I just don't have them at hand right now. Someone. Someone right in, right in, right into Rod. And I correct us.

Rod Pyle [00:13:05]:
I'm not seeing it. So.

Tariq Malik [00:13:07]:
But, but one of the, the. I guess maybe the benefits of this kind of an event is the auroras, because it sparked auroras down to New Mexico on, on Sunday night, you know, Monday, Monday, Monday night.

Rod Pyle [00:13:20]:
And I still haven't seen one.

Tariq Malik [00:13:22]:
I know, but. But of course we missed them in New Jersey. But, but apparently it was spectacular. And one of our readers is a pilot that flies through these things and sends us photos. Those pictures. I know. And he said it was unlike anything he had ever seen before. We got some images of it now on the, on the, on the video stream.

Tariq Malik [00:13:43]:
So very, very spectacular event. Very, very lucky for folks to be able to see it. And I hope that we'll be able to see it again in the future. And not because we've lost our ozone layer and like we get auroras all over the planet, but because there's an actual event that we can go see and acknowledge the beauty of the night sky. I watched the movie Finch, by the way, recently, and that's what happens is that there's no ozone layer, so there's auroras everywhere.

Rod Pyle [00:14:11]:
Sounds like fun for the visual effects team.

Tariq Malik [00:14:13]:
It's a good movie.

Rod Pyle [00:14:14]:
Speaking of fun, we'll be back in just a moment with Eli Sandler of the Harvard Kennedy School. So stay with us. It's a good one.

Leo Laporte [00:14:21]:
Hey, everybody. Leo Laporte here with a quick reminder. There are just a few more days to take our annual survey. Your feedback guides the future of TWiT. You can find it on our website, TWiT TV Survey 26. Take it before the end of the month. Tell us what you think. We'd love to hear from you, and thanks in advance.

Rod Pyle [00:14:40]:
And we are back with Eli Sandler, who is a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. And his research focuses on energy policy, climate, finance. You can tell I'm reading here. And Outer Space. His work has been adopted by national and international policymakers, including the World Bank, US Government and others. And he Teaches a class I'd like to take called Financing the Clean Energy Transition, which I gather is traditionally over subscribed. And the other one that's oversubscribed is the Kennedy School seminar on the governance of outer space. Eli, thank you for joining us today.

Tariq Malik [00:15:15]:
Welcome.

Ely Sandler [00:15:15]:
Great to be here. Thanks a lot, Michael.

Rod Pyle [00:15:17]:
Good to have you. So, just for those of us who are the unwashed, the untutored, what's it mean to be a fellow at a place like the Harvard Kennedy School?

Ely Sandler [00:15:27]:
Absolutely. So I do a mix of things. I teach. You mentioned some of the classes I work on, and then I also lead some research. So on the energy and policy side, I look a lot at how policy can help to build more infrastructure around the world, particularly developing countries. And then on the space policy side, and I'm sure we're going to talk about it, thinking about how new models of governance might be able to solve some of the challenges we're facing in.

Rod Pyle [00:15:51]:
Outer space, which are many and varied. Okay. With that out of the way, Tarek has a question that he always likes to ask.

Tariq Malik [00:15:59]:
That's right. I get to be next, Eli. And one thing that I do like to ask a lot of our guests at the start is kind of what your road to space would be. Because a focus on space policy is usually not on my bingo card with an economist, you know, of your expertise and whatnot. So I'm curious, what was your road to space that got you there?

Ely Sandler [00:16:24]:
So I loved space as a kid, and then I basically forgot about it when I went and became a professional or an adult. And I worked a lot on energy. I worked a lot on financing infrastructure. And I've been doing that for. For a number of years. And I decided I want to be an astronaut. This was my childhood dream. And I went on the NASA website, and it turns out that there's two ways you can become an astronaut.

Ely Sandler [00:16:48]:
Either you can be a fighter pilot, a test pilot, which, as you can see, I'm wearing glasses, otherwise I would have been one, or you can have a master's or a PhD in a STEM subject. And I actually wrote to them. And it turns out that economics does not count while it's a social science. I was not allowed into the NASA program. And that's when I started thinking about basically the overlap between what I was doing in the private sector. I worked for a long time at Morgan Stanley and then ran a business investing in infrastructure and in academia, thinking about policy. And there are actually quite a few overlaps with space. I'll maybe Just mention a couple and then we'll get into it.

Rod Pyle [00:17:25]:
Sure.

Ely Sandler [00:17:25]:
One is, I worked a lot on, as I said, funding of infrastructure. And because of the drastic fall in the price of launch, people are now seriously considering whether space based solar power could be economically viable. I think you guys have talked about it on the show, but on Earth, if you have more and more renewable energy, renewable energy is by far the cheapest form of electricity. But if you get really high levels of solar penetration because it's variable, the cost of delivered energy might go up, basically because you need a backup for when the sun doesn't shine. And that's really expensive. And so I started looking into the economics of is this actually doable and what role would space based solar play in the grid? And similarly, thinking about which we're going to get into some of my research on space governance. Are there models in, let's say the environment or how we think about international banking regulation, or how we think about funding of energy infrastructure in developing countries that we could use to solve some of the challenges in space. And so while I was never going to be an astronaut, it is a way to work on space policy issues I'd always love.

Rod Pyle [00:18:26]:
Well, he joins the want to be an astronaut club with us.

Tariq Malik [00:18:30]:
I was going to be. You can train dolphins for the Navy and become an astronaut, but you can't study like the ins and outs of space policy as a political scientist and still become one. That's crazy. That's crazy.

Rod Pyle [00:18:45]:
Well, that's for now. So I guess my next question is, Eli, as you look at this field, you know, for other people who might be studying that area or looking towards the so called new space sector, what are some of the opportunities and what most needs to be done?

Ely Sandler [00:19:06]:
That's a great question. And in part the thing I think I find exciting about it is the answer is totally different now from what it would have been 10 years ago. So a lot of the areas I work in, economics, we've been thinking about social policy and housing and finance for tens of years. But having the opportunity to have a real career in commercial space in startups, that's completely new. I'm going to give a really boring answer to your question, which is to talk about the policy side of it, which is that I think the biggest thing to happen in space in the last 20 years, very specifically is to switch from NASA hiring contractors using something called cost plus, to fixed price delivery. And that means instead of hiring Boeing and saying, you know, roughly, we'll pay you whatever it takes plus 10% for your margin. They instead say, if you can deliver us this satellite or you can get a person to get a space station, we'll give you how many hundreds of millions of dollars. And if a company can do that, then they have a customer.

Ely Sandler [00:20:05]:
And so for people going into the space industry now, I think the thing that's most exciting is both NASA and the Space Force are opening up more and more programs to this. And it sounds very policy wonkish, but this type of procurement. So the Space Force is now thinking about how they put military satellites in orbit, how our defenses in the United States work. And so the entire world of big government aerospace contracting suddenly is going to be dominated by new companies that can do things really quickly. And that I think from a commercial sector is the most exciting place to work.

Rod Pyle [00:20:36]:
Well, it's been interesting to watch the, the big traditional aerospace companies struggle with this whole fixed price model. Of course, the big stepchild of that is the Boeing Starliner, which hasn't gone well. I'm hoping some of them will survive, but it's been a tough pull for them. Tarek?

Tariq Malik [00:20:54]:
Well, yeah, I guess part of that was the venture side of things. I mean that's kind of the next step. What does it mean to be on the other side of that argument or, or agreement on the, on the, like the, the company side now? Because I imagine that that's very different now as well. Instead of having to navigate some of these, I don't know, these, these really draconian halls of, of, of, of contracts and whatnot, as a government contractor, these companies can now say I've got a product for your need. Like, you know, how do we, how do we get there? And, and I'm wondering as, as like the, the, the venture capitalist kind of side of, of, of your expertise how different that is now than say how it was when there was only like two or three companies that would go to, that we already knew would get contracts for, for space policy.

Ely Sandler [00:21:55]:
Yeah. So I'm as well as my academic work, I'm a venture partner at a firm called Oral Foundry. So it's a space tech VC firm. I'm not speaking for them here, but I could talk about my own view on, on investment in space companies. I think traditionally you had two very separate ways of thinking about what a space company did. Either there were the, the aerospace companies that had big, low risk government contracts. Low risk in the sense of, you know, you're definitely going to get the revenue because you're your customer is the government not low risk. You Know, space is hard and that's Boeing, Lockheed, etc.

Ely Sandler [00:22:26]:
That is not an investment place for venture capital. Everything move very slowly. At the same time you had potentially huge bets on is the space economy going to blow up in the next five or 10 years? And those basically all until SpaceX failed. And so you never really had venture in there, you had billionaires. And I think what's happening now is you've got a really exciting crop of companies that because of the changes to how the government procures services have that customer base of some of their revenue has been de risked. And because the telecom industry has boomed so much, they also have a lot of services they can sell into the telecoms. But those big bets of not only do you have revenue today, but you might actually become a trillion dollar company, those are becoming more realistic. So until now the only thing really that could provide demand for space companies was telecoms.

Ely Sandler [00:23:21]:
That the apotheosis of that is Starlink. But now you've got a lot of other things. The first thing is probably space tourism, people thinking about space stations in orbit. But the things I'm excited about are as I mentioned, space solar power. So could we find a way of actually beaming energy down to Earth and turning our solar field that currently operates only at night into a 24 hour producer of electricity? Can you do things in space because the cost of launch is so low that exploit the microgravity environment, like microbiology, where proteins sold differently in zero gravity or when you layer on proteins in microgravity, you can do 3D printing of organoids. And the new crop of companies both have these trillion dollar bets, but also revenue today because the space industry actually.

Tariq Malik [00:24:09]:
Exists, would you say? And this is just a short follow up because it seems like having multiple avenues to space with different types of access. You can buy a Cub that for, you know, less than 10,000 or whatever, you can buy a private space station, you know, for, for full racks and whatnot. Does that give, I guess a lot more flexibility if you are an idea generator about trying to find a niche now for a different type of product or even if the product is data itself, you know, that kind of a thing. Is there a lot more flexibility now than there was say like in the more traditional space rush of the, you know, 70s, 80s, that kind of thing.

Ely Sandler [00:24:50]:
So the answer is yes. But we, we shouldn't get carried away. Like I think there's still a huge constraint on launch. So compared to five, ten years ago, yes, there's way more things you can do. You can Test your products. You can, you can, you can put things in orbit. But when I talk to companies that are trying to do really interesting things in space, what I thought they were going to say is that the binding constraint is capital or is regulation or is engineering, but actually most of them are being constrained by the ability to put stuff in orbit. And so we still have a huge pent up demand for companies trying to do things in orbit.

Ely Sandler [00:25:27]:
And that remains in my mind a lot of the constraints to the space.

Tariq Malik [00:25:30]:
Industry still, that's crazy.

Rod Pyle [00:25:32]:
Well, we're going to slip from our constraints and run to an ad. So we'll be right back. Don't go anywhere.

Leo Laporte [00:25:39]:
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Leo Laporte [00:26:17]:
Please join the club. If you haven't done it yet, we'd love to have you find out more at TWiT TV Club TWiT. And thank you so much.

Rod Pyle [00:26:26]:
So I think the core topic here today is working with the now slightly outdated and increasingly unwieldy Outer space treaty of 1967, which was initiated and signed by the US and the Soviet Union back then because we were the only two people doing space. And it seemed important to talk about things like, hey, don't put big weapons up there because they scare people and so forth. So this I think is kind of the core of the topic that brought me to you for this. So can you talk about what it is and what it means and how it's maybe becoming a bit creaky?

Ely Sandler [00:27:02]:
Yeah, absolutely. So the Outer Space Treaty is essentially all the international space law we have. So there's a couple other treaties that followed that kind of deepened it. And there's some regulation of spectrum of telecommunications banned through something called the International Telecommunications Union. But basically all international space law is written into this 1967 treaty. And you can read it and you can read the historical debates at the time and you get two big takeaways that have huge problems for today, one is that they did not imagine that the space economy would look like what it looks like right now. They did not imagine private actors going to space. They didn't envisage the problems with space debris.

Ely Sandler [00:27:42]:
And so even if that treaty were working perfectly, it was not written to cover the issues of space we have today internationally. The other big problem is that literally everyone, when the treaty was signed, from Lyndon Johnson in the United States to, you can read. Soviet historian said, this is a first step. This lays in place the principles of what we're going to think about in space. And then just like when Congress passes a law, they use broad terms. And then let's say an agency makes a rule to tell you what it actually means to comply or not comply with the law. Everyone thought that the Outer Space Treaty would be built upon. So as an example, it says all states have the duty to give each other due regard in space, which roughly means, I don't know, let other satellites know if you're going to hit them, move if you're going to hit them.

Ely Sandler [00:28:30]:
But because that was never defined, every signatory to the Outer Space Treaty, which is every country, can say they're in accordance with the Outer Space Treaty, and it not mean anything because it's never been defined in law. And so the core problem with the Outer Space Treaty is one, it was not designed for today's economy. And two, because none of the terms in it are actually defined, it doesn't create any binding obligations. And so this isn't just a problem theoretically. It means that on a really practical level, when satellites are going around the Earth and there's the risk of a collision event, we don't have rules of a road. I mean, it's much more complicated. But you can kind of think about it as everyone goes, you know, drives on the right, or everyone stops at a stop sign. We don't have the equivalent of that for what satellites are supposed to do if there's a risk of a collision.

Ely Sandler [00:29:14]:
And then much, much, much broader, there's wider issues, like what happens with exploration of the moon. How do we interact with each other if we both want to. Want to land on the same, the same spot? Those are more, you might think, might have philosophical differences. So there are some areas where the United States and Russia and China actually have disagreement. But in my mind, the real tragedy is that in terms of those, those stop signs or those everyone driving on the right hand side, we all sort of know what we need to do. But because treaty making basically ended in the 1970s, we never put into international law how interaction in space is supposed to work.

Tariq Malik [00:29:52]:
I was really struck by that because I think what really brought your research to mind is this awesome paper just all about this that came out last month, and hopefully I'm going to pronounce it properly. Governing Outer Space, A conference of the parties for the Outer Space Treaty, which I read as space cops because of the cop, but because.

Rod Pyle [00:30:17]:
Because we're us.

Tariq Malik [00:30:18]:
Yeah, but. But I was really struck by the vagueness, like the inherent and what seems like intentional vagueness of the Outer Space Treaty that I've never. I mean, I've been doing this for 25 years, Eli, and you know, I. We kind of take this, this treaty as a given. You know, we're not going to be mean in space, we're not going to touch other people's things, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But in your paper, you really point out that there's so much vagueness that, like what. There isn't an agreement of what an apple is an apple to anyone else right now. And it could be very different and interpreted in so many different ways.

Tariq Malik [00:30:53]:
And it. It seems like that's a really big thing that we really should clear up before we start having private space stations and people on the moon and all that. That kind of thing.

Ely Sandler [00:31:04]:
Yeah, I mean, imagine just like a really simple example, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees right to freedom of speech. And we know what that is because Congress has passed a bunch of laws about it and the Supreme Court has told us what it means to have free speech and what the defenses are, but imagine if none of that had ever happened. How would we know what these principles mean? This is what's going on in the Outer Space Treaty. And so this vagueness, until now, has not really caused issues because even though there's a lot more stuff in space than there used to be, and I'm sure a lot of your audience have seen this graphic that was made of the Earth surrounded by space junk, and it looks like, you know, everything is about to collide. Well, actually, space is really, really big. And even though there are 15,000 odd satellites and. And over a million small objects, that's actually fine because they're whizzing around in so many different orbits and so many different shells. But as we get more and more and more things in space, the rubber is going to hit the road and we're going to need a protocol for how we deal with these issues.

Ely Sandler [00:32:00]:
And I'm not even talking about the, you know, the Deep philosophical problems of can you own land on the moon? Can you make sure that no one else comes into your moon base? I'm talking about liability for what happens if your spacecraft hits someone else. I'm talking about if there's a chance of you and another satellite colliding, who goes left, who goes right? And so, you know, I'm, to be clear, not the first person to realize that there's these problems. And actually our paper cites a huge amount of literature. And I'm, again, I'm not really from the space policy world, and so I should stay in my lane and say there's been a lot of excellent work done on this. And what the paper is about is saying since 1967, we tried to pass a bunch of treaties and a lot of them failed. So since the 70s, there were no new treaties that were adopted by all space faring powers. There were some ideas of having sort of an overarching space regulator that also failed. We wouldn't want that in the States, they wouldn't want that in Russia and China.

Ely Sandler [00:32:58]:
Most recently, the United States embarked on something called the Artemis Accords, which is a voluntary collection of countries that have come together to solve some of these questions. How do you, how do you navigate on the moon? What do your satellites do? But they're voluntary, so they're not legally binding, and they don't include Russia and China. And so while it's great that our allies have signed up with us, really the countries we need this for is Russia and China. And so what I set out to do in the paper is to say, are there models from other parts of international cooperation that could be useful in outer space?

Rod Pyle [00:33:33]:
So one of the quotes in your, your article that you sent me was, quote, space is congested and contested, which I think you've kind of touched on. But I'm not sure everybody we've talked about on the show before, but I'm not sure everybody really realize how crowded it's getting up there. There's still a lot of room, but you got things in different and intersecting orbits, including debris in an environment where a paint chip can take out window on a spacecraft, which almost happened with the Xinjiang 20 capsule recently. So we were reminded of that in addition to what happened with the shuttle years ago, where they almost lost a front window pane, one of five, admittedly, but to a paint flake the size of a dime, it's a big deal. So obviously no treaty can cover paint flakes and smaller rocket debris. But when you have intentional players up there, especially in the age of when people are still occasionally doing ASAT tests anti satellite technology, this seems like this would be a really big part of this, right?

Ely Sandler [00:34:29]:
Yeah. So at the moment, satellite operators have a protocol for whether or not to take evasive maneuvers. And the least conservative is a one in a thousand chance of a collision. And the most conservative, I believe is Starlink, who say that if there's a one in a million chance of a collision, they'll take evasive maneuvers. The average out there is about 1 in 100,000. So if you have a 1 in 100,000 chance of a collision, you move your satellite right now on average. And again, this is kind of going from publicly reported data. Most satellite operators, that happens once or twice per year.

Ely Sandler [00:35:03]:
So once or twice per year they have 1 in 100,000 chance of a collision, which a collision will be really bad. But that's pretty low. And if you look at the predictions, these escalate super rapidly. So we're talking 30 to 40 times a year by 2030 and even more in the future. And so we're going to have to have a way to avoid collisions or there are going to be satellites hitting each other, which creates more debris, which creates more risk of collisions and could ultimately mean we can't go to space, which would actually change life as we know it. We couldn't use gps, we can use Internet. And so you're right, you can't do anything about the paid chips that are up there right now. But As I said, 1 in 100,000 chance happening once a year is not crazy.

Ely Sandler [00:35:43]:
The stuff up there right now we can sort of deal with. What we need to make sure we do is one, every satellite that goes into orbit has a de orbit plan so it doesn't create more dead satellites. Two, every satellite that goes into orbit needs to have the ability to maneuver because I think it's not the majority, but it's a large amount of satellites go up right now with no ability to maneuver. And so they couldn't take evasive maneuvers even if they wanted. And then three is a common protocol for how you avoid collisions. And those are some of the things we talk about in the paper.

Rod Pyle [00:36:12]:
Well, we have to avoid a collision with an incoming ad right now. So stand by and we'll be back in just a second. So one of the big questions, and I'm extending what you're talking about a bit, but one of the big questions that we worry about is property use, and not property rights so much, but property use, because according to the treaty and Again, it's a little vague and it's very dated, but we're not supposed to claim property on the celestial bodies, but we want to be able to use things there. The US has passed legislation to try and make this okay, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world is going to agree with it. But, for instance, on the Moon, we're interested in resources on the South Pole because there's water ice there, and we can make all kinds of useful things out of. Out of water. But, you know, the first. First mover advantage there is whoever lands and start setting up operations.

Rod Pyle [00:37:05]:
So once you're on the ground, as I understand it, you can set up an exclusion zone. Both China and the United States and I guess Russia in a smaller way, are trying to get together the ability to put nuclear reactors there for power because much of it is permanently dark. So you can't use solar panels unless they're displaced by some distance. But, you know, once you set up a nuclear reactor, and this is just my suspicion, I haven't read much to underscore this, you could set up a big exclusion zone for safety's sake, quote, unquote. And that could be thousands of feet or miles or kilometers, depending on how you want to do it, and just say, okay, you got to stay out from here for your own safety. So how is the treaty interpreted to deal with that? And what would you recommend moving forward?

Ely Sandler [00:37:52]:
Yeah, so right now, what international law says is there's an article in the Outer Space Treaty that makes national appropriation of space illegal. So everyone agrees that you cannot appropriate space. We all agree. This means the Americans, we cannot go and land on the Sea of Tranquility and plant a flag and say, this is New New York. And if you read the debates that were happening at the time of the Outer Space Treaty, they actually knew that this phrase, national appropriation was ambiguous. The Americans, we were really clear that we wanted to be able to own space rocks and we wanted to be able to use ice on the Moon. And the Russians, they didn't want that. They didn't want that to be private property in space.

Ely Sandler [00:38:36]:
They thought that was kind of capitalist grandstanding. But we really wanted to get the Outer Space Treaty signed. And so we sort of brushed it under the rug. And we said, at some point in the future, we'll define what national appropriation means. Well, we didn't. And so now there is this ambiguity, which is, okay, you can't own the territory, but can you own the rocks? Can you own the ice? Can you use it since maybe 2015, I would say, actually the answer to that specific question has become pretty clear. NASA put out a tender and it actually bought some future rights to lunar regolith from a whole bunch of companies, including a Japanese company, including a company based in Luxembourg. And so they're sort of showing there's this international consensus to national appropriation does not mean you can't own moon rocks.

Ely Sandler [00:39:21]:
And I think China and the Russians have come around to this because otherwise it would just be very, very hard to have a lunar base if you had to think about resource sharing. But the other point you mentioned is really important, which is the Artemis Accords, they say that you can implement something called the safety zone, which is that it's also not national appropriation. And the Artemis Accords, if you read the text, it says before, every time they mention what they're going to do with owning resources, or every time they mention safety zones, they say in accordance with the Outer Space Treaty, to make clear that they think this is the definitive interpretation. And they think you can say, because I'm on the moon, you can't land here because if you do, it'll throw up regolith and will throw up ejecta, and that will be dangerous. But China and Russia are not signatories to the Islands Accords. They've actually said they find the idea of safety zones to be in violation of this principle of national appropriation. I don't institutionally have a view on whether safety zones do or do not constitute national appropriation. I think, and maybe we'll get to the point of the paper, is to say we should be talking about this with the Chinese and the Russians, because this is going to come up really soon, because we're all going back to the moon and we all want to use the same spots because there's limited kind of pathways for circumnavigation.

Ely Sandler [00:40:29]:
There's limited spots. Where we have ice, there might be limited spots. We have helium 3. And so what we need is a way of coming together and defining what all of these terms mean to avoid a catastrophe. And I'm happy to talk about how the. The COP model could do that.

Tariq Malik [00:40:43]:
That's actually. Are we going to go to a break rod, or can we. Can we go into this? This is what I was.

Rod Pyle [00:40:48]:
You have five whole minutes.

Tariq Malik [00:40:50]:
All right, great.

Rod Pyle [00:40:50]:
Go for it. Go for it.

Tariq Malik [00:40:51]:
Yeah. So. So I made a joke earlier, obviously, when we're talking about space cops, right? Because I could see an evolution of that to come from this, but I was struck by Your, your comparison of, of the Conference of Parties 30 for, for climate, you know, in Brazil that, that COP 30 and it's, it's the potential model there for use towards space. And so that was the question is, is what is a conference of parties and how can that be used to bring a lot of the parties that are interested now in using space, be it a terrestrial body or just, you know, orbit or whatnot, to the table to outline these issues as they come up. Now, maybe they weren't on the table back in 67, but we definitely have to deal with them now.

Ely Sandler [00:41:41]:
And you'll forgive me because this gets kind of technical because it's a policy question, but the first conference of the parties was in the early 1970s and basically it was an international treaty to do with international wetlands. And what the drafted of the treaty realized is that as science evolves, the obligation states are going to need to have to preserve wetlands, in this case, those are going to change. And because passing treaties is really, really difficult, we need ways of updating what it means to be in accordance with a treaty that does not require you to literally amend the treaty. Again, to compare to the United states, we've had 20 something amendments to the Constitution. That's really hard. But we constantly update what laws mean through the judiciary and through congressional acts. And so the Conference of the Party is, is a pretty unique legal mechanism where all of the signatories to a treaty get together and they basically just chat. They talk about what the treaty means, they talk about how it's going, they talk about the definitions.

Ely Sandler [00:42:40]:
And you can almost think of it as the minutes of those meetings, they become reincorporated into the treaty as guidance. So if you discuss in the Conference of the Parties what that principle of due regard means, or you discuss in the Conference of the Parties what liability means, then those discussions, they become a way of understanding under international law what the terms themselves mean. In academia, people call this the thickening of the obligations. You're not creating any new obligations on states or any new law. Technically, you're sort of like filling in the body of what, of what those existing artistry pastry terms mean.

Tariq Malik [00:43:20]:
So is it.

Ely Sandler [00:43:21]:
Yeah.

Tariq Malik [00:43:22]:
So is it like a steering committee? Is that what.

Ely Sandler [00:43:26]:
It's literally a conference of the party. Like people come together and every year you, you have the delegates speak and they write, you know, a communique. And that communique has the force of creating what you think of as secondary legislation or customary law, where that sort of becomes the definitive interpretation of the treaty in the Paper we really go into like what this means legally under something called the Vienna Law of Treaties. But you can basically think about this as, yeah, like the discussion at these cops, they let you know what the Outer Space Treaty meant to say. And I think the comparison you made with the climate cop is interesting. The climate cop is probably the most famous cop. There's dozens of treaties with cops internationally, many of whom, many of which the United States is signatory to. We go through all of them in the paper.

Ely Sandler [00:44:13]:
But the most famous is climate. And in some ways the climate cop has, you know, everyone is criticizing it because people come together, they go to Belem, they talk, they make all these laws and then, and then nothing happens. And so the climate COP actually it's really hard to get countries to decarbonize their economies. You know, whatever your listeners think of climate change, there are huge costs to decarbonization. And I work on climate change, so I think it's important. But it comes with costs when you switch from using fossil fuels to using renewable energy. And that's not really what a COP is designed to do. COP is designed to create international law.

Ely Sandler [00:44:48]:
It's not designed to have the US switch off its coal or its natural gas industry. What we need in space actually aligns much more closely with the cop. And so I think that even though the first cop was in the 70s, if we had one, if this mechanism had been invented in 67 we had the Outer Space Treaty, what would have happened is every year all the signatories would have come together and what they discussed would have been basically new binding international law. Obviously we do have committees in the un, something called the Committee on the Peaceful Use of Outer Space, where in a non binding way, a very technical delegates come together, but it doesn't really have either the political force or the legal force of a cop. And so in my mind this offers a way where China, Russia, the United States and all the other signatures to the Outer Space Treaty, every year they would come together and they would basically be able to add definitions to the Outer Space Treaty piece by piece without having to agree on a big bang new treaty or a big bang amendment. So if we can't agree on whether or not you can put weapons in outer space, or we can't agree on what constitutes a weapon of mass destruction outer space, which is banned under the Outer Space Treaty, that's okay because we can still talk about what national appropriation is and we can still talk about liability and we can still talk about due regardless. And so in the first Instance a lot of principles we all already agree, for example, something that was written in the un, you know, protocols for how you deal with your satellites, how you communicate with other satellites. Those could just be made international law and then we could start to work on the bigger issues.

Tariq Malik [00:46:20]:
And I guess just as a clarification, we talk about all the signatories coming together to have these, these discussions on a year to year basis. If I'm an, let's say I'm a small country and I've just built my first rocket, but I didn't sign these accords, you know, this treaty in the 60s, it would still apply, right to me or no, I'd have to be swayed to come in at the next cop, that kind of thing.

Ely Sandler [00:46:45]:
Every, every country that has a space program is a signatory to the. Actually not sure about North Korea, but every other country is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty. So this would be, this is, this is like they're all cut basically.

Tariq Malik [00:46:56]:
Okay, all right. I guess so I can't make like a taric land and then start a space program and say okay, we're going to conquer the moon.

Ely Sandler [00:47:03]:
You have to sign up to the rfc.

Rod Pyle [00:47:06]:
Okay, well let's go sign up for a commercial break and we'll be right back. So stay with us. So this sounds a little bit like a Davos of space. Would that be an apt analogy in some ways in.

Ely Sandler [00:47:18]:
So I think that a COP would do two things and we're really clear in the paper that this, we see two reasons to do this or to do something like it. One is there is a very specific legal thing that happens at cops, which is that when, when the, all the signatures get together and they unanimously say something that becomes guidance to the original treaty. And I'm using quite loose language here and you know, formally speaking as a way in which this happens. But basically if everyone gets together and they say well dear guard, probably means you have a de orbit plan and this is, is what a deal. But is that becomes what the Outer Space Treaty means when it says deregard. So there's something much, much bigger than what's happening at Davos. That's great. We can encode international law for the orbiting satellites, for space dragon management, etc.

Ely Sandler [00:48:02]:
The other thing I think is much closer to what you alluded to, which is if we'd had for the last 60 years delegates from every country coming together every year to discuss space issues, I think we would have been in a much, much better place. They would have had the private sector come with them, they would have had heads of state would have seen this as an important thing. Again, it's pretty easy to bash on the climate cop. And at the last one cop 30 in Brazil, you only had one of the G7 leaders instead of six or something. But if you step back from year to year, the variations in these cops, I think it's pretty remarkable that for the last 30 years, every single year every government has gotten together to discuss climate change. And so that is actually a huge body of law and body of communication that has been pushed forward. And if you compare 1992, when the first climate change committee was signed, to the amount of work being done now, even though the trend might be changing, that is colossally different from basically the complete lack of progress in international space law. So the second value is to have this space, which I guess you could compare it to Davos, but where policymakers, practitioners, private sector can come together and law is made.

Rod Pyle [00:49:21]:
So I think we tend to think of this, at least I was as primarily concerning private space actors and how they interact with the state from which they launch and who's responsible for the spacecraft when they go defunct and all that kind of thing. But would this also have ramifications on the military side? Because that's becoming increasingly a concern as well.

Ely Sandler [00:49:42]:
That is a great question. So at the moment there is an obligation under the Outer Space Treaty to register your objects with the United nations when you put them in space. No, no nation does that for the military. And there's an implicit carve out for military activities. Just as an FYI, this is not unusual. So if you look at in climate change, military emissions are excluded from the inventory of every country in the United Nations Climate Change Treaty. And so what I want to see, and I would love there to be progress on this COP idea. And actually we're talking to a lot of space faring countries.

Ely Sandler [00:50:21]:
We're hoping to organize something at Harvard to discuss it in more detail and see a next step soon. I'm not sure that exactly this is what's going to happen, but we do need more dialogue on this framework allows nations to come together. Practically speaking, I think the issues they should be addressing are deorbit plans for commercial satellites, communications protocols, if there's going to be collisions, the issues around registering of military satellites or reconnaissance and this kind of thing, or weapons. I don't think that that could be or should be an area for international law because I think that that would derail progress on the very real logistical issues that we need to Solve just for civilian space.

Tariq Malik [00:51:05]:
You mentioned Eli, like the potential impact of a Big Bang kind of event. An agreement, you know, that would force like a change or some sort of new type of behavior amongst the signatories of the treaty. And you know, I'm looking at the last decade plus of what's been going on. Obviously a very fractured political landscape right now around the world. But in terms of space activities, we've seen like debris falling on farms and you know, concern along of air traffic to you know, that, that type of a threat. We've seen some anti satellite tests, very public ones and some that are kind of under the radar as well as accidents too with, with the Iridium Russia satellite impact there and others that were intentional and, and I'm wondering what is the scale of a Big Bang event? Because those all in just the 25 years I've been covering this felt pretty pivotal. But it seems like the business quickly resumed or found a new equilibrium.

Ely Sandler [00:52:19]:
Yeah, I guess right now the risk of a catastrophic event in space is pretty low. Just statistically speaking, space is big. As I'm sure you and your listeners know, there's something called Kessler Syndrome which would basically be. This is an exponential problem. If there's a small event, it creates a debris field and then that creates more debris and creates more debris and creates more debris. And these are all probabilistic. It's not like let's say that the modeling of emissions to warming and so I don't know what are the chances of, I'm sure there's a paper about it somewhere of the chances of a catastrophic event happening in the next five to 10 years. I guess the way I would interpret your question is would something terrible have to happen for the world to wake up to realize that we need to regulate space debris.

Ely Sandler [00:53:10]:
And I'm hoping the answer is no. And the reason I think that is if you look at the Outer Space Treaty and again, you know there are historians that have done excellent work on this and I've just read it. But my, my interpretation is that the real reason the United States was pushing for the Outer Space Treaty was because they wanted to spy on the civilian. And so the core issue in the Outer Space Treaty, which has been completely forgotten now with something called Open Skies, which is at the time the Soviet Union was incredibly secretive. We didn't know anything about their rocket program, we didn't know anything about the nuclear program and we couldn't fly stealth bombers. And so the question was could we use satellites to take photos of. So we and the United States was very keen to basically declare an international law that once you get into space, that distance, by the way, never defined in the Outer Space Treaty, but once you roughly get into space, you're allowed to be over someone else's land and you can take photos. And that interest was so compelling in the United States military and the United States Department that they really, really pushed for this treaty because it would allow them to have open skies over the Russians.

Ely Sandler [00:54:14]:
And I think that actually the interests today are equally as compelling if you look at what the US Satellite industry is pushing for. They want more regulation, they're asking for national regulation, but they want a whole new regulator to regulate space. They want it to be very, very clear what their obligations are, because they're the actors that are going to be negatively affected by debris. Tragedies of the commons are tragedies because they're hard to solve. But in the case of space, actually, the costs of compliance with deorbiting plans and protocols to move your satellite are relatively low. And you're the ones that bear the negative consequences. And so, in my mind, actually, we're in a relatively good place where everyone's interests could align even without something terrible happening.

Rod Pyle [00:55:01]:
So one thing we have discussed, which was another treaty attempt that did not succeed was the Moon Treaty. Do you have any thoughts on that and the ramifications, pro or con?

Ely Sandler [00:55:10]:
Yeah, just I guess, for background for your listeners, the Moon Agreement was the last attempt at an international treaty that really got anywhere. And I think at its high point, I think it had 10 signatories. Saudi Arabia at some point was in it and withdrew. And basically this was an attempt to pass a treaty. To answer that question, we defined earlier of what is national appropriation? And a whole bunch of developing countries got together and they said, we think the fact that national appropriation is banned and the fact that space is defined as the common heritage of mankind in the Outer Space Treaty, that means that you cannot own stuff you take out of space unless there's a. I forget what the exact phrase is, but I think it's called a resource sharing mechanism. In the Moon Agreement, and they basically say, if you want to use Moon rocks or if you want to use ice on the Moon, that's totally fine. If you give a share of it to the United nations and it shares it with all the other nations.

Ely Sandler [00:56:10]:
And I guess, somewhat unsurprisingly, the only countries that. That were able to get to the Moon and actually exploit those resources said, no, we don't think that's Right. And they didn't sign the treaty. And if you then read the Artemis Accords, they pretty explicitly say the Moon Agreement is not the correct interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty. The Moon Agreement defines national appropriation as use of resources rather than seizing territory. And we don't think that's the correct agreement. And actually, I think that this failure of the Moon Agreement sort of demonstrates why I think the COP model works so well, is because instead of the space community and a few people getting way ahead of where countries are at and trying to pass a big agreement that would redefine space, you have this incremental progress where diplomats every year come together and they make small definitional adjustments. And it's, you know, it's much less sexy than passing a new treaty, but actually could result in new international space law.

Rod Pyle [00:57:09]:
So I think my last question here is about space solar power. You mentioned an interest in that. The organization I work for, National Space Society, is they've been working on papers on that, published many over the last three decades. And we're spending a significant sum of money right now to work up a new study that will be released fairly soon. But, but how do you see that being implemented? And I guess a COP is a good mechanism for getting people to come together on what's okay, you know, what can you beam down from orbit and where can you receive it and is there danger and so forth.

Tariq Malik [00:57:45]:
Yeah, I saw it die another day. I know that it's dangerous. Right?

Ely Sandler [00:57:52]:
Yeah, this is my other favorite topic in space. And so I'll very briefly say something about space based solar. And then I think the role of the cops, which is there are some phenomenal NASA studies out there and studies from academics from people that know way, way, way more about space and space solar than I do. And so my view on it is, the thing that I find interesting is what is the goalpost we need to get to for space based solar to be economically viable? And in the world of energy, we talk about this thing called levelized cost of energy lcoe, which is basically like roughly all in costs, building the thing, running the thing, paying for the thing, how much does it cost you to deliver, let's say 1 megawatt hour of power to Earth, just the unit of power. And there's huge ranges in all these studies going from let's say 20 or 30 cents per kilowatt hour, all the way up to 2 or $3 per kilowatt hour. And the thing that interests me is knowing what the goalpost is. So terrestrial solar on Earth now and so there's going to be a lot of numbers in the next 20 seconds. But terrestrial solar on Earth you can probably create electricity for about 3 or 4 cents a kilowatt hour.

Ely Sandler [00:59:01]:
That's cheap. Gas is probably 20 to 30 cents a kilowatt hour. Nuclear is probably 50 cents a kilowatt hour. And so if your goalpost is space based solar needs to be cheaper than terrestrial solar. That is a tall order like managing to get to 2 or 3 cents per kilowatt hour. There are some startups out there, I know, that think they can do it, but no serious scientific analysis has validated that, that I've seen. But the problem is that, that solar on Earth can only be delivered when the sun is shining. And so actually there's a whole load of costs associated on a grid with having solar power be integrated into your, your energy mix.

Ely Sandler [00:59:41]:
You have to have transmission lines, you have to have batteries when the sun doesn't shine. You might actually also need to use gas if you've got a few days without sun shining to, to run your energy system. And so if you think about modeling the whole energy system, which is something I did in a paper that is now under peer review, you get to 20 to 30 cents. If we could get to that level with space based solar power, you start to create huge demand on the grid for that sort of service. And there's two implications I think from that. One is that that would create, apart from telecommunications, basically the only limitless demand for launch services. So if you can figure out how to do this, then suddenly we have limitless demand for launch and the space industry takes off. And the second is that has some impacts on the types of space based solar power we should be funding specifically.

Ely Sandler [01:00:31]:
And again, this gets really wonky really quick, but we should be using radiation to beam down in a spectrum or in a frequency that can be used on existing solar fields. So basically you want to turn your solar field into a 24 hour producer of electricity rather than having to build a whole new ground based receiver. And that probably means using near infrared rather than microwave radiation for your, for your transmission. And there's a couple of companies out there that are doing it. But that's exactly, I guess your final point, what we need regulation on. Because while that's not going to, you know, fry a bird or make a plane drop out of the sky, that could interfere with terrestrial, let's say WI fi or communication networks. And that probably needs to be regulated in international level.

Tariq Malik [01:01:15]:
Oh yeah, yeah. Watch out. Don't, don't mess up with people's WI fi, Eli. They'll come out. They'll come after us.

Rod Pyle [01:01:22]:
Yeah, that's practically an act of war. Did we miss anything that you wanted to touch on?

Ely Sandler [01:01:26]:
That's great.

Rod Pyle [01:01:27]:
All right. Well, I want to thank you especially and everybody else for joining us today for episode number 194 that we like to call, you know, this is coming, Cops in Space. And now you know what that means. It's not police officers. Eli, where's the best place for us to keep up with your latest work.

Ely Sandler [01:01:44]:
On the Harvard Kennedy School website and on LinkedIn?

Rod Pyle [01:01:48]:
God, I wish I could say that. Tarek, where can we find you shooting it out there these days in your video game glory?

Tariq Malik [01:01:54]:
I got rejected from Harvard. As for many things, no, you can find me@space.com as always on the socials. Tarikj Malik on YouTube, Astron plays and hopefully in a month's time with Rod watching people fly around the moon for the first time in 50 plus years. So that'll be really exciting.

Rod Pyle [01:02:15]:
And we're hoping to be doing a couple of things, either canned or live from there for Club Twit.

Tariq Malik [01:02:22]:
That's the place.

Rod Pyle [01:02:23]:
You can find me at pilebooks.com or@astermagazine.com working away slavishly. Remember, you can drop us a line at twistwit tv. We do welcome your comments, suggestions, ideas, and we answer each and every email with joy because that's what we do. New episodes publish every Friday on your favorite podcatchers. So make sure to subscribe, tell your friends, and give us reviews, especially for Eli. We want five stars for Eli because he gave us a great show today. You can also follow the Twitt podcast network on Twitter and on Facebook and Twit TV on Instagram. Eli, thank you so much for coming in today.

Rod Pyle [01:02:59]:
Thank you and a pleasure for everybody and we'll see you next week. Bye bye. Thank you.