Panel discussion

Anushka Sharma led a panel discussion on a wide range of topics, with particular attention to the social and humanitarian impacts of blockchain technology in space. The panel consisted of Dean Masley (Moonshot Express), Benoit Chamot (Innovative Solutions in Space), Pavlo Tanasyuk (Spacebit), Dan Acristinii (Kryha), and Jerry Stone (Spaceflight UK).

Transcript:

Anushka: I consider each and every one of you sitting right in front of us as part of this extended panel, so get ready with your questions to dive deeper with everybody here and also get involved. Does that sound good? Guys, you’re going to have to get involved! [laughter] Does that sound good? Amazing.

So, I guess I want to ask a question to each and every single one of you. This has been quite an eclectic event by way of the diversity of perspectives that we’re representing across the space ecosystem. We have had startups inspiring us, aspirational entrepreneurs, we have VCs and investors and firms, we have talking about Mars and changing Mars to Earth version, we’re talking about Bitcoin and crypto and actual blockchain applications in space. What today, for each and every one of you, has been your highlight so far?

Dean: I’m in the blockchain space, I don’t really interact with too many aerospace people, so it’s super cool seeing this intersection, how many people are interested in the intersection itself. For me, I think it’s a perfect fit, so seeing the actual size of the people here that came out and are asking questions and getting involved, to me is just super cool to see the size of it alone, and I’m still comprehending that. [laughs]

Pavlo: I absolutely agree. Two-three years ago it was perceived as science fiction; now everyone is talking about blockchain for space, which is very important. I believe that we are at the very beginning, the inception of something great, something big, and we should keep moving. We’re at the very beginning, and there’s many things to be achieved, absolutely.

Benoit: As I said, I’m a complete noob in this domain so I’m still taking it all in — I’ll probably have to think about it with a beer tonight in my hotel room afterwards and come back with a better answer tomorrow. [laughter] But I like the way all of you guys are thinking not only about the technology but also about real problems and real applications, not only on the technical side but also when we had talks about the legal aspects and the cultural side as well. Almost at the philosophical level as well, ways of dealing with or without the government, and that part of the discussion as well, more than the technical side, was really interesting I think.

Dan: I really loved the conversation regarding the legal aspects of actually going to space, who owns what and who can do what and who is guilty for what. For me, that is an eye-opener, and it’s from someone who actually knows their stuff and who parsed that information for me, so that was great. Other than that, seeing the reception from the space industry and the intersection between blockchain and space is just amazing. I’m really happy to see people being interested from both sides, to interact and to actually work together.

Jerry: My area really is just in space exploration, and when I got the invitation to come and speak here, I’ve got to say that my initial reaction was “Blockchain? I mean, we’re talking about finance, logistics and stuff like that… That doesn’t really fit in with what I do.” [laughter] But am I glad that I’ve been here today. It’s been for me really exciting, really interesting, especially… This is pretty much getting in right at the beginning of this kind of activity and movement. Yeah, I can see that this is going to be a big thing in the future, so you need to invest. [laughter]

Anushka: It’s just really interesting hearing about the intersection of what we’ve kind of all come to experience today. Because I’ve been knocking about in this sector for a couple of years, and it’s really interesting seeing the acceleration, particularly in London, outside of the hotspots that we have around the UK, particularly in Berlin. Something that Disrupt Space was doing about two years ago was bringing together innovative space startups and aspiring entrepreneurs, and putting them in a fuzzy unconference, pretty much like today, with the likes of Airbus and ESA, to help deals get done. And it’s really interesting, because I think an outcome of what you achieved has really set the trend in this sector, where ESA have now deployed incubation centres, we now have one in the UK, we were in Estonia in November where they launched one out there. It’s really interesting seeing how this sector is really scaling up, not only in Europe but across the world. But this audience is connecting globally, and that’s the great thing about space, because it incorporates each and every one of us.

If you were looking to meet someone today, in this room, or someone who you could meet with to help each and every one of you on your main outcome… I know you’ve sort of semi-pitched, but I want you to nail it in one answer, who is it that you’d like to talk to? Because sometimes not everyone in an audience is open as maybe I am in saying, “This is what I want, this is what I’m looking for.”? Who are you looking to meet and talk to and connect with today?

Dean: We’ve been interested in the legal aspects. Finding rockets and finding legal help are our two biggest bottlenecks, and I think we’ve been finding some good help so far.

Pavlo: For me, it’s mostly finding likeminded people and doing something together, bringing to a larger scale and doing something really at scale and together, rather than trying to build your own stuff. Because we are at a very early stage, and we are competing against very large corporations at the moment, and I believe there’s power in unity, doing things together.

Dan: You should have seen how happy they were to meet each other, Dean and Pavlo. [laughter] Oh my god, I had to take a picture of them, they were like “Do you want to send something to the Moon? I can help you with that. — Okay!” [laughter]

Benoit: For me, it’s about understanding the technology a bit better and how it can help us in our business, and discuss opportunities for you guys, launches but satellites as well, and how we could help you build your infrastructure with the infrastructure that we can provide.

Anushka: Is there anyone looking to build a satellite and deploy it?

Jerry: My needs are pretty simple: I need people to book me, get me to come and give a talk on some aspect of space, or to book my space workshops. Speaking of books, buy the book, alright, so I don’t have to carry them home. Or even to sponsor me, okay? [laughter] No, I’m quite serious about this. Next year is the 50th anniversary of the first men on the Moon, and I’m going to be incredibly busy, I have several new presentations I’m working on. For example, next year is also the 500th anniversary of the start of the first circumnavigation of the world, Magellan’s voyage, so I’m developing a new presentation called Around the World and off to the Moon, so it compares Magellan’s trip with that of Apollo 11.

I’m also working on being able to have a cardboard Saturn V 1/50 scale, so that means it’s over seven feet high, that schools will assemble and keep and so on, and other activities. If I get sponsorship to help me with that so that I can keep the cost down for the schools, that’s the main thing, schools, but it’s really appalling these days.

Anushka: UK Space has some great funding to help with that.

Jerry: Well, possibly. Every single time I have applied, there’s always been someone else who seems to have something which is so much more worthwhile doing than my activities. Yet, what do they keep saying and have been saying for the last six years on the BBC, on every sporting thing? Get inspired. So I’ve said, “Why can’t we use space to inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, all the useful people that we’re going to need in the future?” Surely that is as important as inspiring sports. That’s the message I’m trying to give.

When I go to a school, I don’t pretend for one instant that all the pupils in the classroom are going to grow up with careers in the space industry. I mean, who knows, they might be lucky. Though I do point out that practically every career has some link to space. I mean, you might be working in TV, so Sky TV, which ought to be called Space TV, they use satellites to transmit stuff. You might be a lawyer: space law is a huge and rapidly growing area. So there’s all kinds of options. So, if I can go and get students to be inspired and to be interested in following the STEM subjects, then to me that’s job done.

Anushka: It’s super important. Because coming from the point where the intersection of tech and space comes, we don’t have enough developer talent, we don’t have enough engineers, and even if we doubled the number of kids going to uni to take an engineering degree, we still wouldn’t fulfil the deficit that we need. I’m looking at solutions, that we can look at maybe getting apprenticeship training schemes to really help share talent. Are you guys lacking any particular talent or skillset that you need to maybe help you guys scale with what you’re building? Is that something you’re finding, or are you okay with the teams as you’re looking to scale and build your business?

Dean: Well, ours isn’t necessarily a team, we’re more like a community, and we’ve just been pulling people in from everywhere. We can take all the knowledge we can get, put pretty much everyone just kind of jumps in and does their own thing. So if anyone wants to, they can just jump in. [laughs]

Anushka: Awesome. I’m going to start asking you guys in the audience if you have any questions. Are there any immediate, burning questions anyone would like to ask us?

Dominic: I started organising this conference about a month and a half ago, and it was a subject I knew nothing about, I knew a fair about blockchain but nothing about space, and I thought “What is there out there?” and the more I looked, the more I found that there was a hell of a lot of stuff going on between blockchain and space. There’s everything from the stuff that’s been talked about here, through to NASA doing a debris tracking project, ESA and Airbus and Lockheed Martin doing supply chain management, they’ve got projects in early stages, but they’re not very well known, they’re not known by the blockchain community and they’re not known by the space community. But trying to get speakers from those organisations to come and be with you today was really difficult. In a way, it’s all slightly too early. I think when we run this conference again next year, which we will do, it’ll be a whole different affair, I think there will be a lot more to talk about for those people. But right now it’s just… The objective was to make you aware of this crossover.

But secondly, also to put your minds onto the much bigger picture. The much bigger picture is what Jerry was talking about, that we have to leave this planet, our survivability as a species now depends on it, and there are so many different parts to that. It’s what the big guys are doing with the big rockets, and what Jerry’s been talking about, the big missions, but also about all of you guys, the blockchain community has its part to play in incrementally building out parts of the technology we need to get there. That’s really what I’d like to leave you with.

Anushka: It’s so interesting, because I think everybody who has spoken today and is attending today, everyone has a different vision of why we want to look outwards. For me, and I’d love to ask you guys as well, it’s not necessarily the same thing that Elon wants to do in creating… There might be an Earth catastrophe, that it makes sure that we have an insurance policy, if you want to call it that, for the human race. I love what ESA are doing with the proposals around the Moon village. They have a creative artist in residence who is already designing temples that depict what it could be like for a non-denominational religious human entity, showing kind of the human stamp of what it’s like as we progress in our steps, as we move forward and move to the Moon and a galaxy gateway, or to Mars and beyond.

So it’s really interesting for me, because I’m all about exploration, and I think it’s something quite human and instinctive to want to look outwards and forwards and see what the capability of emerging technology is to enable that. That’s where I do believe that blockchain will be the foundation, and the reason why I talked about supply chain through a real-world example today, is as much as that FMCG brand is looking at deploying blockchain to really build a foundation of where they want to take future supply chain, they’ve only just started thinking about it. So many corporate executive teams and senior leaders, as much as we are enriching ourselves and delved into this technology, so many people at that higher-ranking business level are only just understanding why that technology is relevant and why they should even be considering it as a line on their budget to start investing in.

That’s where the hacking world of startups and scrappy scale-ups for me is so interesting, because we look at the MVP, the minimum viable product, to see an idea. Because let’s be honest, no one is going to be talking about AI or blockchain — as much as it’s the buzzword out there, not for us in here — no one is just going to lay down 50 million euros or dollars or pounds to build a solution without at least testing and trialling it. So it’s really important that those of us that are taking these initial steps and are really putting ourselves out there to be part of this sector that’s emerging and has constantly been evolving since the 60s. Technology has come to a point now where it’s accelerating the timescale for us to deploy it, but a lot of the foundation work is still being done.

I just took that and riffed. I’d love to know from you guys: why space? What drives you? Because that’s me, that’s what I’m passionate about.

Dean: Back in the day, I grew a network called the Blockchain Education Network, where we built Bitcoin clubs on university campuses. The whole idea was that you can empower an individual to take extreme initiative in their local community, and the change they’ve created was huge. In aggregate, it was the global revolution of the grassroots blockchain effort. I see something very similar now, where you can use the same technology that’s very accessible, it enables participation from downloading an app on an app store, and you can apply these for these concepts from an area where normally people see on TV some great astronaut, but now is the chance that every human can be an astronaut or can be part of these efforts in a very significant way. So that level of access and participation really rustles my jimmies, yeah.

Pavlo: For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to do something space related. I believe that many of us have this gene, the gene of explorers that drives us, drives us out of our homes, out of our beds every morning, and we really want to achieve something beyond our daily lives. I was in fintech before, I was running a company similar to PayPal in Eastern Europe and in Asia. I sold the company and I decided that I want to do something else, so I started doing blockchain, and space a bit later. For me, it’s something that really drives me, rather than just simple financial transactions.

And we should think outside the box. When you talked about the corporates and how they use new technologies, including blockchain, sometimes they’re trying to use it for incremental innovation, they don’t want to take risks to disrupt their business models, to disrupt their lives. Well, they have shareholders, they have many things to lose. But startups, or people, individuals, they are more flexible, and they really are ready to take the risk, they’re less constrained. I believe it is very important that the new blockchain movement, which always had less constraints than the corporate world, is driven into space industry now, and I believe that we can work on this together. Something which we thought was not possible will become possible. If SpaceX was able to cut costs 10 times, then blockchain-based distributed systems can cut those costs even more.

Benoit: I’ve worked on several satellites, I’ve been involved in several satellite projects, as an engineer first and as business developer second, so I have a bunch of hardware in orbit now, and that’s a feeling that is impossible to explain, that’s just super cool. So why space? Because it’s fucking awesome, it’s just as simple as that.

I also think that in the US, in Europe, we’ve also forgotten how it can drive people as well. I work with countries who are starting their space program now, in North Africa, in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, and that’s really something that they use to put themselves on the map. They are already on the map in a lot of different industries, but they also use space to show to the rest of the world that they can do it and that they can be heard. Some do that with nuclear missiles and then they invite the US President, others just decide to do it in a more peaceful way. That’s I think what’s important as well, and we have to remind ourselves that’s also the reason why it started.

Dan: I always considered space cool, ever since I was a kid. The fact that you cannot actually put something in space now for me is just… I’m sorry, I really feel bad that I don’t have something in orbit. But the other thing I’ve noticed is something more specific to the people I work with. We’re a blockchain consultancy development company, and when we launched this product it was just about swarm, just overall swarm technology. It’s interesting, it’s exciting, but a lot of our people did AI, so swarm is exciting for people who do AI. Once you add something on top of that and you say, “We’re going to do it with drones,” we’re like “Oh man, this is going to be so much cooler!” Then you’re like “Oh yeah, drones are cool, but now let’s do it with satellites in space,” and developers are actually excited to write white papers, business plans — I’m not kidding. People are naturally excited about space, it’s something they haven’t thought about that they could do, and all of a sudden you say to them, “Yeah, you can actually do it, it’s not that difficult. Just have the right mindset, have the right people that can help you with it, and find somebody to launch it: done.” So for me this is the thing, people get excited, it’s something new again. So, why not?

Benoit: Yeah, build the first satellite and then the engineers are not really interested in writing documentation again. [laughter]

Jerry: Actually, on the subject of documentation: Wernher von Braun used to say that when the weight of the documentation equals the weight of the rocket, then it’s time to launch. [laughter]

I’ve been passionate about space since I was really, really young. Next week I’ll be celebrating the 50th anniversary of my first space talk, which I did when I was at school when I was 14 years old. If you ask schoolchildren what subjects are you interested in, they might say history or mathematics or something. But then you ask “What subjects are you excited about?” and space, space is the one, it just knocks them away. I get teachers say to me, I get emails “You came to us last month, and the pupils are still talking about it. They’re not going to forget this for a long, long time,” and that’s it. I mean, the standard thing is young people are interested in two things: dinosaurs and spaceflight.

A few years ago, Comic Relief’s theme for their Red Noses was dinosaurs. I usually do demonstration air rocket launching at the end of the day, and one day I was checking over stuff, refitting fins and so, and I thought “Hang on, my rocket has a red nose cone,” so I contacted the schools that I was going to during the next month, which happened to be March and Comic Relief was going on, and I said, “Instead of me launching the rockets, your pupils can launch them for a £2 donation to Comic Relief,” and we put a dinosaur Comic Relief Red Nose on it, so we combined dinosaurs and spaceflight, and down the side of the rocket I had it printed “I launched this Red Nose cone rocket for Comic Relief,” and that first year we raised about £500. Comic Relief said they’ve never heard of anybody raising money for charity by launching rockets, and even they said, “Wow, this is cool!”

And that’s it: space is cool, it excites people! When I first was really getting into this, there were actually occasionally people who asked me why I was interested in space, and that created a problem for me. Because I couldn’t understand why they had to ask! Wasn’t it obvious?! I mean, we’re doing things we’ve never done before, in the entire history of mankind! I said, “Look, I don’t denigrate explorers like Columbus and Magellan, but when it comes down to it, the bottom line is they went from one country to another country, where there were other people there, there was food to eat, air to breathe, a blue sky. They didn’t leave the planet and fly across a quarter of a million miles of space and land on another world!” I saw that happen live, and I regard myself very privileged. It’s that kind of… the recreation of that experience I hope we’re going to get next year.

I’m a part of a small group at the British Interplanetary Society, looking at how the Apollo 50, as I’m referring to it, can be celebrated, and I produced a list of people, organisations, places, events that might get involved in this, and in bullet points it runs for over three pages. It’s not just the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society and Greenwich Observatory, we’re hoping to have a mass picnic in the park there, but other things. I went past the BFI, IMAX ,and half of it was covered in this huge advert for Costa, this huge coffee cup, and I thought “Okay, let’s see if we can get Costa to produce some templates that can be used in all their shops, so you could sprinkle something over the top of your cup of coffee, and you’ve got a lunar footprint outlined there.” And there’s other weird things, like Have I got Space News for You, the producer of QI is very interested in doing something.

Anushka: I’d love to see Helen Sharman versus Tim Peake hosting a team on Have I got Space for You — that would be great!

Jerry: Yeah, yeah! I mean, potentially we can get these people, and it would be really great. But, we would pair them with a comedian who knows or is interested in space, so we’ve got Dara Ó Briain and others. In fact, anybody here who has any ideas for ways of celebrating Apollo 50, please come see me afterwards, I’d love to talk to you.

Anushka: Awesome — thank you Jerry. Does anyone else in the audience have any questions, or would like to share a comment?

Anton: Touching on some of the things which had already been said, and looking back to the opening of this conference and some of the things Vinay Gupta said, I wonder what the panel sees are the most exciting or the most important humanitarian implications of the marriage between blockchain technology and space travel and space exploration.

Dean: He compared space travel before as being competition between nations, two nations, the communist world and the capitalist world are competing to see who could be the best in space, and I really like the idea that now it’s quite different. The technology exists, and now there’s enough people who are capable of participating and collaborating, and in this new world we’re seeing that collaboration is a fighting force to work with. What we could accomplish as humanity, people of all different countries, collaborating on goals that they find enthusiastic and fun to do, I think that is a paradigm which is kind of hard to comprehend, how globalising a force that is. Everyone on Earth is able to work on a goal together; it’s not competing between each other, but rather putting all the best minds together and the biggest problems. I think that’s an awesome paradigm to be seeing in the new type of space race, and when Vinay was talking about that, it triggered so many euphoria rushes. [laughs]

Dan: That is the core idea: if we cooperate in space, that’s how we can actually move forward. I think that is also one of the reasons why there’s actually not much regulation in this area. You can have private companies own it, you can have nation states up there, there are multiple ways, but at least how I and people that I talk to see it is we decentralise space ownership and everybody participates with their own thing, you can create this ecosystem where everybody else can actually also participate in getting the data, you don’t have a central point of ownership, and that is the thing about space: if you think about it, it should belong to all of us. This is what I think blockchain enables.

Pavlo: Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. Referring to the Apollo missions and the first Moon landing I was not present, I was not alive at the time [laughs], but I’ve been told that everyone… I was born in Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union at the time, I moved to the UK 15 years ago, but everyone, even in the Soviet Union and in other countries, they felt that they did it as humanity, it’s not the US that landed on the Moon but humanity as a whole. I believe even though they had that feeling but were never able to actually own part of it or to be part of it, I believe that technologies like blockchain open models for a new economic system to be deployed, and with the Fourth Industrial Revolution hopefully people will have more time to think about space, with automation and all the rest of it, and we might be able to produce something which goes beyond what we have thought was possible.

Anushka: For me, it’s making sure that we have equal and fair access for everyone who wants to explore space. At the moment, we know that it’s been mainly pilots, engineers, scientists, astronauts that are trained. I would love to see a future where anyone, whether they grew up in a council estate in Southwest London, on a farm in India, or went to Eton or went to Cambridge, had equal and fair access to visit the Moon, to have a chance to go around the Earth and see that beautiful blue dot from space. I think that we’d no longer have to bind ourselves by the constructs of just Earth, and I’m not just about Earth-based thinking. I think it’s so nice when you start thinking about solving problems from not just an Earth-based mindset, and if anyone has seen me on Instagram, I’m constantly asking them for me to be able to spatially tag the Moon every time I take a photograph of the Moon, as the Moon is part of being the satellite that orbits Earth in the physical 3D space that it is.

Dominic: What you said about the collaboration and all of that, that’s brilliant. I just want to anchor it back to what blockchain and space are doing humanitarian-wise, into some of the examples that I think James gave earlier very brief in his slides, things like the use of multiple imagery to look at crop growth and things like that, and disaster relief photography from space, that is stuff that’s going on right now using blockchain. One of the speakers we’re going to have from Cloudeo, they are using blockchain, they’re a long-established geodata and geoanalytics company that are now using blockchain as part of that marketplace, and a lot of their imagery that they get through their market is used for humanitarian relief. So there are real practical examples, as well as all the cooperation in the future.

Question: I see a lot of projects about constellations of satellites, but they’re always looking inwards. Why are we not looking more outwards? Is that are reason of physics or economics?

Benoit: Economics, mostly. If you want to look outwards, there are a few things that you would be looking at. I talked briefly about the lunar project that we did with the Chinese. That’s the first stepping stone in putting a constellation around the Moon for radio astronomy, looking at the dark ages of the universe. I won’t go into the scientific details, but the only reason why we want to be there is use the Moon as a shield between Earth and all the radio emission coming from Earth, so that would be one.

Observing asteroids would be another one, either to find out where they are and try to characterise them so we can go there and mine them, also for prevention in case one is heading towards Earth. But in all of these cases, the business cases are not that obvious, and there is a lot more that we can look at facing Earth, for civilian purposes and all the other kind, for which they are actual business cases, and that’s the reason and that’s where we look. I don’t think it has anything to do with the technology, because those are problems we can solve; it’s mostly economics.

Comment: Thank you. It sounds super interesting to me, and I think it would be really good if we could democratise how we can find out about these projects that other people might be interested in. For me, I would be very interested in contributing to things looking outwards, but I have no way of even knowing about them, and maybe we’re not quite at that point where you can crowdfund in that way, but that sounds exciting.

Benoit: That could be an idea for a platform, maybe not blockchain specific but in general. Because there are quite a few people looking at… There is a citizen science project. We launched a satellite earlier this year called PicSat, the goal was to observe the transit of an exoplanet, and they made all their data available, and anybody with a simple radio could listen to the satellite, get the data, know how to look at the data and then participate in the science, and there are quite a few of these projects out there. Maybe the only thing that is missing is a platform to group them and help the general public be aware of it.

Dan: Or it could absolutely be blockchain-based and it could be a DAO and you could vote.

Comment: That’s what I wanted to hear! [laughter]

Benoit: Going back to Dominic’s comment earlier about getting people from the space industry interested, I think that’s one of the things, is we need to look at at the applications and what blockchain can do rather than the technology itself, that’s how you get other people in other industries interested as well. Because I can imagine people at ESA, and even the UK Space Agency now, although they are looking at this more and more, to us, to be blunt, it’s mostly a buzzword, we don’t fully understand what it is and how it can be used. That’s why if we have more use cases and real applications that are explained to us in a very simple way, because we are simple people, that would help both parties a great deal as well, by bringing people in from other industries to this conference.

Dominic: I agree. I was actually trying to get specifically the people from ESA and Airbus who are doing the blockchain projects to come and explain it to us, but getting those people here is quite difficult.

Comment: I spent 10 years of my life at Airbus, and I’m here today, I’ve built up a blockchain startup in fintech. I think what you’re doing is exactly what needs to be done, make the link between industry, government and the entrepreneurs. My idea for the panel for next year is to make it even more international. We’re here in London, but we should bring Americans, Asians, Russians, Europeans. I would be interested to hear from the panel what Brexit will bring for the UK. Because I was involved for 10 years in the European aerospace industry, I’ve been an entrepreneur in London for 16 years, we now have Brexit, we have the space agencies splitting up. Maybe blockchain could reunite everybody around this new idea, and that’s what we’re working on with my co-founder. I’d be interested to hear your view on that.

Pavlo: I talked to people at the European Space Agency, and when we talked about projects like Galileo, we’ve been advised to form an Irish company. [laughter] But, I don’t know. Hopefully blockchain will be this enabler and a component that can help communicate and reunite people across industries and across countries as well, but it’s hard to say because we are really at the early stages at the moment. Obviously there are different expectations at the level of startups and the level of corporations. If we can breach that, and we can find common ground and how we can enhance each other, then we can really work together.

Anushka: Imagine the application of smart contracts as we work to collaborate in a post-Brexit era, in really working together with nations that may exclude the European Union. The UK obviously has been pushing its relationship with the Commonwealth countries, a lot of those are really emerging markets, and it’s really important that we ensure that everybody, no matter whether it’s Kenya, which actually was an ideal position to launch if you’re going to the Moon geographically… So we need to be thinking about geostrategic partnerships in the UK, particularly post-Brexit, but what smart contracts and blockchain will help us to enable is tying up those dots in geographical locations, to build in the projects, and hopefully ensure that the transparency of how those countries and institutions and individuals or entrepreneurs within those chains come together to deliver those projects. I think if we’re looking to go off Earth, that smart contract application with blockchain could be really, really interesting. Anja, I’d love to know if you have any thoughts on that as our legal expert? [laughter]

Anja: Yeah.

Anushka: I put you on the spot, I’m sorry!

Anja: I feel like I’ve brainwashed all of you with the idea that space belongs to all mankind. [laughter] Because there was a lot of people asking me, when I started studying space law, why space? Because there are so many international issues here on Earth, so why on earth would somebody go to space? I was searching for the answer for quite a long time, and then I came to the point where I’ve realised that we actually have to go to space so that we gather all the information, and find a solution how to tackle the issues that we have on Earth. That’s the first one.

The second one is even more interesting actually, because it’s funny how we can perceive outer space, including the Moon, to belong to all of us, but when it comes to Earth we are not capable of this perception. So when you think of having these solutions in space, think of how these solutions are going to bring the same perceptions on Earth. That’s usually how you bridge communities, when you have small countries that are not going to be spacefaring countries ever, and all the communities that are going to be built independently. Because that’s already happening on Earth, and these bridges are missing, and because of these missing bridges we’re actually facing the threat of Trump. Because there’s going to be another battlefield, and when we reach Mars, when we reach the Moon, that’s just going to create more competition. Those are my thoughts.

Anybody else? Should I put somebody on the spot? [laughs]

Jerry: I suppose related to law, what you were saying earlier about insurance: I gave a talk at Wycombe Astronomical Society just last night on the threat of near-Earth asteroids, and something that I quoted was a lovely line from the great science fiction author Larry Niven, he said, “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space programme,” and he then added “If we become extinct because we don’t have a space programme, it’ll serve us right!” I then went on to explain how plotting the orbits of asteroids, we need to do that for two things. One, so that we know where they are, and we need to assay them essentially remotely, so which ones to go after to get useful materials. But we also want to know where they’re going so that we can work out which ones may hit us in the future, and the tracking of asteroids is essentially an insurance policy.

If we spend some money in doing this, setting up tracking centres, even sending out remote craft ready to go into action to hopefully deflect something, and compare the spending of that against the cost in human lives and physical destruction of an actual impact… That’s what insurance is about: you spend a bit against the threat of something else. So what I tell people, when people say, “What’s the point of spending money on space?” I say to them, “Do you have any insurance policies?” and they say, “Yeah, of course,” and I say, “Well, this can be looked on as our insurance policy,” and, frankly, if space can save the world, isn’t it going to be worth it?

Anushka: It’s really interesting that you mention the insurance side of it, because there was an event I attended last year called World Space Risk Forum, and it was literally the world’s insurers who insure the launch organisations, and one of the big risk factors is actually the debris. But also, our insurance policy in the future, as we look outwards, is those defunct satellites that are lying up there, that if they are on a global register, then actually those are resources that we can repurpose when we’re in space and we run out of certain elements. I think we start thinking about solutions like that now, imagine what the collective creative power of tech and non-tech people can bring together.

I’m a big fan of STEAM, because it’s not just about science and technology and engineering and maths, but arts are a big part of that creative synergy, and I think bringing lots of different people… I’m going to challenge you guys: maybe to have a hackathon before next year’s event, or just even a half sprint, because I’m all about scrum and whacking through ideas really quickly. Imagine what we could then hack together and see what we build on as a community, if we’re all doing open access projects and accelerate each other. I think that would be really interesting.

Dominic: To add context to what Jerry was saying about near-Earth objects impacting us. From what I remember, a piece of rock the size of a house, if it lands in Central London, it will effectively destroy the entire Greater London. I think it’s that sort of magnitude.

Jerry: Yeah. I mean, that’s about the size of the object that came down over Tunguska. June 30th at the end of this month will be the 110th anniversary, I included that in my presentation yesterday. What I then showed was what would have happened if it had come down at the same angle over London, and the area that gets destroyed reaches out to the M25.

Dominic: Yeah. I was just making that point to say that we do live on something that’s quite fragile. Whether or not we as human beings destroy our own habitat, there’s a lot of stuff out there in space that really could hit us at any moment and the devastation would be massive. So tracking near-Earth objects is really an important job.

Jerry: And space debris. On a recent flight to the International Space Station, a test craft was taken up, which the day before yesterday was ejected out of the airlock of the International Space Station, the largest object they’ve ever put out there, and this is a test unit with a net and a harpoon, to try out ways of removing dead satellites and other pieces that are in orbit around the Earth. Incidentally, where was this thing made?

Anushka: In the UK.

Benoit: We built the deployers for it, it’s also a bit Dutch. [laughter]

Anushka: Any more questions from our audience? Do we have any final thoughts from each of our panellists, is there anything you’d like to say or wrap up with?

Pavlo: I believe that we should be really accelerating the pace of innovation, personally and collectively. This is a good beginning, but we shouldn’t stop here and we should continue as fast as we can.

Dean: Yeah. When you get enough people enthusiastic about something, it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more that you guys come out to these events, the more people talk about these things, it kind of just ends up happening. Ideas float around, people get inspired, and you’ll be surprised at the exponential pace of these things.

Benoit: Let’s think about applications as well and build real stuff, real hardware that we can get excited about, and let’s launch it!

Dan: Also software, and also don’t keep it to yourself. Try to find partners, find people who actually like it and maybe find a use case.

Jerry: This has been the first blockchain conference, and we have 50 people here today, which is a fantastic response, and all kinds of different people! Well, the only way is up, isn’t it? [laughter] I mean, well done to all of you, Dominic for organising it and getting a great range of people along here. I think it’s really successful. Next year is the 50th anniversary of landing on the Moon, so your strapline can be: let’s look to the next 50 years in space. It’s going to be so, so different, isn’t it?

Anushka: I think that’s a perfect way to sum up this panel, by saying exactly that: let’s look at the next 50 years and what we can achieve — thank you everyone! [applause]