SWF Team Highly Visible at London Space Commerce Conference
Friday, January 25, 2013
Secure World Foundation was well represented from January 24 and 25, as the newly established Dawan Chair in Space Policy of King’s College London, presented a Conference entitled, “COMMERCIALISATION OF SPACE: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES.”
Organized by Bhupendra Jasani, the holder of the Dawan chair, the conference consisted of 8 sessions. Three of the sessions were led by members of the SWF community: Advisory Committee members, Gérard Brachet and Ciro Arévalo Yepes, and Executive Director Michael Simpson. Presentations were equally balanced between discussions of technologies undergoing commercialization and the legal and policy questions implied by space commerce.
Dr. Simpson moderated the panel on Space Tourism, and Ambassador Arevalo-Yepes led the panel on Earth Observation. Gerard Brachet moderated the conference’s final session on the Ethics of Space Commercialization during which Dr. Simpson summarized the conference’s themes against the backdrop of the incipient commercial interest in space mining.
The following conference objectives reflected a clear interest in exploring the challenges of governance, equity, and cooperation that will be presented by the growing interest in space commerce.
- assess critically whether commercialization of space is benefiting all countries and peoples irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development;
- identify precisely critical challenges to commercialization of space and to propose viable solutions to address these challenges;
- how to achieve a balance between commercial benefits and benefits derived from space capabilities for economic development through exploitation of Earth’s natural resources in developing countries; and
- develop a model of public-private relationship by studying different cases and identifying a successful model (or its factors).
Published proceedings of the conference are expected to be available by early summer.
Share