March 2023 IPNSIG Academy Keynote: Space Policy, Perspective on IPN Governance (Dr. Scott Pace)

9:54PM Mar 1, 2023

Speakers:

Vint Cerf

Keywords:

itu

space

moon

standards

internet

people

interplanetary

lunar

deal

reference frame

terrestrial

spacecraft

questions

point

technical

participate

scott

signatories

system

international

All this painting. And then I guess.

You ever everyone. That's the universal foreman. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. My name is Vint Cerf. I'm Vice den Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. But for purposes of today's webinar, I am a member of the board of the interplanetary networking, special interest group and you join a part of our academy discussions and today it is the topic is interplanetary Internet governance. I have with me Dr. Scott pace, who is director of the Space Policy Institute and a professor of practice of International Affairs at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. And I suppose, Scott, if our work goes well, that will be the school of Interplanetary Affairs at some point or you'll be able to set off a new a new evolution at the school. Ladies and gentlemen, I am not going to try to read all of the wonderful history behind Scott Case his contributions but I will say that he was the executive director of the National Space Council who reports to the Vice President in the United States. I had met him well before he undertook that role as a vital role in the pace policy here in the United States. And so we owe him a debt of gratitude not only for his work in the Obama administration, but also for his contributions to the architecture and policy panel. The aw Gee of the interplanetary networking, special interests we Scott is touching on topics that are going to be increasingly important to all of us as we watch this unfolding of commercialization of space and the engagement of multiple parties, multiple stakeholders in the implementation of products and services that are operating well outside of Earth's near Earth envelope. So, as they often say, without further ado, let me turn the microphone over to Scott pace. Got the floor is yours.

Super Vint. Thank you very much. One one correction I'll make. The Obama administration probably doesn't want to admit to any contribution I made, say for the bush and Trump administration's did but the good thing is is space is relatively nonpartisan or bipartisan. And so a number of things that were done in the Trump administration with me working for Vice President Mike Pence have actually continued on under the Biden administration. And so a good friend of mine is now the current executive secretary, and I wish them all well. So one of the few areas I think of collegiality in Washington, in this space regime. Also, maybe not mentioned to give people a sense of my biases. I did about 10 years, working with the ITU in supporting some things during the end of the Clinton ministration actually, and then into the Bush administration, dealing with allocation of space spectrum for GPS. And so that is what got me exposed to international governance issues within the international telecom union. So can cover it some of that. So, the first thing is many of the people tuning in will know is the interplanetary Internet, it's going to be familiar we hope be able to use email applications and other things on it. But it's going to be very different. And the wonderful analogy which I stole from someone else in the group, is you can think of the treshold Internet is like traveling from LA to San Diego. You know, you get on the freeway, you drive you get off, get your termination point and all good. And this Trishul Internet is one where it's it was a government program for sharing computational resources that's in transit transited into what is today a multi stakeholder enterprise, not just governments but lots of other people involved in it. And given how fast you grew kind of technology came first and governance questions came a bit later. And there were still arguments over this and over the vision of the Internet. The interplanetary Internet might be likened to traveling from LA to Jakarta. You get in your car and you go to the airport. You know you catch you catch a ride, we call it maybe bundled protocol airways and you get to your destination you then get off and and drive around and you may have to change planes you have to wait for the flight. You have to have a lot of things have to literally line up before you can do this. So it's a bit more complicated. So but familiar but different. Space Communications today and Deep Space Network in particular, are point to point governed by National Space agencies and various cooperative agreements among them. And there's a number of complex processes that ally assigns spectrum and time and what's gonna go on over these point to point enterprises much of it is in fact automated. But some of it is really, really judgment calls about what's important and what's not. barriers to entry are somewhat high than the regular Internet. But there's also opportunity to take some lessons learned from the growth of the Internet, where governance issues weren't really dealt with until people realize what a big thing they had. So I think one of the bottom line up front to me as again, probably the most non technical person on this call, is that Internet Protocol issues. various sorts are probably the most really immediate thing I think for the community to think about as it impacts governance. Right now of course IP is being used. It's certainly on the Artemis early Artemis landing programs. I think SpaceX is using IP version six, but maybe not a lot of it. And there needs to be some sort of transition strategy for implementing DTM and vulnerable protocols that can cope with delays and communication breakups which are you know, going to happen in space. And it's entirely possible. Again, the implication of this is that you'll have pretty independent internets that will arise and other moons and planets and spacecraft, navigating the source system. This could easily go bad bunch of things that don't really communicate with each other. It can go bad if you try to extend IP protocols to areas where they really can't scale and go. And one of the issues needed is how to disjunct Earth uses of IP addresses for any uses offer there might be IP address you say and political lunar base or maybe between a rover and a lunar base. But once you start getting away from I think relatively local areas, BP is going to be necessary and how do you make sure you don't confuse yourself between what's happening on the moon versus what's happening on Earth or other systems. Same sort of disjunction needs to happen for the autonomous system number and numbering space. And one of my naive questions is, do we make that some topological thing like the moon or some distance from the moon or measured by light time? distances? I don't know. But certainly where people want to draw boundaries for ASN numbering space is going to be a subject for debate. Now, in the near term also, this numbering and domain names structure is going to be needed for future expansion and scaling. Again, you can get away with it for right now for the existing Artemis missions. And certainly, for doing this only a limited number of ways with existing robotic missions. But there's an old French proverb that goes nothing lasts like the temporary and something that might be temporary seemingly could easily go on for quite some time, with a number of dysfunctions. As a result. So how the authorities and sub authorities for numbering are managed. National level, agency level program project level is something that I think the Internet community should be discussing, and whether or not there needs to be a defined relationship between IP addresses node numbers, domain names. Certainly domain names are critical for electronic mail and worldwide web. But, you know, it's an open question about how quickly it's going to be transitioned to use the bundle protocol. And then how the references between the Internet as we know it today internet's plural and an interplanetary Internet should work. So it's, it's like familiar problems that someone on steroids. Now among the things you want to nail down first, if you're looking at the software stack, you know, do you have wire 802 11 B, you know, what do you what are you talking over? First Aid, you gotta have spectrum. If you're on space, and you don't have spectrum, you don't really have anything except maybe a local wired Wi Fi system on the moon. There the good news is the US has put forward a proposal for a new agenda. Item to be discussed at the next World Radio Communications Conference, which will be in Dubai of this year. And the thing is fairly long finally just did a screenshot of the beginning of the proposal of a draft new resolution that says considering people are going to be using the scientific and commercial operations on the moon around the moon, around Earth are increasing. And through the next few decades, we're going to need to have some understanding of what spectrum we're going to be used there. So a first discussion of lunar operation in both spaces space service allocation as well as Earth to space space to Earth are going to go on there is no moon service application yet if you ask about you know communication link between, say the lunar surface and a spacecraft, they say the gateway or something coming toward the moon. That's all space to space. Itu you know, originally developed for telegraphy, yet later evolved to handle wireless and later evolved to handle satellite systems. And right now, the only kinds of applications are space to ground ground to space and space to space. Clearly as we start operating on other planetary surfaces, that seems rather limited to call everything off Earth space to space. So that will evolve and this kind of resolution is maybe the first step toward thinking about how that might apply. And there's a number of specific frequencies in the in the resolution that are being talked about. So after naming and numbering and spectrum allocations, decisions are needed on standards. And I think again, everybody here probably understands the importance of standards. You know, where the domain name boundaries will be? And can you get international agreement on that there's some been some recent press stories about isa talking about there being a lunar timezone

and without debating the merits of that, that's an example of a particular domain getting a name and and then seeing how far does that go and what would be covered in in a lunar timezone? And there's a variety of ways one could tie it to characteristic gravitational sphere of influence transmission times, maybe some topological connectivity, like sharing a common contact graph. I don't know but that's, again, what we're looking to the technical community to suggest. Number one is adoption of a coordinate system for operations across physical domains. The good news there is That's seems to be largely settled. A very US centric celestial reference, same. BCS is what's used for spacecraft all through the solar system. I don't see any reason why that would that would change requirements for time standards, not just time zones, but what are the time standards and how you would distribute precision time for the functioning of that that network so relativistic corrections, both special in general, are needed and determining what standard you have to meet for say, a DTN bundle protocol network to function properly. The political side of this is things like what is a time standard every time standard on Earth? is tied to a national lab of some sort. So in France, it's bi pm in the US, it's the US Naval Observatory. We talked about UTC, Moscow time and so forth. I once tried to suggest use of GPS as a UTC spacetime and I'm still pulling the arrows out of my back for that transgression. But some sort of space time maybe around the moon, maybe with local clocks, wind up coming up, but before we get to that definition, the definition of time standards and how you distribute precision time to what what level will also be needed. We know how to do this. This is not a technical problem, but getting agreement to do it is something still to be done. As I said here on the chart time transfer is largely a solved problem on Earth for interplanetary Internet. It's complicated. I know of people working on the Europa program fairly far out maybe spend half their time on their specialist spends half their time worrying about this and we'll also need to correct for computer and spacecraft clock drift. So what are the standards of the clocks are is everything going to be you know, a cesium level clock or will there be lesser clocks that will be allowed for the Internet? Again, this crowd does certainly knows what network time protocols and correcting that to UTC times should there be a space version of that. And you can have an argument across risk trade because no one answer for implementing a space NTP is whether you would trust a single clock or the Moon or Mars or whether you should have an ensemble of clocks to maybe take out local gravitational effects or maybe systemic biases that might occur and certainly on earth we use multiple clocks around the world to develop UTC. And, as I said, mentioned down on the bottom the there's a political aspect of using terrestrial ATC laboratories, you know, could we create a UTC Moon or Mars that would, again be recognized by anybody Okay, we have a couple of ways of talking about this outside of the normal regular Internet and time communities that again, people are familiar with, you know, as of March. Today, we were 23 signatories of something called the Artemis Accords, which is for countries that have expressed an interest in participating in Artemis and agreed to follow international law and as it applies in and around the moon. There were a couple of notable exceptions so that for different reasons Germany, India, Russia and China have not signed up or expressed an intention to resign a sign up the case of Germany and India it's more a disagreement over having using the accords as a mechanism for agreement as opposed to a binding international treaty or amending the current international law at the Outer Space Treaty. In the case of Russia, and China, it's more political on their part. You know, for the record, there is nothing that says they can't sign in fact, if they wanted to sign tomorrow and commit themselves to it. There no country, including United States could really object to that. Section five of the accords is probably the one that's most relevant as a call to this conversation is a call for interoperability across all participatory signatures want to have interoperable and common exploration infrastructure? And they cite some examples like fuel storage and delivery and landing structures, communication systems in particular, that will enhance exploration utilization. And the signatories commit to using reasonable efforts to utilize current interoperability standards and to establish such new standards when current sent do not exist or inadequate. So what I was saying about standards and naming protocols and so forth, I think falls quite within the intent of Section Five here of the Artemus records. Now, so much of the frustration of the State Department, NASA currently does not have one set of definitions as to what constitutes cislunar space. More than one foreign service officer has wanted to put a definition in and has not been able to get anybody to agree as to what that means. Now we have a defined space service volume for global navigation satellites services, so receiving GPS out through Geo and even out to the moon. We have defined power levels and volumes to be serviced. But it's not really tied to the sizzlin or term. And so again, the relationship of interplanetary Internet to domains and physical domains. Is it going to be a discussion, I think, certainly among the Accord signatories, at a minimum, and the near term issue, of course, is the NASA lunar net program. That will be involving a number of space agencies that are accord signatories. So precedents are going to be set. Pretty much in the near term. That will then shape how several will later occur. And I'm looking at Yeah, again, definitions will be the need to communicate into areas that are going to be problematic, like shadowed craters or underground tunnels. that are not directly accessible. So relay stations, beacon systems, all of that. There's it's not just one giant Wi Fi field. It's going to be a whole bunch of different systems, depending on the physical area of operation.

So I've mentioned the UN, you know, a couple of times here, and just to be painful, I thought I would so show all the different organizations that can get involved in which ones you need to care about and which ones you can probably kind of ignore in the UN there's the UN General Assembly, which is all the countries are roughly 193 of them. There's a Conference on Disarmament that deals with anything leading to space weapons, arms control, so forth. The ITU which was just briefly mentioning, recording to the General Assembly is there's a un first committee and fourth committee's first committee deals with disarmament and security issues. The fourth committee deals with sort of special issues. Interesting enough space reports to the fourth committee civilian space, which supposed to deal with D colonialization. You know, so we have to make sure we don't call split talk about space colonies because the whole point of the fourth committee is D colonialization. There's been conversations back and forth between first and fourth committees about dual use technologies like launch vehicles remote sensing, maybe communications. Currently, there's something called an open ended Working Group, which means it doesn't have a set deadline that is discussing space security issues, and recording to first committee. The area that I spend more time in is committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Which is all civilian but some dual use. So this committee will develop things like orbital debris mitigation standards that it didn't accept, actually, really recognize the standards that others have developed and then brought into the committee. The committee, I don't think is terribly great. At doing original technical work, but it is good at taking work from technical experts massaging into an international consensus that people can then refer to there are two subcommittees under Copus. The legal committee dealing with things like where does face begin are applications of international law. And the one that is a lot more busy is the scientific and technical subcommittee. Again, were discussions of Satellite Servicing, remote sensing nuclear power sources, and I would suspect, interplanetary Internet would be reported out progress or whatever would be reported out to the STSC. On the committee operates by consensus. So if you don't have a consensus, you you don't have an agreement. I found that that's been very helpful for protecting us interests. You make things harder to get done. But on the other hand, it means kind of done things have a harder time happening because of that consensus principle. Because it's a an international multilateral organization. You do get official positions. You get people paying attention really show up, but because it's not really a technical organization, they really depend on outside groups, whether orbital debris or Internet to come up with technical consensus and then bring it into the organization to then then be blessed and worked on. Going back to the ITU. There is a fairly complex process of regional positions us as part of the Americas, Europe and Asia, big regional groupings. And then there were technical groups that focus on specific topics like space services or terrestrial mobile. And what happens is the regional groups build up their positions. The technical groups build up their positions and then they come together and blend at World Radio conferences which are treaty making bodies that then amend the ITU convention. So there's a couple of different balls to keep in the air. Itu in general is not going to hopefully get down into Internet political issues. They have tried in the past and event has the scars of trying to get into governing the Internet from from the UN. That hasn't gone hasn't succeeded. But what has happened is countries like China and Russia have pretty much gone their own way a Great Firewall of China. Russia has its own system. So you can certainly imagine a pardon the phrase balkanization of the internet's globally before everything is said and done. And then finally, you have pretty pictures you can see the picture the center is of, of Geneva, and one of the writers of the UN offices in Vienna, and in New York is kind of the most brutal architecture is not terribly attractive. Others are more federal looking. So I'm talking about Copus. Like the UN Internet Governance Forum, as I've stressed it's not really an effective forum for technical development operations, but it is a great forum for information exchange. There is a group called the International Coordination Committee ICG on GNSS. So all the GNSS providers GPS Bayto blown os que CSS so forth, all come to the meeting for information exchange. They represent official position of nation states, and it's a way to improve transparency and coordination without anybody ceding national authority, something like that, and ICG for lunar operations. You can imagine coming up not just for interplanetary communications, but for also things like the guard frequencies or people on what's the size of a landing pad area for safety reasons. So stay tuned for if Copus gets around to forming a international coordination group for information exchange. We have other forums that where space agencies talk to each other. So Luna net right now is covered, but we don't really have one that deals at a multilateral nation state level. And since it's difficult for us folks to talk directly with China, multilateral places are, I think, probably among the more promising areas for information exchange given limitations on bilateral US China discussions. Now Copus has been spending time developing guidelines of for example, like the end of life disposal, orbital assets, two areas that I would suggest for monitoring. One is the proposal to create a radiofrequency quiet zone on the lunar farside. And this can be implemented a number of different ways through the ITU or the Consultative Committee on space data standards. I know there's a number of people in the ITU who would like to auction off radio astronomy spectrum, use the proceeds to buy a lunar base and send all the radio astronomers to the far side of the moon. But before that happens, there will be operational probably operational limitations in around the far side of the moon that will make communications more difficult or challenging on farside. Another one is the provision of space safety services. There was international treaty 1968 on the rescue and return of astronauts and imposes a positive obligation on member states to treat astronauts as envoys of mankind and provide aid if they're in distress. So a solar system Internet that supports emergency communications, regardless of nationality. You know, could be an example of how Artemus court members or whoever's cooperating and socialism Internet is fulfilling their obligations under the treaty. So there's a safety imperative that that is there, and it's not good people. are talking about it, but it's not really fully recognized yet because they don't quite see how it might be implemented. But as soon as the Internet becomes more real to people, then I think you'll see that safety function get more attention. So some some observations. The good news is from the standpoint of a political or policy guy. There's no real fundamental governance barriers to creating an interplanetary Internet. You don't need a positive authorization to make this happen. Multiple Forms already exists to explain and promote the concept ranging again from the ITU and artists record signatories, un Copus. There's no centralized authority to really deal with but really a lot of complex technical standards, interfaces and protocols that have to be tended to and implemented and you know, the old the old

joke in Washington is a point of view is worth 50 IQ points. If you have a point of view that you can, you can get technical consensus on doesn't have to be 100% but enough to implement that will go a long way. The political and policy community does not want to hear people arguing about standards that they know nothing about. They'll just tune you out and say come back when you're ready. So if you want to make more rapid progress, driving toward a technical consensus that does not have to be politically adjudicated would be important. Consultative Committee on space data standards are working on a number of standards relative to interplanetary Internet. Some of this work may may or may not overlap with other standards bodies of course IETF IO ag question mark about itu T sector. And what I was talking about in spectrum earlier is itu our sector which allocates reader frequency sector, T would deal with things like time standards. I think you want to be careful about letting them sort of get into this. I think the space people want to settle what their timing needs are and what the implications of different architectural approaches are. Once that's done, getting that locked down into an itu standard can be fine, but it can be a dangerous place to develop new standards of few years many few years ago. There were efforts to have multiple different time standards that were disjunct from national laboratories. And there were people in the final high speed trading community in finance that were very interested in that because if you could have a standard that was legally recognized, and you could shave a few milliseconds, on a high speed trading network, you can make a lot of money. So a lot of mischief in things like that. So you want to make sure your technical communities together first. Again, as a non technical guy, just reporting what I hear interplant here it cannot be based on IP but must use DTN BP I can see it being used in very localized system. The patient challenge is going to be determining time to include special and general relativistic corrections as a technical issue. But please, no one should think that Internet in space is just going to be an extension of IP the spectrum for lunar common nav needs to be recognized internationally, that will in turn affect the kind of amount of bandwidth you have, which will in turn affect the efficiency of your communication. So some of the complicated scheduling processes that we go through now on Deep Space Network are still going to be around I don't think they're gonna they're gonna go away completely and put the boundary conditions we're going to work with, you know, what's the amount of what's the amount of information we can shove through the pipe at any time. Of course, Shannon's law tell you it depends on the bandwidth and the power you got power we might be able to get bandwidth me may not be able to get. So the outcome of the spectrum discussions will will set major sets of constraints. And as I said, the US at least is raising this as a specific agenda item. I trust that NASA is already talking to the space frequency Coordination Group who supports itu to make sure at least the other space agencies are on board with this and that could include Russia and China. They're not to be arguments, the courts are going Tories but but anybody operating in and around the room, the moon we want to get on the same page. Close with proximate the way ahead. As I said, no fundamental barriers need support at the ITU and timing, and then how do we get agreement and I would look to you all to tell me how to get to agreement on a naming and numbering scheme and make sure that we don't let legacy standards go on for any more length than they have to because that will constrain the soul. I wanted to throw in two charts that are not mine at the end, but the Lord and an artists gave a great talk. I think in a recent meeting where she talked about from her perspective, insights on space governance, from the experience of terrestrial Internet governance, and the red arrows are my additions, where I wanted to foot stomp her observations a common numbering scheme, and then interoperable classical Internet but interoperability can take on a lot of different forms. And I think the the cleaner the break between the two you might have classical Internet operating again on the moon and local areas. But intermixing BP and IP seems like a recipe for badness. And then finally, a framework for multistakeholder Internet governance and she points out some some differences about resources were implemented and how standards were done. Probably the biggest immediate, quickly relevant decision is is this going to be driven by governments or is this going to be a multi stakeholder approach as the Internet itself was the Internet going as a multi stakeholder approach is probably the most salient political reality for it and it's a very different world if it's only governments in charge, if the same is true for solar system Internet. The good news I think, among NASA and other space agencies are leaving the door open to moving beyond a government only system. So that's good, but one can expect there may be other countries who will not take such a evolved attitude and will be important to minimize damage. And make sure we continue to the multistakeholder approach in space that I think has worked so well to date on Earth with that turned it back to

back to them fumbling around finding my unmute button. Wow, I can't believe that you actually did that in 30 minutes in a net that is truly phenomenal and what a giant collection of challenges that you put in front of us. We have a number of questions that I think we should get to. And then and then we can talk a little bit about what comes after this particular webinar. But what I think I'm going to do is hold these slides I wonder if you can actually stop sharing. While we have while we have our q&a period, and then we'll pull the slides back up. So I can do a little wrap up. We already have several questions in the q&a box. And so I thought why don't we begin with that Oscar? Garcia asks, what are the forums where time in space is discuss? And you touched on that? A little so I don't know whether you need to amplify on that.

Well, it technically all time standards can be discussed. You know in the in the in the ITU but I think the space folks need to get an answer for themselves together first. So the first place I would look to discussing this is within the space frequency Coordination Group among the major space agencies and particularly people working on Luna net. I don't know that a and again, there's much better media reactions are going on just actually today as we speak about this idea of a time zone because the moon because that's gotten people kind of excited. But the first thing really is a technical question about how precise do we need time to be for Internet to work and how do we transmit How do we do time transfer to get that system? To work? And then what are the ongoing sustaining aspects of it. So I think it's going to start inside of lunette and within the space agencies, and then it will likely expand into ccsds and I would suggest not going to itu T sector, until everybody is really settled. And we're ready to have something that commercial academic industry people can go look at more broadly. I think we have to get our own house in order first, before trying to solve things at the ITU level.

Well, not to put any words in your mouth, but I would render that as do not ask questions to which you don't already have the answer.

I think you're afraid says ask me no questions. I'll tell you no lies

or something like that. Right. So there's still a lot to be done in that space. Okay. Mo vos has been the ITU is so involved private industry going to have a seat at the table. This gets to your multi stakeholder point. That raises an interesting question about it use slow I would say recognition and multi stakeholder processes may actually be in its Bogdan running the ITU now perhaps she has a positive view of that and and certainly the Internet Governance Forum which is not sponsored by itu but sponsored by UN adjacent to Amazon adjacent organization. Everything is very multistakeholder how do we respond to our game?

So the first sort of good news is is that private industry can participate right now as a sector member. I mean, major corporations pay to be sector members and that doesn't mean they don't get voting rights. But they get to show up, participate in debates, do information, papers and all of that. And in the ITU in the Internet world, it was attempts by Russia and China to limit the participation I think of sector members, which was a problem. So the ITU actually is pretty, pretty open to that when US delegations go over they typically have people from government agencies, but also they have private sector, folks on board and for example, I've done both I've been both the private sector person on a US delegation have also been a government person on a US delegation and you will certainly see other countries that have private people and their delegation. The US tends to do it the most. But it's by no means you know, really forbidden. The main thing about ITU is that it's rather opaque to two outsiders who are not on the dealt. So this is not something where there's a lot of press coverage. They don't have credit, a lot of press. So deals are made for billions of dollars in whole industries in secret in Geneva. You know, one nation one vote, no Security Council, you know, no veto override. They play for they play for big stakes. They take a long time. But the thing that's really interesting about it is you see where the industry people think the technology is going to be in say five or six years so you know, I was there when we were debating to g and this new thing called 3G. What would four GB and things like that? So as an early warning system, it's definitely definitely interesting. But you first have to convince a national delegation to take up your cause. And if you don't, you can still participate kind of on your own but you don't swing a big bat unless you have boats and boats are with the National delegations. So org A I would say you know, being a sector member which is forget with the current numbers are used to be like 20 or 30,000 Swiss francs a year wasn't cheap. But it was certainly certainly doable. And you had to be tied to an organization you couldn't participate as just random individual. You had to be some organization but then included NGOs so it wasn't

it wasn't that restrictive.

See a question from Oscar. The interest in goals in each of the different countries and space exploration. I teach a two semester course that topic. So I think that's that maybe maybe too broad each country has its own its own interests. Some people like to be in the space club, you know, it's a sign of an advanced, developed country. There are ways that countries one of the things that's good about the moon, and where solar system Internet can help is it provides a potential on ramp for countries that previously weren't able to participate. You know, space used to be something that really only you know, the US and the Soviet Union did, and then it expanded to Europe and Japan. Now with the growth of the commercial space industry. Many developing countries are able to participate. One of my favorite examples, bring out is Astrobotic is a lunar delivery kind of company for $1.2 million. I'll put a million but we put a kilogram for you on the lunar surface. So the Mexican Space Agency, bought a payload and then involved students and a small rover and all that. So Mexico will be the first country to from Latin America to put a payload on the moon and they do it as a result of partnership. Of course, with the US company. And so the moon has got a lot of different price points. Mars is really hard. Ours is different category. But because the moon has a lot of these different levels to it, you can do really major things. And you can do fairly modest things. But as long as you can communicate and get a ride, you can participate. And so to the extent that social splinternet lives up, I think to its vision, it will be yet another platform for the democratization and globalization of space, which has really been the major trend since the end of the Cold War.

So it's been again and turns out that I briefly was dropped off the call and when I came back again, all the chat disappeared. So everybody was asked him there is no longer visible to me, but I did catch two things from Jim shear and I wanted to ask him to amplify on that. He mentioned that there were activities underway already to deal with the coordinate system and with timing. So I wonder, Jim, if he's on the call, maybe he could say a little bit more about that for everybody. Are you on the call still, Jim? There he is. Hope that maybe he's not listening. Okay. Mute. muted. Can you hear me now? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can. Sorry,

I think Florida do give me the power to unmute.

Yes, well, you are you are we can hear you.

Okay, so sorry. The question is on the reference, coordinate systems are time

both you had comments on both of them, but I don't know if everyone caught them. And I thought just a moment on what's going on there would be very useful and a complement to what Scott was showing

okay. So, what we've discovered is that for celestial bodies, like the moon NASA has already sent a number of spacecraft over the years and we have established geodetic coordinate systems. We have established gravity models for some of the major objects like the moon and Mars. But the models that we have are the result of typically a single sensor on a single spacecraft that refines the best results that we got off of some previous spacecraft and sensor. And it's, it's it's NASA's usual series of one off missions and one off sensors. There's no operational capability to sustain it. Whereas around the earth we have an international terrestrial reference frame. And that is actively maintained as an international standard, with contributions from multiple sensors on multiple platforms provided by multiple countries. And academic organizations. With with a large international process and set of entities that participate in in maintaining it in the United States, the NGA, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which is a mouthful. It used to be the Defense Mapping Agency that was responsible for military mapmaking originated with the Navy. That that's responsible for for those kinds of standards. In the US, and they're also our US representative to the international forums like the International Astronomical Union and so on. And so what we're doing for the moon is proposing a an exact parallel to the earth the the international terrestrial reference frame is tied to the international barycentric reference frame which is which is where we measure the center of mass of the solar system from from the you know, in the in the sun. So rather than having a lunar reference system that's offset from the earth, we're proposing to have an independent lunar reference frame that's also derived directly from the very centric reference system and so it will be equally equivalent and there will be mathematical transformations that enable you to convert from terrestrial reference frame to lunar reference frame. But it will mean that the coordinate systems will be different. One of the things that that will enable us to do is when we convert from Ephemeris representation using something old fashioned like a two line element, that's specifically limited to the terrestrial centric reference frame, is we'll be able to have an expanded definition of Ephemeris that that's captured in ccsds navigation messages that will enable you to specify this is a framework for an object that's in an Earth orbit. This is an Ephemeris for an object's in a lunar orbit, and therefore, they're referring to different reference frames or coordinate systems. So that that is in the process of being worked out by NASA and other US government entities right now trying to come up with a national approach before we take it to the international level. But our objective is, everybody agrees what we want out of it is an international set of standards that are operationally maintain. And that means it probably won't be done by NASA. It'll probably be done by some other US government entity.

So, Jim, it's bent. Does this mean for example, that his face was interesting? The spacecraft that that takes off from Earth on its way to the moon might have to switch reference frame somewhere part of the way along the journey? Yes. Wow. Okay, yeah, this,

what we do right now is we use two line elements as one method of representing Ephemeris and it's okay for Earth orbit. But if you're trying to use a Lagrangian point, say a ballistic trajectory to the moon, your your two line element, reference representation of the framers will break down badly, long before you get to the moon. So

you know what we literally have

to use a different representation for ephemeris. And that means people who are stuck using two line elements and software that uses two line elements and the terrestrial coordinate system are going to need new software. Along with the updated message format.

I wanted to put to put stop that point this is one of the reasons why we're looking at changing space traffic management over to a number of different commercial systems that do that are disjunct from the legacy systems at the aging space? Control squadron has been using because the two line elements stuff goes back to the time of Hollerith punch cards and the propagator models that they used back then or are still tied to that really, really unsatisfactory for for longer term. So if we want to have sensible space traffic management in and around the moon and so forth, we're going to need to go the direction away from two elements stuff as as the commercial industry is already wanting to do, because we simply can't upgrade the legacy systems away. You might you might think it is a break.

This is fascinating. So the same thing applies to time. So just as we have international time standards, like UTC for the earth, but but they're based on a terrestrial model. And if you're in Earth orbit, you're on a slightly offset time because of the relativistic effect of your orbital velocity. So relativistic corrections are factored into GPS. As a result, if we're going to have a lunar navigation service that broadcasts lunar time, that we'll have to do the same thing. The moon's gravity model is a whole lot lumpier than the Earth's gravity model. So it'll be a bit more dynamic and deal with a lot more perturbations than the than the relativistic corrections on GPS, but functionally, it will do the same thing.

The cost of the good news is menu incorrect, or there's gonna correct me but I don't see that bundle protocol per se requires a lot of really precise time. But but the rest of the networks that this thing might have to talk to, will need precise time timing navigation. But I think strictly speaking, there's not like some standard we have to meet for BP to work

well we that's actually may not be the case, because we have to be able to know when and where to point antennas, for example. And so and depending on the slew rates, of the various components of the system, that precision may turn out to be quite important. We also have to know when to start transmitting, in order to know when it's likely to show up at the other end and be picked up as opposed to mystifying the move in

order to have a lunar time standard. We will likely have to place atomic clocks on the moon's surface. And so we've already had started discussions with ISA and JAXA, that if NASA ESA JAXA each put an atomic clock on the moon then we would have the beginnings of an ensemble time. The same way that we represent international time and the terrestrial frame. And then it would have to be the source of a lunar Coordinated Time. I used LTC in my comment as the you know, the acronym equivalent. But but that would have to be broadcast and then everything else would be have its own local time, relative to LTC with with some appropriate offset for its speed and altitude and whatnot.

I think that Jim, I want to assign you a writing responsibility. I want a three page essay on this topic and I want the title of the essay is what time is it? It takes a village to answer that question? All right, we're just coming up on 555 my time, speaking of time, and I think we need to start to wrap up there I'm sure are other questions but what I would suggest is that you accumulate those and and send them Scott, are you willing to accept questions from from the folks who participate

Sure. And and like I say, I'm the non technical guy here. But if you want to ask, you know, philosophical kinds of things, and where things are going, I'm happy to opine on that. And I'm happy to do so.

So can we put your email address in the chat

and the email address in chat Believe it or not?

There we go. One I love this that gw.edu So this is wonderful. It really stimulated a lot of discussion and a lot of thinking. I wonder if I could trouble you bringing the slides back. I have just a couple of final remarks. Before we close this really wonderful women should be so

somebody skipped to the end

there we go. Okay, so just to let everybody know that this is part of our lightning and sync Academy and you've just gotten Academy lesson number 11 from Scott pace. The next one is coming up is an IPNSIG workshop on architecture and governance and that will be on April. Fifth. So we look forward to seeing many of you at that point. If you'll go to the next slide. We would like to invite people who are not yet members of IPN safe to join us it doesn't cost you anything. We are scattered all around the world almost uniformly which is quite striking considering most of the other chapters are less so of course as time goes on, we hope that the Martian and Moon membership will increase as well. If we go to the next slide, there's just a little warning that we're going to send you a survey. Or alternatively, if you happen to have your mobile with you can take a picture QR code there and respond to a survey asking how do we make this better? If we did something well as Scott said, please send okays, but if you're not happy about it, send the brickbat and we'll try to respond to that. But I think you especially Scott, for taking us through what is a truly fascinating journey will only get more interesting as time goes on and to the rest of you. Thank you for joining us. I will say at this hour as opposed to this evening. We look forward to continued interactions as they say to you on the net. Thank you anyway thanks Scott.