Happy Tuesday. I’m excited to see some Polaris readers in person, both tonight at Payload’s first DC event and next week at the Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability in New York, where I’m moderating a keynote on new debris mitigation recommendations. Send me your best NYC pizza recs!

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COPUOS’ Progress on Space Sustainability

The United Nations gave an update on a new group studying guidelines for the sustainable use of space in a conference room paper released June 2 at the 66th session of the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), which will conclude Friday in Vienna.

What it is: The COPUOS Scientific and Technical Subcommittee includes a “LTS 2.0” working group, which is a follow on to the “LTS 1.0” working group that spent over a decade drafting and promoting 21 voluntary guidelines for long-term sustainability in outer space that were adopted in 2019.

The working group will write a report on three main topics:

• Challenges with implementing international guidelines in orbit

• Lessons learned from the implementation of the 2019 guidelines

• Recommendations for future work for the subcommittee

What it’s not: The paper stressed that the aim of the working group is not to negotiate or draft new guidelines, but rather to focus equally on all three lines of effort, including a final report that details topics or thematic areas that could benefit from the establishment of new recommendations.

“If the subcommittee decides that developing new guidelines is an appropriate way forward, a future working group could be established with a terms of reference, methods of work, and workplan tailored to address consideration of these possible new areas for guidelines,” the paper says.

Top issues: The paper lays out two main types of challenges likely to be addressed by the working group: areas where guidelines already exist but there are questions or disagreements about how to implement them, and new areas where there are not yet recommendations.

Who? The UN conference room paper, which was submitted by Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the US, is intended to serve as a focal point for discussions at the current session.

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Last week at the GEOINT Symposium in St. Louis, MO, we witnessed a clear desire to increase collaboration between government agencies and private commercial space companies to enable faster integration of space technology and create more informed and accelerated decision making.

Planet designs, builds, and operates the largest commercial constellation of imaging satellites globally, and provides medium and high-resolution images of the Earth’s landmass, daily. With a strong (and growing) partner ecosystem and an agile aerospace build methodology, we’re well positioned to be a leader in these efforts.

Planet is adding a completely new dimension to how governments, researchers, analysts, and humanitarian organizations monitor conflict around the world. Learn more in our new white paper, Deterrence By Observation, which also explains:

• How and why the commercial satellite industry has grown so rapidly

• What makes Planet’s agile aerospace methodology highly resilient and reliable

• How daily imagery can be used to automatically detect changes in land cover, road and building construction, and vessel and aircraft location

• Why Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and private-public collaboration is essential to detect threats and anticipate change more efficiently.

Library of Cosmos

• Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked the GAO to look at NOAA’s GeoXO program and whether it will be able to stay on time and under budget.

• How the Space Warfare Analysis Center is putting research over politics.

• New Zealand unveiled a national space policy because terrestrial strategic competition is increasingly spilling into orbit.

• Rep. Eric Sorensen (D-IL), ranking member of the House space subcommittee and former TV weatherman, has a long history of talking about climate change to skeptical audiences.

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