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Jah Calls for Space Transparency, Predictability, and Accountability

Dr. Moriba Jah, Strauss Center Distinguished Scholar, Program Lead of the Space Security and Safety (SSS) program at the Strauss Center, Director of the Advanced Sciences and Technology Research in Astronautics (ASTRIA) program, and Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics in the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, recently co-authored an op-ed on SpaceWatch.Global, titled “Spacewars: ‘Those Aren’t the Droids You’re Looking For.’” In it, he and his co-author John Holden argue that a widely accessible “civil space situational awareness (SSA) and space traffic management (STM) entity” is a requisite precondition to achieving transparency between actors in space. Jah and Holden discuss various claims made by U.S. Space Command of Russian troublemaking, such as the recent claim that Russia made an additional on-orbit weapons test. Such allegations, Jah and Holden note, are fruitless without widely accessible evidence of misbehavior and malintent. They further argue that the necessity of such a mechanism will only continue to increase given the rapid proliferation of commercial space activities. Thus, they emphasize the necessity of making space a more transparent, predictable, and accountable environment, by way of developing a “verifiable body of evidence to aid in decision-making and hold entities accountable for their behaviors!” Read the full op-ed here.

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