The Aerospace Corporation and the Maui Economic Development Board (MEDB) led the annual International SSA/STM Policy Exchange on 17 April 2023. This invitation-only event was held in conjunction with the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA. The session was cohosted by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the Space Agency of the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR) and the UK Ministry of Defense (UK MOD).
The primary desired outcome for the 2023 exchange was to: 1) begin discussing approaches for incentivizing a significantly wider population of SSA data providers and satellite owners/operators’ to: a) voluntarily participate in efforts to overcome technical and non-technical communication and data sharing issues that inhibit getting decision-quality data to owners/operators; and b) voluntarily participate in current and future SSA/STM workgroups, consortiums, dialogues, sharing initiatives, and so forth dedicated to developing international SSA/STM solutions. Additional goals of the workshop were to: 2) learn from non-government organizations how they have successfully incentivized broad stakeholder information and data sharing; 3) re-emphasize and report progress on existing SSA policy community priorities; and 4) gather participant updates on data sharing efforts in order to learn from successful examples, and identify policy gaps and roadblocks.