Global lifelines beneath the ocean and above the planet in orbit and the importance of maintaining their safety form part of the agenda at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026.
At Davos 2026, leaders from space, cybersecurity and communications warned that modern life rests on largely invisible infrastructure: “about 12,000 active satellites” and “about 600 submarine cables,” carrying “99% of the world’s international data traffic.” Jessica Rosenworcel argued their shared trait is vulnerability—ranging from “space weather” and “intentional jamming” to cable cuts in hotspots like the Red Sea. ESA Director-General Josef Aschbacher emphasized society’s hidden dependencies: 11 of the OECD’s 16 critical sectors rely on space, including finance where precise GPS timing enables trades and ATM transactions. With satellite counts trending toward “close to 100,000,” he called for stronger protection against interference and debris, citing ESA’s debris charter requiring end-of-life deorbiting.
ICEYE CEO Rafal Modrzewski illustrated the new economics of space: student-built CubeSats have scaled into multi-satellite radar constellations enabling 30-minute revisit monitoring for defense, disaster response, and even automated insurance payouts after floods. Dragos CEO Robert M. Lee cautioned that cybersecurity investment skews toward enterprise IT while operational technology—the revenue-generating physical layer—remains underprotected, sometimes lacking “a firewall.” The panel converged on a need for international coordination, modernized rules, and practical, basic defenses to preserve both innovation and public safety.
Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to what's going to be, I'm sure, an exciting and very informative session. On guard from deep sea to orbit. And I want to welcome all of you for having chosen wisely this exciting session, but also to everybody following us online. We really have an outstanding panel to help us think further, understand how all of our lives and our businesses depend on basic infrastructure crossing the bottom of our oceans and orbiting the Earth from all those assets to to working well, and also to, dig a little deeper into what can go wrong if we don't take care of those of those assets. With me are Joseph, who's the director general of the European Space Agency? Pretty big organization. Almost €8 billion, more than 6000, and a huge amount of very complex partnerships to lead European space program. Also next to us, Jessica Rosenworcel, who is, now the director of the MIT Media Lab, just an absolutely, very unique organization in American higher education. But before that, she was the she served as chairwoman of the US Federal Communications Commission. Next to her, we have a European entrepreneur, Rafael, who co-founded an incredibly interesting satellite company with, I think, a Finnish, co-founder. And it's now, a, the leading operator of a type of satellite that can, make observations of the Earth no matter what the weather, might be. It uses radar as opposed to, to to light waves. We'll learn about it in a second. And why that kind of technology matters. And, and at the end, we have, Robert Lee, who's the co-founder and chief executive officer of, of a company that helps organizations, deal when things go wrong. This is the the the man you call, I'm Angel Cabrera. I'm president of of Georgia Tech, a large research university in the great city of Atlanta and increasingly busy with issues around cybersecurity. We have not only, research programs, but increasingly academic programs. There is a growing interest in the space. And what I've learned from my colleagues is that some of the most interesting and complex challenges are not just software challenges, but at the intersection between software and physical and physical systems. But we're going to we're going to learn a little bit about all of that. But, to get us started, I would love for, Jessica, since she had that very unique policy position in the United States to help us understand why and how deeply our lives depend on all of that infrastructure, space, assets under undersea cables and all of the above.
Jessica. Sure. Let me start with the big picture. There are about 12,000 active satellites in our skies and about 600 submarine cables. Almost everything in modern life depends on them. Global positioning systems that are used by vehicles, militaries, financial transactions, Earth monitoring, weather 99% of the world's international data traffic. And they have two things in common. We don't think about them very often because satellites are in our upper atmosphere, most people don't see them, and submarine cables are buried in the deep, dark depths of the ocean. The second thing that they have in common is they're both extraordinarily vulnerable. Our satellites are vulnerable to everything from space weather to intentional jamming to orbital debris and anti-satellite missile technology and our submarine cables. Well, aquatic life could nibble at them and cause real harm. Or there could be malicious actors who actually cut them. And we've seen some of that in hotspots around the world, like the Red sea. So these two facilities that most people never think about are so fundamental for modern life. And they're also fundamentally vulnerable.
Thank you. Thank you for that overview. We'll get back to you with, with a couple more questions. But before that, Joseph, of course, you're more involved with assets orbiting above us. And, are we doing all we need to be doing to protect those assets and make sure that our phones continue to work? Our GPS and more important systems continue to work?
Well, first of all, thank you. And, what Jessica was saying is absolutely right. We have all these assets in space or thousands of satellites today, about 12,000. And the number keeps increasing literally by the day. There are some predictions that say that this will go into the tens of thousands, if not close to 100,000, by the end of the decade or within a couple of years. So this is really asymptotically increasing. And yes, your question is a very good one. Do we do enough to protect them? First of all, space and this is not so widely known, is literally serving many domains of society. You mentioned navigation also telecommunications, earth observation and many other space hardware or space based information is really serving people every, every day, every every single minute. If you make a bank transfer from one place to another, if you trade on the stock market, you need very precise timing from PA systems. If the precise timing is not there, you you cannot compare the the quotes and therefore your stock trade for example, could not be executed. The same applies if you retrieve money from a bank from an ATM machine. In navigation, it's literally used not only in the mobile phone to go from here to there and cars and many other things, but also for security and defense. So space literally is entering many of those. The OECD has been doing, studies, to assess the most critical sectors of society. There are 16 of those, from transport to energy to health and many others. 11 of those need space infrastructure or could not, could not do without space infrastructure, because space is not only serving the space domain, but really literally all or many other domains. So this is really something that people don't realize how dependent we are. And therefore your question is very valid. One do we do enough to protect that? I think there we have to catch up. We have to do more. And this is on one side to make sure that our assets are protected against jamming, against interferences and disturbances. But also and you mentioned something earlier in the morning where I fully agree with you is the, the usage of frequencies on one side, but also debris. Debris becomes more and more of an issue, those satellites at the end of their life, they are not controllable. They are normally flying in orbit with the European Space Agency. Initiated something, what we call a debris initiative or debris charter, where more than 180 signatories today confirm if they sign up to this charter. They promise that at the end of the life of the satellite, they take the satellite out of orbit. And that's essential because otherwise you have a dead satellite in orbit, which of course can cause harm, can be colliding with others, or can, the fuel tank is exposed to very high temperature changes between the night side and the and and the and the day side, and therefore sometimes explodes and therefore causes debris. So all this is a danger that is out there and has to be managed and has to be taken out of orbit. And this is something that we are working on a lot, both in terms of awareness but also implementing technologies that help doing that. So yes, there's a lot to be done. And I think people now become more and more aware of how much needs to be done to protect space assets for our daily life.
All right. We'll get back to you with some questions about specific solutions. One of the reasons why we have these many thousands of assets in space, because the cost of building a satellite and launching a satellite has declined so exponentially that now virtually, student in college and can create a CubeSat and and have it launched. So, before, do you mind telling us a little bit of the story of how, these two, European young men decided to create a satellite company and why it matters because I've heard some of the applications of your technology, and it's pretty impressive.
Sure. Thank you very much for for having me over here. And I think the the topic is, exceptionally important today. For two main reasons. One, we know that this satellite technology, as well as the deep sea cables, they are infrastructure supporting our, our civilian lives, but they are also an element which has a dual use. And the second part of the use, which is the military use, is probably even more important today than it than it has been in the past. And the, the capabilities that the satellites provide us when it comes to military technology and, and the provision of securities is actually extremely important. And the second element over here is that there actually has been quite a big transformation when it comes to how we look at space and, and who produces space capabilities and why. And and this is indeed a little bit of the, the starting part of, of Eisai's story. I will take it maybe a little bit from, from the back because just this December, so about three weeks ago, from the perspective of our company, we have reached a major milestone. That was a major milestone, both for us but also for the European security and defense. The German government, Bundeswehr has decided to build a 4D satellite constellation, 4D satellite, SA satellite constellation purely for Earth observation. And that's a €1.4 billion contract. So that's a that's the largest contract that we have seen when it comes to new space companies in the history of new space companies. That's one of the largest single earth observation contracts. And it's by far the largest constellation of satellites dedicated to Earth observation. Now, this contract has gone to Eisai in partnership with a company which obviously you're all familiar with called Rheinmetall. Both of us work on that. But, you know, that happened this December 10th years ago. I was actually a college student at the university, and so was my my friend Pekka, and we were building a satellite the size of a milk carton. Back then it was three kilograms. It was a bunch of students. Maybe there were 15 of us. All of us, sub 23, 22 years old. And we were all starting to put it together. Not only we managed to put it together, but we actually have put it together in less than two years. Now, that transformation is very recent, and it has basically allowed significantly smaller groups of people with less infrastructure than we had in the past, build capabilities that are comparable to what we used to launch into space, and very often actually significantly superior. Now, where does the superiority of the small satellites lie and why the German government is spending so much money. They have a panzer brigade stationary in Lithuania, and they are interested to know what's happening around that. Parts of the brigade should they should they be ready for an attack, or should they not be ready for an attack? How to come by this information when they put together a constellation of 40 satellites using radar imaging system like ours, they can take a picture of all the surrounding areas of this panzer brigade every 30 minutes, every 30 minutes, regardless of weather conditions or time of day. They are going to get an information of. Is there any movement of foreign adversarial troops around the Panzer Brigade, or do they have to prepare for being attacked or not? This kind of capabilities is strictly linked to the amount of satellites that we have launched. And that's why Joseph has been mentioning that today we have 12,000. Probably five years ago there was 2000. We're actually expecting up to 100,000 by the end of the decade. And the reason why this number is growing so quickly is because the capabilities that we can unlock with the mass amount of satellites are actually significantly better and more more capable than what we used to do with one satellite. That's why Starlink is ultimately so many satellites, and this is why it's important to pay attention to this. Because, as you can see, not only a completely new set of capabilities is being uncovered, but also a whole new set of actors, significantly smaller companies, moving much faster, moving at speed that is is highly unprecedented, brings capabilities that become a lever for international global politics.
That, That's terrific. Do you mind sharing also the insurance application and the natural disaster? I was fascinated by that application.
Sure. And look, the interesting thing about the company, if you if you look at the name, Eisai, it actually has nothing to do with defense. It's a combination of words. AIS and I, we have just removed one of the these, when we, that's how clever we were back then, when we started the company, the, the intention of it was to use this frequent imaging capability to support climate research and, and information gathering about climate change. It's actually fascinating because the, the other biggest Earth observation system that exists today that has this particular purpose is the Sentinel system or the system of Sentinel satellites under Copernicus. And the father of that system is Yosef, who is sitting over here. So the the connection between us is, uncanny. But look, that was the intention. We were going to look at the ice cap in order to support the future vessel traffic, in the, in the Arctic Ocean. Now, the important thing about the satellites and why we should actually build them today is, look, they are important to secure our, our defense capabilities and ensure that our nation stay safe. But the exact same infrastructure, the same way as GPS, is both being used to target missiles as well as make sure that you get to get to home safely, is actually going to be used for making sure that insurance companies can function more efficiently, that we can manage our forests, that we can manage our mines, the ability to observe Earth with frequency as high as 20 or 30 minutes, with resolutions as low as 15cm, means that when, for instance, recently, what we did with fire in Los Angeles, Los Angeles fire happens. It turns out that when a fire happens, not every house burns. But we actually don't know how many houses have burned in what neighborhood. How are you going to deploy your resources when you have always limited amount of of fire brigades? How are you going to deploy them? Not knowing where the fire has consumed majority of the infrastructure and where they didn't. Space offers a solution to problems like this where that's actually paying claims at the end of the day, from the insurance infrastructure perspective, or just helping save those people out there. And to give you a glimpse of the future. I actually love this example that we did in Japan. So we are deploying our satellite technology to help support car insurance. So if you own a car in Japan, you're actually insuring against floods. It floods so often Japan that very often a flood happens. It consumes your car and then obviously it's destroyed and you have to get your insurance claim. Now, today when a flood happens, we detect the flood. We take a picture of that flood. We measure the depth of the water. The insurance company is actually knows where your car is. At any given point in time, we are able to determine the depth of the water within 24 hours from the moment the flood starts. If they realize that there was more than one meter of water where your car is located, you're automatically getting your getting your claims money in your bank account. There actually has been hundreds of people in Japan last year that have received their money before their fight, their claim. So you didn't even know that your car was flooded and you had the money on your bank account. That's the type of future we are talking about if we can build this infrastructure correctly.
Thank you. Thank you Rafael. So now you can just imagine the the variety of applications and the variety of ways in which businesses will increasingly rely on this technology. I'm guessing that most companies overestimate how safe their business models are and that, that's actually good business for you, right? Because then they call you when they're, they're they're in trouble. What's your assessment?
I like to be called before I got much better than being the guy that's just representing your worst day in life. But generally speaking, when we look at this infrastructure where we're talking about, like a space revolution, a lot of discussions like the AI revolution, all these different things require infrastructure. And there's all the data centers and energy grids and every component that goes into it, and it's all physical and forever. Like for the entire sort of history of cybersecurity, we've talked about things in the world of data and systems and enterprise IT. And while those are very important, all the stuff that we're actually talking about here is all the physical stuff. We talk about that as operations, technology. And that's been something that's just been massively underinvested. It's an area that largely gets very little attention. And what you'll find, even in government briefings and executive briefings and board of directors briefings, is they'll get all the pretty slides and all the green KPIs and everything that we're okay, we're okay, we're okay. And they're only talking about the enterprise IT side, the operations side where they generate all the revenue. Generally, they're spending less than 5% of their budget actually dealing with that. So all of that operational side turns to therapy sessions honestly. And incident response cases with the CEOs, they say, well, I thought we were invested. I already thought I did that. I made all these things. I had this regulation and compliance and we're good. It's like, that side of the business, not that side of the business. That side of the business is what we're all talking about here. And I think, you know, it's really important to understand that while companies are awesome and private companies are great and I run one, they're still going to do things in the interest of profit. They're still going to do interest of getting to the market as quickly as possible. Not everybody is as thoughtful as, let's take our satellites down when we're done with them. And that's true of infrastructure companies as well and the startups that support them. What that really means is the cybersecurity stuff and the cyber cybersecurity spend gets put last. And what you end up having is a lot of connected infrastructure. We've seen cyber attack against the Polish grid last year and December. That's going to become more and more normal. We started seeing that as early as 2015, dealing with a lot of the incidents, dealing with a lot of customers that have our software deployed all over the world. We see a lot more than you'll ever see in the media, and it is a very, very large, ongoing thing. It's not a one day we're going to see these attacks. We see them all the time. We're talking about attacks that explicitly target human life. And we had one of those cases where somebody, a state actor, broke in just trying to kill people. These things become more and more and more real. And as we get more and more connections and more and more infrastructure, and we continue to ignore the very real scenarios that are already taking place, we could very much find ourselves in a world where we're causing societal harm by the very innovation that we're trying to capture.
Are businesses hearing your message when you get to them before?
Yeah, yes. And so what's really interesting, I think, on this topic is I find it easier to talk to a president or prime minister or board member or CEO about this topic than I do many in the security community. It's very quick that a CEO goes, oh yes, of course I operate wind farms. Those are important, the cybersecurity of those matter. But a lot of the cybersecurity community has been again built up on enterprise IT. So if you've come out of help desk, if you've come out of IT infrastructure support, you've had a beautiful career and it's wonderful. And thank you for all that you're doing. But you've never spent time at the plant. You've never gone to the substation. You don't know any of that side of the business. It's not the thing that you think to protect. And if you do think to protect it, you try to apply enterprise IT cybersecurity practices, which actually can be disruptive to it. So I'm finding that governments are actually a more ahead on this topic than some of the individual companies themselves. That should be. But at the same time, those governments oftentimes have economic policies that are not in line with their national security policies. Your electric operators in Spain and Portugal, as an example, with the power outage that happened there earlier, earlier last year. You talk to those CEOs, you talk to the CEO of EDP and so forth. I had a conversation here with them, extremely well informed, knows exactly what to do. Many of these asset owners and operators understand it, but there's not the money and resources to actually do something about it. And so at the same time that the Australian government, as an example, goes out and says, we have this new regulation, we're going to really start requiring companies to do this. Those companies turn around, go to their economic regulator, and the economic regulator says we're not paying for that. And so it's very difficult, I think, for these companies to really get ahead of this, and there really needs to be an alignment in governments to understand that, especially when you look at very connected governments, like here in continent of Europe, like we have a lot of governments that have to work together Spain, Portugal, Poland, they're all connected on the same electric system. And that electric system is supporting your satellite system, supporting and everything else. So it's very complicated. But at the same time, what I would leave you with is the scenarios of what we need to prepare for are very well known, and we know exactly what to do. Sometimes on these things, the investments are very straightforward. It's not like we're trying to come up with some net new innovation to keep ahead of the adversaries. Sometimes it's very basic. I got I asked in Congress last year, why aren't we doing more in our water sector and so forth? And do we need quantum encryption and AI and everything else? I said, Congressman, with all due respect, there's 55,000 water systems in the United States. Most of them don't have a firewall. Like, let's start there. Let's do the basics, and then we can be in a much better place.
Fascinating. And Jessica, as someone who's been inside of government until relatively recently, do you think government is fully aware of the risks and that we're doing an offer? What's your assessment?
The risks are enormous. Government has the power of pattern recognition because it sees some of the same things happening in different parts of critical infrastructure. And I think we have to develop a more cooperative relationships between our governments and our industry to try to understand what those problems are, where those vulnerabilities are, and how to fix them.
Gotcha. Yes. Have you mentioned that there is a whole bunch of exciting new technologies? Give us what what are the that those exciting technologies that you think hold the greatest promise?
I mean, there are literally a large variety of technologies that are quite, quite, I would say, breaking the frontiers of what we know today. And this really starts, you know, exploring our universe. If you really want to understand how the universe is composed and what it is made of, very few people know that our universe, everything we see, all the stars, the moon, the sun, all the planets, everything we see is only 5% of the universe. 95% we don't see because they are what we call dark energy and dark matter. And yes, we have a mission called Euclid, which is exploring exactly these secrets of, of the universe. But let's get a bit closer to our planet Earth. Everyone talks here in Davos about artificial intelligence and how this is being utilized. Of course, in space. This is, something we utilize a lot. ESA was, in fact the first one who used an AI chip, which we bought on Amazon. I'm not making promotion of any of the distributors, but for €70, and, we, we I was challenging my own team. Whether such an AI chip could be brought into space, together with an imaging sensor, which is looking at the Earth, and we train the AI chip to to recognize certain patterns. Today, you may say this is common practice. Yes, it is in the meantime, but we were the first one to test it. We trained the AI chip to distinguish cloud covered from cloud free areas, to therefore reduce the amount of data that is being transmitted down to, to Earth. Because the cloud covered areas we couldn't use, but we and at the time when we did it, people said, no, no, this will never work. This is too complicated. It's too exciting, it's too difficult to do. It worked. And today we have many satellites doing exactly that. In fact, we have a more clever AI chip now flying, who is looking at, forest fires automatically a bit. What Rafael was, was saying before that you detect from space, already when a fire starts, not until somebody discovers it or and then informs the fire brigade. But you already see it from space. The moment the satellite flies over, there's a fire and sends an alarm to whoever needs to act upon it. And of course, you can use the same AI chip to detect troops or movements or whatever for security and defense. So AI is something quite, important. We use it, of course, also for our missions. I'll give you another example. We have one mission called Hera that is flying to an asteroid. Actually, two asteroids that have been one of them has been hit by NASA with the Dart mission, literally with an impact on the asteroid in order to see how the asteroid is, what it is made of and how whether it breaks apart or whether there's a crater and how it looks like. And why do we do that? NASA was hitting the asteroid. We observe it in order to understand what happened and what material it is composed of. And we do it because there's an asteroid coming, and there we have to use artificial intelligence because our our mission flies there. The distance is so large that it would take 20 minutes and back to, to command a satellite. So the satellite has its own imaging, sets and sensors, detects what is around an asteroid is not just one chunk of of of of rocks and other material. It's really accompanied by many different, break, break away rocks. So the the satellite or the mission has to to look at it very carefully. We have two satellites that we released that will land on this asteroid, do, in order to study it very well. And we do it because another asteroid is coming to our planet Earth on, believe it or not, on Friday the 13th of April, 2029, it's called Apophis. And we launch another mission to really fly to this asteroid, Apophis, one year before to study it and make sure that, of course, there is nothing happening. We know that it's so everyone can be reassured. It's not a it's not hitting our planet, but it is coming very close to within the what we call the geostationary arc. So you would see it with your open eyes. It will be making headlines for sure before, during and after. But we have a mission there in order to really accompany what happens. So this is another good example where AI is needed in order to act and work in space. And there are plenty more examples. Of course, analyzing images like the ones Rafael was talking about automatically. When you get all these data volumes down to detect automatically something that interests you, changes on the surface and so on. So yes, we are this is our job working on the frontiers of science and technology.
Let's plan our trip to Hawaii, darling. Before before Justine. Just in case. So, Rafael. So, yeah, now having a constellation like we know from, from from the space station, having a constellation probably increases the resilience of of the system, I suppose. But at the same time, having a constellation increases dramatically the numbers of assets that we're throwing that we're launching into space increases the probability of, running into each other, producing debris. We still don't have an European Space Agency, trash truck flying and collecting. So are you. I mean, in a way, your solution makes your system safer, but makes the overall resilience of the overall system a little harder. Any thoughts about that conundrum?
Look, I think this is one of those challenges which sort of reflects on the fact that very often, technology develops much faster than our international laws and regulations that are supposed to govern it. Right? This is this is true for for AI. It's obviously we're we're all aware and and it's true for drones. But but I think exactly why we are speaking about space over here is we're kind of a little bit more aware of the AI and drones, and I think we are significantly less aware of the the space based challenges. Now, we are probably treating this quite seriously. There is a reason why our constellation performs much better if each satellite has maneuvering capability, and the fact that they do have a maneuvering capability means that they ultimately are able to execute on on something which would be called a avoidance maneuver. So you actually move away from, from a, from the route of a different satellite. You know, we do that. SpaceX does that too. And we do it honestly more and more frequently. Right. Like, I think right now it's with constellation that we are operating. There's about 40 satellites. We do it so often that we don't do it manually anymore. There is there is an algorithm that detects a potential collision. It sort of tries to identify whether it.
Should the satellite ducks.
The the satellite ducks. That's correct. Now, so far it's worked well, but.
But everyone is not a good actor like that. That's correct. That's the problem.
Because the truth is that, I mean, look, it it actually takes a lot of effort. It takes certain. And it's not that everybody is not a good actor because they don't want to, the ability to launch stuff into space today, it's actually relatively easy, right? People often ask me, oh my God, I mean, building satellite, that's not an issue. How do you launch it? And the funny thing is that today, launching stuff into space is a commoditized market, right? There's actually rockets provided by a variety of different partners. People believe that SpaceX is the only rocket factory out there. That's that's actually not true. They are, you know, launching the most often. But but there is Orion, there is Japanese rockets. There is Indian rockets. There is there is rockets built in New Zealand. So there's a lot of variety of, of access. And the regulations aren't very strict. You can actually launch stuff into space with ease. Right? I mean, Elon himself launched a Tesla which which I don't believe is executing on any, any avoidance maneuvers over there.
It looks cool.
And look, and it is a problem that we actually will have to address as a, as a community. Right. So, there is a situation over here which is, which is very true. I mean, if you if you think of the the whole spectrum of technologies that are going to even even be enabled, we have all these technologies that are observing the Earth, and we have all these technologies that are providing us on Earth with capabilities, things like communication or of observation, but there is going to be a whole new host of capabilities that we will have to develop in order to maintain the infrastructure in space that actually provides us with those capabilities. Right? Whether that space situational awareness, which is still in a little bit early stages, or whether that's an active way of removing those capabilities, which for whatever reason or not, cannot be removed.
Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to open it up for for questions. If you do have a question, I ask that you, stand up, please, and identify yourself, and we can please the back of the room.
Hi, my name is Tris Jahanian. I am from Carnegie Mellon University. Hi, Beth. And, I have a question. My career was in, computer systems for financial institutions, specifically, networking. And so I am very versed in distributed processing. I guess mostly this question is for you, Mr. Lee, but, I bet you, I've got a a part that's about government, too. So in my career, we had, quite a good distributed system. And then as, things got commoditized and there was competition, we went from four to 3 to 2 data centers and then things like, well, the capacity of the, of the second data center didn't have to be as much as the first. And then we had a couple of disasters and found out what disaster that was. So my question for you is, would AI help build trust among CEOs and those people who have essential services as their business? If it were described to them, what was necessary for distributed processing or fault tolerance, would would that help CEOs put more money toward that problem? And also for governments, is there a role in regulation if you're in an industry where the community, requires this service, can it be regulated that you do put a certain percentage of your, business into the fault tolerance of your business?
All right.
Perfect. So I think I think it's a very good idea to have, like, the governmental discussion as it relates to resilience, if we're going to end up having services that we all depend on, then it's a public good in some manner, even if it's an investor owned company or so forth. And so I don't think, as an example to your question, let's say there's a chemical manufacturer or manufacturing plant trying to help out with space based systems, and they're producing chemicals, and they know there's a realistic scenario that a cyber attack could cause an issue with a safety equipment, releasing those chemicals and killing people at the plant. Inside the plant, there still needs to be certain regulations, but let's say in that scenario, it can get outside the plant and go into the local town and community. The CEO and board understands that risk and then decides to accept the risk and not do anything about it. Should that really be that company's choice? I would argue no. You can make all the risk decisions you want about your company, but the moment it goes outside your fence line and kills my kids, I don't think that you're authorized to have that risk choice. Now, what are the realistic scenarios and how to do that? And what is the actual manners? It's a very complicated question and answer, so I don't want to skirt over it, but it's not being had very often now in the AI discussion for CEOs and trust. I think there's a lot of applications for AI. I think there's a lot of cool things that we'll find. I don't think it's, trust so much that the CEOs are not putting into the financial outcomes for the company. I don't think it's a lack of trust in cybersecurity. I don't think it's a lack of trust, in any given answer, I think it's simply the motivations, the of the company, the regulatory environment that they live in. It's not just like the power company, as an example, doesn't do something because they don't want to. It's usually a public utility commission or someone local that's not allowing them to do those things. So if a let's use the water example, if a water company wanted to actually go and put cybersecurity into their systems, on the operations side, they almost have to hold like a town vote. So now you've got to convince the community that, oh, there's foreign state actors, and they could hurt us with targeting the drinking water. And I don't think that's going to go very well in most local communities around the world. So I would argue that the most important thing is alignment between the private sector and the government, with a very clear understanding of what the scenarios are that we're going to deal with, and a very clear understanding that enterprise IT security is very different than operations, technology, security. And let's get to the things that have actually demonstrated success and less to the research and projects and things like that. Those are great. They have a role in responsibility. But if we know something that works now, let's just do that now.
And Jessica, do you want to add to that?
You know, I don't think it's enough for individual governments to manage this risk because we're dealing with facilities that depend on shared spaces, upper atmosphere or the ocean. And we're going to have to globally wrap our arms around the fact that we could have 100,000 satellites in space, several hundred more submarine cables in the next decade, and the vulnerabilities are all shared. But our regulatory frameworks around the world are pretty old. They're pretty dated. They largely rely on things like the Outer Space Treaty from the end of the 1950s, and we're going to have to figure out how to make sure that there's enough orbital space for all different countries around the world, all different satellite systems, that satellites are maneuverable, and that when they lose pieces of junk that, you know, stay up there, we're going to have to build robotic systems to start taking them down. This is a profound level of international cooperation to manage these risks. And we're just in early days. But it's really clear to me we've got to work on it.
Very, very, very interesting. We have another question here. I don't know if we have time for all of them, but if you can keep your question short.
Maybe I'm the vice minister of high tech industry from Armenia, working in an orbital operation in Armenia. Space program and also cybersecurity. Two questions. Okay. One question.
Thank you.
Thank you. So, yeah. So, talking about cybersecurity, we.
Just adopted cybersecurity law thinking how to create a security environment. So what's your vision. What do you think. Because I like how you said we are in a shared space. But there is no shared responsibility that much to be honest. Yeah. Everybody is doing. They're quite fragile. So how do you think we need to cooperate in a global level and a local level, let's say locally, to come to that level from the private perspective, as you said, a little bit touch that point. But how you would do it if you do it.
Yeah. Here we go. Don't just talk about the problem. Have the answer. Yeah, that's a fair, fair thing. I think it's going to require all of it. Right. You're going to have local sites that have local security regulations and so forth, and you're going to have international cooperation that's required. But state is simply when you have a global company that ends up operating in all these different areas and you end up having all these different regulatory regimes over top of them, it becomes extraordinarily cost prohibitive to do anything. And then you don't get to an outcome, and it's very expensive. So honestly, there's, a real need for global cooperation on certain cybersecurity standards and efforts and just responsibility in terms of being a global company. And then it's also okay to then have more prescriptive local discussions if it's more interesting to your country for one topic over another. But but either way, I'm not this huge fan of let's Regulate everything. I just go on the record with that. But I do think at the very end of the discussion, we're going to find that a role and responsibility of government does have regulations and compliance and laws for these companies, and we just need to get aligned on what those are.
Terrific. One one last question. I'm sorry because I want to give you a chance to have a closing comment.
Thank you. Roman Larkin, the chief executive officer of Adora. I love the way you put it, Jessica. The deep space and the space and deep sea infrastructure is is fundamental and fundamentally vulnerable. We've heard about some very interesting use cases from from Rafael in particular. I love the example with the the German army being protected by your civilian service. Then obviously you become a target, right? If the, if the German army is going to be subject to an attack on that part of the Eastern Front, they're going to aim at your satellites as well, if not first, as we as we've seen in Ukraine at the beginning of the war in Ukraine with part of the.
What is the question?
So how do you protect yourself, not only you as I or how do we collect? How do we protect the space infrastructure from not only debris? Because you provided part of the of the answer, I guess, but also from hostile attacks. So this is not a question only for for ICI, but also for your customers and for all the institutions that that you collaborate with, including Joseph. Yes.
Look, I think this is another one of those those more challenging ones. And I'm looking at the clock having four minutes. I'm not sure what I'll be able to solve the problem right now, but I will, but Joseph will, so.
All right.
So so how about we turn that into your closing, comment, which is what what is what is the message that you wish people were following online or here that they take home in terms of what's what. The stakes are okay.
Being very short. Time is ticking. You need space traffic management and really understanding what happens where with very high accuracy and very high confidence, of course. And here I think you're absolutely right. We need a policy at global level in order to manage it. It's not possible that just everyone is is I would say using space or I would say relatively under controlled or under-regulated, not big friend of huge regulations, but there needs to be some regulation as you have in air traffic. So I think this needs to work together. And in some extreme cases, Jessica said it, you need to take debris out of orbit. We are also working on that on these technologies to really literally grab a spacecraft, take it out if it is a very important one or dangerous one in order to really work together. So it's a lot of things that need to be done together. But we are working on this. But I really would like to say we are on day one at the very beginning of this. A lot more needs to be done.
All right, Jessica.
We've been talking a lot about the risks associated with these technologies. I just want to have a boost of optimism, please. It's amazing. We have Earth imaging capabilities in real time that can help with emergency response monitoring, climate change, understand what's going on in the world around us like never before in human history. And on top of that, there are more than 2 billion people on this planet who don't have internet access, and it is cost prohibitive right now to supply it on a terrestrial level. We can do it from our skies. So there are opportunities with these technologies that are phenomenal, and that's why it's worth working through all these risks.
Love it. Rafael, your closing comment, including an inspiring rallying cry to all the aerospace engineering students at places like Georgia Tech who are really looking up to you and what's possible. Go ahead.
Excellent. Look, I will maybe just quickly addressing the question, I'll say, I think that the first thing we have to do, and this is actually not true for most of the countries. You have to realize that that infrastructure in space is actually critical infrastructure, because once you legally define it as a critical infrastructure, then you even start having a legal regime that allows you to act in case somebody is about to destroy it. Right. But in my in my closing comment, like, look, I think as it has been mentioned, the capabilities that the technologies offer today are amazing. And I think, you know, we've been at it for ten years, and every single day it feels like we're just at the beginning of a major revolution. We're scratching the surface barely right at day one, as Joseph was saying, like, we, we, we know that this is going to be amazing, but there is still 2 billion people without internet, right? And that's just the most obvious capability. So to all students out there, look, I can tell you for a fact, you can start a space company from a university with two people and be successful. It doesn't have to take an army of people anymore. So go and do it. Solve the problems that are out there and let's make this world a better place.
Awesome Peter. Closing.
Now that everyone's.
Being inspiring, then it comes back to these.
Hacks, right? So be afraid, all right? No.
Look, defense is doable. We know how to do it. You can get together and actually accomplish this. But let's also be aware of the facts. Somewhere around 90% of all of the guidance ever given to any of our infrastructure owners and operators has been about trying to prevent things from happening in their systems, sub 10% of any of the systems around the world. Could we even detect that something was a cyber attack, or that we have visibility into those systems and networks? And the reality is, I've been involved in many cases where people were hurt or explosions or impacts and they didn't think cyber was involved, and it was we can change that. And as we start learning what the threats are actually doing and getting better visibility into them, we can take that expertise with a lot of innovative and wonderful folks and we can change the discussion.
Terrific. Well thank you. Please join me in thanking our amazing and fun panel. Thank you for joining us. And thank you to everybody following online. Thank you all and keep enjoy Davos.
Thank you.