Boardroom Conversations with Alan Duffy

Episode 7: Alan Duffy – The governance of space, what STEM professionals can add to the board, and the dangers of jargon

Professor Alan Duffy GAICD is an astronomer and scientist. He’s also the Pro Vice-Chancellor of Flagship Initiatives at Swinburne University, plus the co-founder and CEO of mDetect, a muon technology company. We talk about the governance of space, how STEM professionals can contribute to the boardroom, and the dangers of using jargon in communication. Plus, what’s a “muon” and why is Alan’s company trying to detect them?

Transcript

BENNETT MASON

Welcome to Boardroom Conversations, a podcast from the Australian Institute of Company Directors. My name is Bennett Mason. Thanks so much for joining us. And each episode will have candid conversations with some of Australia's leading directors delving into their background journey to the boardroom and some of the challenges they’ve faced along the way. Our guest this time is astronomer and scientist Alan Duffy. He’s Pro Vice-Chancellor of Flagship Initiatives at Swinburne University, plus the co-founder and CEO of mDetect, a muon technology company. Alan was also the founding director of the Space Technology and Industry Institute and a member of the Board of Advisors at Questacon, the National Science and Technology Centre. Alan, thanks so much for joining us.

ALAN DUFFY

Thanks so much for having me.

BENNETT MASON

Now let's talk a little bit about your background first. As we mentioned, you're an astronomer and a scientist. Now, there aren't many AICD graduates or AICD members who have “astronomer” on their CV. How did you become an astronomer and what was it that so fascinated you about space?

ALAN DUFFY

So for me, growing up in Northern Ireland, it's a very sparsely populated country. The advantage of that is that you have limited light pollution. You get beautiful night sky views when it's not cloudy. And I was always fascinated by those stars growing up and particularly fascinated by why there were dark regions. Why were the areas where there weren't stars? Is it a simple absence of stars? Is there something that's blocking the light of the stars? Or is there something that is there but I just can't see it? Is it fundamentally visible? Well, it turns out it's all three, as I've discovered, as an astronomer. But for me, the realisation that that could be a career only came when I read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time as a very precocious 12–13-year-old, trying to read that book. I discovered there was a job title called “Cosmologist”, and you get paid to study the universe. And I never looked back.

BENNETT MASON

You certainly were a precocious 12-13-year-old, if you were reading Stephen Hawking at that age. You mentioned that you grew up in Northern Ireland, we've obviously had waves of migration from Ireland to Australia over the years. But how did you end up here?

ALAN DUFFY

Somewhat usually for my countrymen and women, I came here to help build a telescope. So, Australia had invested in a visionary concept known as the Square Kilometre Array, the world's largest telescope. It will stretch, hundreds of thousands of individual telescopes which stretch across Australia and similar amounts of overall collecting area. So literally if you add up all the areas of those individual telescopes, you'll get to about a square kilometre. So half here and a half in South Africa. This continent spanning telescope was an investment over the course of decades, multi-billion dollars, primarily international partners funding this. And that kind of vision and that kind of draw as both a technology but also a capability building measure. Just how could you say no? I mean, to be a part of that journey. So I joined UWA to try to figure out what this telescope could see and how could we optimise it better. In particular, the Australian Square Kilometre Pathfinder run by the CSIRO. That's now fully operational, I've been here this long, that was 2009, is now fully operational. The SKA has just broken ground. So to me, the incredible privilege of still being in Australia and indeed being an Australian to now witness this ground-breaking is a wonderful moment and something that I hope more Australians are aware of because we are one of the best places in the world to do astronomy. We have some of the best astronomy groups and indeed, Swinburne is one of the largest astronomy groups in the whole southern hemisphere, and that's something we should be proud of.

BENNETT MASON

Well, speaking for the Nation, Alan, we're very pleased to have you here. Just on that the SKA, Square Kilometre Array, what are some of the projects you worked on when you were there?

ALAN DUFFY

Well, one of the challenges with this telescope is we've never built anything even remotely as powerful. I mean, this is hundreds, thousands of times more powerful. It can pick up a mobile phone signal on Pluto. It's going to map a billion galaxies across the entire visible universe. At least when we were designing their ground-breaking, designing this SKA, it will create in a day as much data as exists on the internet. So every day this relentless torrent. So, I was working on the computational side. I was trying to understand, if you create a baby universe from a supercomputer, that's my Ph.D. And then you look at it with the eyes, as it were, of this telescope. What can you see? And then how can you optimise, in the software aspect of this, rather than messing around with the telescope cells, how can you focus on the bits of the data the most valuable? How can you essentially perform a reconstruction to get out the kind of answers that you're most interested in? And by having the prediction from the simulations and then that full freedom to change the software, however you like to do the reconstruction, you can really get a wonderful level of specificity in the kinds of questions you ask. It turns out that's a technique that ends up being incredibly relevant for my most recent career changes. But at the time I did it just because it was fun. You were building universes on national supercomputers and then trying to imagine what this facility decades hence would be able to do in terms of seeing it. And now I'm incredibly I'm still here getting that privilege to be involved.

BENNETT MASON

Let's talk a little bit more about your career because many of our listeners won't be that familiar with the day-to-day life of a scientist or an astronomer. So, what do you actually do every day? What does your what does your 9 to 5 look like?

ALAN DUFFY

Just as everyone else? It's meetings, it's emails, it's document revision and it's code development. But context helps, right? And this is, the emails are about the latest discoveries that are being made in the world of astronomy or space science. The meetings with my PhD students working on their challenges in their programme of work. So, if they have challenges with the derivation of equations or the analysis of exploding stars is one program of work, or another is trying to find the twinkling of stars is tiny black holes, postulated by Stephen Hawking. In fact, go between us and those stars. Context helps, right? So, it is a series of meetings and emails, but it's all about trying to manage teams and budgets, trying to have a programme of work that stretches out several years with an uncertain, ambiguous endpoint and trying to create a reasonable and structured process to get there. Very familiar, I suspect, to many of the listeners. But rather than project management for a new high rise, this is perhaps a new telescope or a new detector facility. So, all of these things are general skill sets that maybe 10% of your day you'll have pen and paper genuinely doing equations. The rest of your day, you're just running teams.

BENNETT MASON

So, it turns out that astronomers are just like us? Meetings, phone calls, emails. Sticking with your career, Alan. We mentioned earlier that you were on the advisory board of Questacon for several years. Questacon is well known to many Australians, whether you went there yourself as a kid or you've taken your own children there. How was that experience on the board and what were your first board meetings like?

ALAN DUFFY

That was a firehose. That was before I did the AICD Company Director Course. So, I was reviewing PNLs, I was looking at these financials and forecasts and wondering what these red colours were against some things and green colours against others. I was curious why there was no minus signs anywhere and in fact, there was just a bracket somewhere. That was my level of experience. I was being brought in though as, obviously thankfully not the financial expert here, but the domain expert in science communication. And a demonstrated ability, particularly with digital and virtual reality environments, for teaching. So, I knew my role and I was happy to stay quiet for the first board meeting, chaired by the legendary Leon Kempler, who ran those meetings with an incredible generosity to allow everyone to give an update to their lives and to share what they are undertaking and then get into the strategic discussions. For me, I learned a lot about the kinds of challenges that an executive team face in such an enormous organisation, a national mandate. Hundreds of staff, tens of millions of dollars budget and critically a mission. Every single report, every single person who would come up from the team to give a specific briefing. The website redesign is one that particularly comes to mind, and it was all framed in that mission to inspire, to educate, to reach out to all Australians. And that was one of the most fascinating things to me was the trade-off between - an inherent trade-off with a limited budget. How can you reach the disadvantaged? How can you reach students or young people in regional areas? And that's the wonderful work of Questacon and the travelling science circus, a bus load of experiments and incredible demonstrators that go around the regions. It is just one of those, along with the flying doctors, quintessentially Australian services. But for me, it was realising the work that I had done at an individual level in the science communication programs, I had to elevate my thinking and set out a strategic role for individual programs within that broader mission and mandate. And that was exhilarating. And as I say, thankfully then I eventually did do the Company Directors’ Course and realise just how much I had to learn. But at least I had stumbled into the awareness that you've got to think bigger and broader and a thousand-foot viewpoint. And that's what the CDC at least said I had got right. And all the bits about brackets around numbers? Well, I now understand why and I'm happy to say that there's fewer of those by the time I was leaving than when I started.

BENNETT MASON

Do you have any advice for other scientists or people with a STEM background who are joining their first board? Is there anything you wish you'd known before you joined the board at Questacon?

ALAN DUFFY

That's a great question. Yes, I wish I'd realised how valuable my skill set was, how unique. And sadly, I think actually within ASX and other sectors, how unique that that STEM background really is. You come with a mindset, an ability to structure a problem and a series of questions to realise an ultimate answer, particularly where there's an ambiguous answer and that is literally just what we do in research. And that was a revelation, how much I had to contribute from my own experience. I hope other STEM professionals would realise that too. The fact that you are not a legal, governance, financial expert, that's okay. Obviously, you have a director's fiduciary responsibility. You have to understand what you are doing and that's where the CDC is invaluable, and I would highly recommend everyone does that. But the fact that you are coming in as an expert, don't shy away from and instead lean into what your unique background provides in terms of the kinds of questions and insights you can provide. Just be a little wary. And this is really where the chair is so critical, and where Leon was so wonderful, you could very easily become the voice of untested wisdom, in a sense. If there's anything AI, cyber, data-related, you may have an undue influence on the board. Just be mindful of that. Really stick to your lane and experience and call out when you are leaving that direct area of expertise and you're just using your insights to advance the conversation.

BENNETT MASON

Is there a danger then sometimes in organisations bringing on a STEM expert onto the board that, like you said, the other directors look to that person for all things science? And do you think maybe that it's the responsibility for all directors to up their knowledge of science?

ALAN DUFFY

I think that's absolutely right. I think in just the same way as a board will have a financial expert, former CFO most likely, and I will respect their understanding and knowledge. I can't sign off on something unless I understand it too. And in just the same way, those individuals really must have an awareness of the science, particularly around AI. You don't have to be able to code it. You just have to understand it's advantages and disadvantages. Where it is going to hallucinate, in the parlance of AI, to make things up. Other kinds of issues, baked in biases and the like. Those are the kinds of topics that you need to be aware of as a risk factor in your organisation. You don't have to be able to code it, you do have to be able to understand it. And that's where the expert can help in that board. They can take a lot of the weight on this, but that doesn't allow you to shirk all your responsibilities to also lift up your own capabilities.

BENNETT MASON

For directors and board members who maybe don't know a whole lot about STEM areas, whether it's AI or something else, where's a good place for them to start?

ALAN DUFFY

Look, I'll have to acknowledge my inherent bias on this. I was the lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia for many years. There's a wonderful product, Cosmos magazine and podcast associated with that, where you’ll get a very wide-ranging level of the latest science and technology. We also have the Babbage podcast of The Economist. I just find, every time they have ever spoken of my area of expertise, I have been astounded by how well-researched and accurate it is, and I have to assume that's the case for the other topic. And then, of course finally, the AICD. The magazine, I regularly read it, and now this podcast. Those kinds of products are a good place to start and to get a general understanding. But there is no substitute for finding an expert. Go through the directors list, on AICD for example, to find domain expertise and question those people. That's how you learn. You learn not just by reading but having more of an active learning where you try to understand how is this relevant for my context and ask an expert to better understand that.

BENNETT MASON

I want to ask a few more questions on your career. You've very kindly done this podcast today and you do a lot of podcasts and a lot of interviews on TV. I'm sure many of our members and listeners have seen you. Is it challenging sometimes communicating what are often quite complex ideas to a lay audience?

ALAN DUFFY

It is if you try and explain everything. If instead you invest the time in the discovery of the concept to understand what is exciting, what is new, what is relevant for the audience, and only try to explain that. And particularly by use of analogy, where you can have a shortcut from people's everyday experiences to the topic at hand and they don't have to then understand Einstein's GR. They understand how a ball moves in a sheet which is, which is stretched out and it has a little curve to it. So, the ball will roll around in a curve. Great. They don't have to now do algebra with Einstein's theory. So, it is about having that level of respect for the audience that you are trying to provide them the relevant and fundamentally useful insight to the topic. That you have invested the time to understand how to communicate it and critically you have not used a crutch. And this in particular is where acronym, nomenclature, jargon is often used by experts when they are not comfortable in the environment. Maybe they don't understand the work themselves. Well, maybe they're just not comfortable being in this in this communicating environment. Or they're just intimidated by the audience, and they will use jargon. And that is a giveaway that they are not comfortable for any of those reasons. And what they're doing is putting a barrier between themselves, the work, the message, and the audience. And this is something of a cardinal sin. It's something I've been relentlessly drilling many, many students, when I delivered the “101 Comms” lectures at Swinburne, to avoid the use of jargon. That being said, there are just some things you have to explain.

BENNETT MASON

I think that tip on avoiding jargon is a good lesson for all of us. I want to touch now on some of the other roles you've taken on. We mentioned earlier that you're now the Pro Vice Chancellor of Flagship Initiatives at Swinburne. What does that role involve?

ALAN DUFFY

This is a role designed to find partners externally, as well as domain expertise within the university, to address some of the biggest challenges facing our nation and world. It covers key portfolio areas: space, aerospace, quantum AI, hydrogen, MedTech and others. And the idea was, there are certain challenges which are just too big, too complex, too weird - and certainly what is required to address these challenges - to fit within traditional funding models. So instead, what we need to do is access new capital, be it international funding schemes, translation or commercialisation funds. If you want to have an impact, you have got to spin that technology out and involve industry. So, in other words, there's the recognition that these challenges were so large and so complex that the traditional funding models weren't just weren't going to cut it. Where it's a couple of hundred thousand dollars goes to a uni to do a bit of work for two years. You're not going to solve the green steel transition on that scale. Instead, and this is relevant for me, this is literally just something we put together within Swinburne and some international partners. It was led by Geoff Brooks, but this was an idea of seeking out millions of dollars, bringing together iron ore producers, bringing together the steel makers, the best in Australia, the best in the US, and bringing them together to address a supply chain issue and trying to have a much more holistic view of how the solution might be advanced by those partners, but in particular be adopted by those partners. And again, it's about impact. If we want to have a measurable change into some of these most wicked of problems, we have to be working with industry. Government can support, absolutely. Research from the unis is critical, but if industry isn't willing and even aware. The first is “willing” because the solution fits their needs to adopt it. We're just going to get nowhere.

BENNETT MASON

Alan, you're the CEO and co-founder of a company that's come out of the university sector. It's called mDetect, which is a muon technology company. Can you tell us, firstly how that company started and then also importantly, what are muons and what does your company do with them?

ALAN DUFFY

So, this came out of a program of work to discover a mysterious ingredient to our universe, a substance called dark matter. And this was many years, about five years of work, for my engineering team. And we were developing a detector to remove the background. So, the things that get in the way, the particles that get in the way of us seeing the dark matter. We hope, by the way, and spoiler alert, we haven't seen it yet. This is a Nobel Prize, though, if we ever make the discovery. This is a part of an experiment called SABRE ten tonne detector. It's about to go a kilometre underground and be installed in an underground physics laboratory in an active gold mine. It’s a wonderful program led by Elisabetta Barberio of Melbourne. But we were designing a detector to get rid of the backgrounds, those particles that would get in the way of the experiment. In other words, we were trying to sort trash and you know, as the adage goes, one person's trash, another person's treasure. Those particles we were detecting and hence removing from the experiment are muons. These are the fat cousins, if you will, of an electron. They come barrelling in from the atmosphere so high energy particles from feeding black holes, exploding stars and crashing into our atmosphere, produce these showers of high energy particles, including muons. And they can punch through up to a kilometre of rock. What you can do if you have a detector is place it under an area of interest and allow these muons to travel down through the rock. As I say, many hundreds of metres. They are preferentially absorbed by dense structures. So in other words, if you've got a detector underneath a big blob of dense material. Let's imagine it's an ore body, you're going to have a shadow. There's fewer muons taking it than you had anticipated. If instead there's an area of underdensity, so a cavity or a void has opened up, you're going to have hotspot. So, more muons arriving than you had anticipated. And if you have multiple detectors, let's go back to the MedTech analogies, you can go from an X-ray to a CT scan. You get now a 3D picture of the underground region. So, the work we did was to develop a very cheap - because it's science, we never have budgets. An innovative approach to building a muon detector. A few years into the science, we realised we got something quite novel in terms of the capability. And instead of say, one detector, as traditionally, we might be able to put a hundred of these down. They're all very cheap, very rugged. And during COVID, when most people were trying to bake bread, I decided I’d do a spin out and embrace the Swinburne Accelerator program and never looked back. And in fact, we're about to reveal the deployment at BHP, Prominent Hill tailings storage facility at a national tailings conference. We were able to use our detectors to image the wall that holds back millions of tonnes of the by-products of the mining industry and use these modern detectors to take this X-ray like scan of the wall and reveal this internal structure and its stability as a result. So, a really important contribution to the mining sector, the resources sector in particular, around its sustainable operations. You can do mineral exploration, but you can also of course do safety and environmental evaluation. But the fact that it came from the most esoteric of searches, this dark matter, this weird new stuff we think's out there, is a wonderful reminder of tomorrow's technologies and market innovations come from today's fundamental scientific questions and investigations. There's no way you could have funded a revolutionary new scanning capability to help safeguard tailings by trying to look for dark matter. There's just no direct connection there.

BENNETT MASON

BHP aren’t really in the business of looking for dark matter data either.

ALAN DUFFY

That's right. Although there's lots of it, five times more with everything we can see put together. So if they want to mine that, that would be a tremendous advantage perhaps. But this is, you know, you get to these wonderful innovations by doing exceptional engineering and scientific endeavours. For me, what was quite pleasing is that the kinds of things that I was doing in my PhD in the telescope, we started with SKA simulations and others. That's the software experience that I needed to help tease out the signal within the muons we were detecting and do the inversion to see in 3D what we were actually scanning. In other words, it has been an extraordinary and very much random walk, a winding road to arrive with the skill set I needed to spin out and detect from my CDC learnings, driven by my Questacon experience, the software in my initial experiences of postdocs in Australia. And now the privilege of leading an engineering team over many years, as part of this dark matter experiment, this incredibly esoteric program. All of those things came together to give me the best possible shot at advancing this company.

BENNETT MASON

Let's try to jump from dark matter to governance. We are an AICD podcast. MDetect is a growing company. It doesn't have an independent board or anything like that yet. But when and why would you consider adding one and what would you maybe be looking for in independent directors?

ALAN DUFFY

We just closed our $1 million seed round. We have lots of customers and enquiries. We are in an incredible growth phase. The board as it exists, literally the directors are the founders and one independent non-executive director, who is an investor. And the insights they are bringing are incredible. And I want to have more of that. As we mature, as we grow, you inevitably require new skillsets. You also need, because it is still a start-up, you need those directors to be far more operationally involved than, with the CDC lessons I had, advise me in a mature company. And it is a case of “all hands-on-deck.” and I think that's thrilling actually for our independent director. But the idea of what's missing is absolutely greater experience in governance and financial. Taking us to that next level of capability, of quality, of the board discussions, that we moved to a more strategic direction, that we're able to have a more directed and thoughtful process of opportunity identification, risk assessment. Right now, it is the classic start-up where everyone is wearing an operational executive hat and then takes it off and tries to put on their strategic directors’ hat. And it doesn't always work seamlessly. We can get bogged down in detailed text chat. When really what was demanded of us was a better understanding of our governance requirements. So, in taking on this new capital, I have the opportunity to take in a new director from one of the investment groups. And they have a portfolio, if you will, of possible directors that we can choose from. And I have given my wish list. And as I say, it is around former CFO ideally, but not of a large company, but rather one who understands the journey we're on and the scale we’re at. Have governance experience. And in particular, any sector experience is helpful, but not necessarily required. By that I mean we have customers in the mining resources sector, but we're also interested in construction, there's potential defence implications. So that's a “nice to have” but not required. I think just that fundamental experience in growing companies is what I would be looking at, and that's very rare. Most directors are not on that, have not had that recently at least, and if they have, they're still involved in the organisation they're supporting. So, I think that that's something that is a very unique aspect of the AICD community. A start-up and rapidly accelerating small, growing to medium, enterprise where there's just a very different cadence and demands and a sense of that exponential growth potential. That is exhilarating, but it is a little unusual in terms of the experiences we will typically gain. And I wonder if that's something that we should be better aware of, a better able to put our hands up to gain. I think I think both parties would gain immeasurably from it.

BENNETT MASON

Is it challenging for you personally at all, as the CEO, as the co-founder, to bring in outsiders? I mean, this company has been your baby. You've put in your own blood, sweat and tears. Is it hard to give over some control or some power, for want of a better word, to outside directors?

ALAN DUFFY

Look, there's always that that sense. I haven't experienced it myself because I've always valued other's input. That if I just think back to my career, no matter what research project, PhD or whatever. I was always very happy to have more people involved than not. And I certainly haven't come to a point of crisis or challenge in that regard for mDetect. I think it could get challenging, however, if there was a radical departure of vision. If a new input was to say: “Forget the resources sector.” I don’t know why they’d say this because it’s a billion-dollar opportunity. But whatever. “Forget that, go down, agriculture.” And I think that would be challenging and I would have to understand where that viewpoint was coming from. And I hope from the conversation that would follow, both would gain both, both groups. But certainly, I've never been precious about control. I've always valued and welcomed dissenting opinions, of voices. The one thing that I would demand from both my company, but also in Swinburne in my research is respect in that conversation. That people are coming to a point of discussion that is, of course, handled respectfully. But more than that, they've done their research. So, it's a meaningful contribution. And that's what I mean by respect. It's not just the ability to be respectful in the discussion. It's the fact that you've shown respect to the others, that you've done your homework. And you haven't just derailed the meeting with a brain fart that is adding no value but has now taken out 30-minutes of our time and is hugely disrespectful to everyone in attendance. So, I think that that's the one thing that is a non-negotiable. I'm very happy to have people come in, take control of aspects of it, even advance a new vision. But only if they are able to demonstrate they've had a time and research behind that opinion rather than just a knee jerk reaction.

BENNETT MASON

Well, look, if there are any directors listening who might be interested in adding a new, exciting opportunity to their board portfolio, maybe they could reach out, get in contact.

ALAN DUFFY

Absolutely. I'm on LinkedIn. Hit me up.

BENNETT MASON

Let's now get to space. We should talk about that because one, it's fun. And two, you're an astronomer. A lot has been said and written about the private sector space industry. And some of the world's most colourful billionaires have taken an interest in this area. How big could the commercial space sector be and how can Australia take advantage of this opportunity?

ALAN DUFFY

The sector is enormous. By some measures $350 billion, maybe $400 billion globally today. Morgan Stanley estimates by 2040 it's a $1 trillion sector. And this is not that you have a trillion dollars’ worth of satellites, but rather the data products, the relay of communications via space and within space are underpinning sector value worth a trillion. And that's the key - space is not an end goal in and of itself. It is a domain for the provision of infrastructure back on earth. Space’s value is the fact that it's close to Earth. There's lots of space. Now for Australia, we have a unique opportunity. We have a large landmass and marine environment, sparsely populated. It demands remote sensing, so the ability to scan from space to do this in a cost-effective manner, provide that 24/7 coverage. We also have essentially about a third of the sky under our observation and a privileged position in in the globe, in that sense. What that means is, that's great, we look at stars and that's why so many telescopes come here and look right in the Milky Way. We also have all of those satellites travelling overhead, so we're providing the monitoring of those, in terms of their trajectories and that's very, very valuable data. But we also have NASA, the European Space Agency, the Swedish Space Corporation, Leo Labs, several other comms providers, Optus and the like, with their dishes here. So huge amounts of infrastructure have been invested in Australia to relay those signals. So, it is a unique comparative advantage, both, a geographic sense, but also in terms of our lineage. We are coming late to the space sector. We don't have any legacy systems to maintain. It allows us to leapfrog from the old behemoth satellite models of old to the new LEO, Lower Earth Orbit CubeSats, so very, very small satellites. Which is driving the likes of Elon Musk, as one of those “colourful billionaires” is one way of describing them, in their new commercial endeavours. That is our opportunity. But we can only get there through sustained support and investment by government to catalyse the industry and to give confidence to venture capital that this is a market worth investing in. And that the companies that we are growing here lead a myriad, providing communications, data, farming, providing individual farms with areas for application of pesticides or fertiliser, and in an intuitive app on their phone, all derive from space. These are the kinds of companies that we want to see greater investment go into, to provide that capability for us as a nation. And then, of course, export that globally.

BENNETT MASON

What is actually possible in the space sector over the next few decades? We hear about all sorts of things from colonies on the moon, space tourism, missions to Mars. But what is realistically doable and in the next 10, 15, 20 years? And are there any concepts that really excite you?

ALAN DUFFY

Look, we are going to be mining the moon by the 2030s. NASA as part of their Project Artemis, wants to go to take the water in particular from the moon, but also other minerals to help fuel, resupply and refuel their exploration missions. That water, if you split in hydrogen-oxygen, that is literally rocket fuel. Swinburne within the institute, the Space Technology Industry Institute, which before we've undertaken a lot of work with NASA, in fact. And presented it at the World Mining Congress in partnership with the CSIRO recently on these endeavours. So, there are certain things that Australia can do. It's history in the resources sector allowing us to be a part of this great exploration on the moon. Can we do that responsibly, I think is the key. And that again is something that Australia is very aware of. And recent history has that front of mind to the directors, in particular of these companies that are involved. And BHP and Rio are part of a mission called AROSE to do this mining, at least in its early stages. So that's one thing. But I think and space tourism is happening, it's already happened, and we'll have the laps of the moon coming up very soon with Space X's launches. But far more exciting for me is, is the fact that we are moving to the industrialisation of low-Earth orbit. We will soon have 40,000 satellites in orbit. In the last few years, we launched more satellites than in all of history combined, to that date. The provision of Internet globally is now here. Very soon we will have global coverage from space of the imagery of the earth so we can provide real time, quasi real time bushfire response, emergency management, providing first responders with the data products they need. And a whole host of commercial opportunities in your supply chain optimisation or remote asset management. So, all of these things are happening. So, the thing that most excites me is the fact that the commercial sector is now the driving force in space and that will only continue to grow and that's where the innovation is coming, that's where the vast cost reduction is launched. The new capabilities of these small satellites are coming. The largest earth observing fleet operator in history, is a company called Planet, co-founded by Chris Boshuizen, an Australian. It didn't exist ten years ago and now it operates hundreds of satellites. If you do your Google Maps, you are using their images. That seamless success of the industry, however, is its greatest challenge. If we are to continue to gain investment and support from government. The unlocking further of venture capital and the use of the data, products, and services from space, we need people to be aware of space as a sector.  It’s a domain, just like the sea. It supports other sectors of the economy, but only if people are aware of it. And the problem is we've got so good at making that seamless as an interaction point. I suspect most people are unaware of just how many times they're using products in space. Every time you open your maps and your phone. Every time you use an ATM you are using a product of space, the security system behind it uses timing from space. 95% of your weather forecast. So essentially all of it is based on spaceborne imagery. That is the astounding point that we find ourselves in where our daily lives are absolutely reliant on space and almost no one's aware of it.

BENNETT MASON

I wanted to touch on something you mentioned a moment ago. You talked about BHP, Rio, other resources companies responsibly mining in space. That's one regulatory issue in space. But what are some of the other governance issues we should be aware of?

ALAN DUFFY

Well, it's the flipside of its utility. The more you use space, the more depend become on it. And there are tremendous advantages, as I mentioned, in remote asset management monitoring and mineral surveys and the like. But the more dependent you become within the agricultural sector, we now have autonomous tractors that are deploying precision amounts of pesticides and fertilisers. All of this power to AI but utilising fundamentally spaceborne imagery and comms and position navigation timing. So, if that goes down well, that's rather a big risk. And it's not that you're going to lose every asset, but you are vulnerable. And you have to have a risk assessment and within your organisation you have to be mindful of these opportunities, but also there’re risks and manage those appropriately. One of the biggest governance challenges on earth is cyber, and space is no different. And in fact, arguably because of the long lead times, typically decades for capabilities to deploy in space. Since you don't want to try the very latest thing, if you're NASA, you use tried and tested. Our systems are lagging and are not the best and most recent developments, particularly around cyber. So that presents a very significant challenge. And it's not that necessarily you'll be hacked via space, although that’s certainly a concern in the comms sector. There are just new ways of being compromised that you won't perhaps be aware of as a board and really need to be mindful of. Not obsessed by, but certainly aware of and have strategies to take effect For example, we currently have a scenario where all of Australian farms can be mapped to monitored and their productivity and yields evaluated in almost real time. In other words, if you're in the futures market, you can very accurately estimate the amount of wheat, for example, that will be produced. Now, what happens in that automated workflow, because of course no one's individually looking at these farms, this is an AI-based approach based on imagery from space. What if the satellite has been compromised and there is a small what’s called a watermark? But essentially a small corruption of the image that tricks the AI into thinking: “Wow, I'm seeing absolute crop failures galore.” And maybe not existential levels, but 10% reduction. Now that's going to filter through to the price in the futures. I chaired a panel in cyber space at the Sydney-based Australian Space Summit, and there were cyber experts there who raised this specific example because there's an obvious direct financial benefit to the bad actors, and it's quite easy to do, relatively speaking. And what chilled me was they couldn't believe that this hadn't already happened. We just don't know. So, it's not that we're getting hacked in the traditional sense. It’s that we're being compromised, and we don't know it. It's not that you're going to get a satellite shot down, although sadly, there are some countries that can do that and have done that. And that your satellite capabilities are being compromised and you're just not aware of it. So, there are many ways in which your supply chain can be affected, can be compromised, that your remote asset management monitoring can be affected, and a whole host of other negative concerns for your company. Don't get obsessed by it but do be aware of it and have a risk management system that is appropriate for your company to the potential impacts. But get creative because the bad actors are.

BENNETT MASON

Alan, I know you've got to run off and deliver a lecture. Of course, but there was one final issue I wanted to ask you about. We've spoken a little bit about the sheer amount of satellites, and I'll use an unscientific term “stuff” that is in space now. You've talked previously about the issue of space junk. Can you tell us what that is and why it's a risk we should be thinking about?

ALAN DUFFY

So, space Junk is the name of any material that's in orbit that is out of control. So, it could be an old satellite. It could be a newly launched, but now failed satellite. It can be a screw that fell out of an astronaut's hand, as it were, trying to repair the space station. There's actually a hammer floating around at seven kilometres a second right now. At that speed, orbital velocity speeds, a screw if it hits another craft has the energy a hand grenade. In other words, you are going to cause a tremendous amount of damage. You're going to destroy that satellite you hit, and all of that junk now goes in orbit at those speeds and hits other junk. And we get what is called Kessler syndrome, where there's this runaway avalanche of material. Because of how dependent we are on space, that would be an absolute catastrophe. We are so much more vulnerable to this doomsday scenario than we've ever been because of our use of space, but also because of how much stuff there is. And that wonderful opportunity of 40,000 new satellites or 40,000 total orbiting satellites. That is orders of magnitude more targets for junk to hit and then trigger this this Kessler syndrome. That is an aspect of sustainable use of space. It is not sustainable as it is. We need to do better in terms of the decommissioning of these craft at the end of their lives. We need to do better tracking. So, we have companies like Leo Labs that have set up tracking stations in Australia to connect to their US-based ones, so they've got continuous monitoring of the junk. We have with in partnership with EY and the CSIRO Data 61 we stood up, at SmartSat CRC. We stood up a PhD in responsible AI in space to better understand how the automated systems are going to be able to interact. Mot to develop new AI, but to develop an assurance framework for companies to essentially be accredited, if you will, or to understand better how these complex systems interact. And I think that's the key. We in Australia have a wonderful regulatory environment. The Australian Space Agency is led by Enrico Palermo. It is also championing and is mandated to grow the sector. It both regulates but also grows, quite unusual, and it's doing a great job. But internationally, we are not going to see an international treaty anytime soon. That's just the nature of the world. Space is inherently a global opportunity and challenge. It is the ultimate tragedy of the commons as space junk is demonstrating. So nationally we can be well regulated, but internationally, how do we do better without those international treaties? And I think it's through the directors of companies, both national but also multinational. By the provision, say, of an assurance framework. They can have a better-informed decision matrix around their operations in space themselves or their reliance on services provided by others. With directors being informed and taking these kinds of actions in lieu of international treaty obligations, I think we will address the problem. Because we all recognise that if space junk gets out of hand or if mining the moon becomes a race in a gold stake, lame kind of action, that advantages no one. We all lose. And I think it's in the boardroom that you have the right people with the access to the capital, the companies, decision making, and also the time and resources to think strategically, to think five, ten years hence. That can make these decisions that will safeguard our use of space, allow us to industrialise low-Earth orbit, continue the moon and beyond. And of course, all the while improving life on earth with the provision.

BENNETT MASON

So, governments, states might have been unable to form these agreements on space junk or other governance issues. But you think directors and boards can fill the void?

ALAN DUFFY

That's absolutely it. We are seeing norms, normative behaviours from companies, the large space for everyone's liking and certainly not always uniformly positive. But they are taking actions that clearly show they are aware of the challenges. It is through these partnerships, but also other frameworks or other opportunities for the industries to come together to be facilitated in those kinds of learnings and decisions. The norms and the rules of the road, so to speak, can be agreed upon. Government has a critical role. The US, of course, as primary space player drives a lot of this. But fundamentally every individual company has to understand its own risk and opportunity in this space and act accordingly.

BENNETT MASON

Alan, we should leave it there. As I mentioned, you've got a lecture to deliver, so thanks so much for joining us.

ALAN DUFFY

Thanks so much for having me.