Closing Bell - Manifest Space: The Middle East in Space with UAE Space Agency Chairwoman Sarah Al-Amiri 10/19/23

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

With geopolitical tensions rising as the Israel-Hamas conflict escalates, what is the state of space & international relations? Morgan sits down with H.E. Sarah Al-Amiri Chairwoman of the UAE Space Agency and the Minister for Public Education and Advanced Technology in the United Arab Emirates, to discuss the agency’s rapid growth since its inception in 2014, navigating geopolitical tensions, and deep space ambitions.

The Israel-Hamas war has injected uncertainty into the world economy and is testing foreign relations across the globe. The United Arab Emirates was the first Gulf country to normalize relations with Israel in 2020, and its president the first Arab leader to speak with Israel's prime minister following the attack by Hamas. The two countries have an innovation partnership and through the broader I2U2 bloc with the U.S. and India, recently announced a space venture. That relationship, at least as of now, is not likely to change. The space sector for us is not part of a geopolitical movement. So most of our partnerships today in space and also in science and technology

need to remain ongoing regardless of any political situation. So we're not holding back on anything. The current partnerships that we have in place are continuing down the line, and creating new opportunities for collaboration and coordination needs to continue down the line. Her Excellency, Sarah Al-Amiri, is the UAE's Minister for Public Education and Advanced Technology. In 2020, at the age of 35, she was appointed chairwoman of the country's space agency, or the equivalent of NASA administrator. UAESA is one of the youngest space agencies in the world, less than a decade old. But it's making up for lost time, spending over $6 billion as it

strikes partnerships, engages commercial space companies, and invests in its own homegrown pool of talent. The agency has so far sent two Emirati astronauts to space and, spearheaded by Al-Amiri, became the first Arab country to, with a hope probe, enter Mars orbit on the first try. On this episode, we dive into the agency's rapid growth, deep space ambitions, and navigation of geopolitical tensions. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Let's start at the beginning. Let's talk a little bit about the UAE Space Agency and specifically some of the work that you are doing. So the UAE Space Agency has been established quite recently

in 2014, but comes after investment by the country in the space sector, both in commercial spacecrafts that have to do with communications and then moving into spacecraft design and development. The sector then saw the need for an overarching direction in terms of our strategy for development, support for the private sector, and a robust regulatory framework that allows for growth of the sector, both locally with global incidents. And we've been working quite extensively within the space agencies to continue diversifying opportunities for overarching space sector, both in exploration, in communications, in spacecraft development and operations, and continue to support the development of the overarching sector.

And that feeds directly into the diversification of our economy here in the Emirates. So I want to get into all of that a little bit more. But I think the first place to start is, how does this diversify the economy? What does that vision look like? So we've got an overarching vision for diversifying the economy. I'll speak to the element that has to do with advanced technology, which is the portfolio that I sit in at the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology and where space and the Space agency also plays a role in. Today, if you're looking at the advent of our existing industrial players in our economy to increase their size and also to increase collaboration, also increase the remit of reach.

So to be able to move into exporting and increase the size of the market that our industrial players are currently working on. We have an extensive technology enablement program for existing production processes that works on investments and technologies to uplift our current industrial players. We have trade agreements globally that are increasing the reach of our products and services coming out of manufacturing and also out of industry. And we've also worked quite extensively in creating an end-to-end robust ecosystem that has technology embedded at it. We also have the element of sustainability built into the program

for technology readiness and technology adoption. So that's the first aspect of diversity in the economy, and that's increasing the size of our existing industrial players. Then we've moved on into new sectors. So what new sectors of the economy can the UAE invest in to be able to establish those industries? So healthcare has been one. We've increased quite extensively both our investments abroad and also investments locally. And we see biotech and also various elements of the healthcare ecosystem and pharmaceuticals growing within the country. Space is actually another one of them.

And we've taken quite an active effort over the course of the last few years and has been tasked with the UAE Space Agency to start expanding that remit. So we're moving from a space sector that was predominantly funded by the government, works on exploration, works on exploratory science and technology capabilities, and works on capability and capacity development and advanced robotics design and development that goes into most of our spacecraft mission. And today we are undergoing the development and sort of transfer of a lot of that capabilities and capacity from the public domain onto the private sector domain through funding opportunities for the private sector,

through a mechanism to even build capacity in individuals and support them in starting up their businesses. So we're not even starting at startup phase. We're starting at pre-startup phase, even pre-seed phase, to be able to build the necessary capabilities and capacity and move forward with the extension into establishing a very robust space industry within the country with not local demand, but fitting into the global value chain. And we're very conscious to ensure

that we're not reinventing the wheel, that we are part of a global ecosystem, and we add on to the overarching space sector, because that's where opportunity exists. So when you talk about funding the private sector, it's Emirati businesses and entrepreneurs specifically, or because I know you also partner with commercial companies from other countries as well. Yes, it's actually a mix of many different programs that goes into this. So I can speak within the remit of our next exploration mission to the asteroid belt and how we're designing different programs within it to build that capability and capacity and partnerships. So we continue our partnership with a US-based institution, the University of Colorado Boulder. The reason for that is we continue our know-how

transfer and capability development program. And that's where our up-and-coming engineers and more experienced engineers continue to build on their capability and capacity. Then comes in the more experienced individuals that today have an interest in establishing their businesses. And those are Emirati individuals and non-Emirati individuals, but based out of the Emirates. And what we do is we further upskill their capabilities and capacity and start fitting them into the program to deliver on either services, so engineering services or products and services that are part of the materials that goes into the program to deliver on either services, so engineering services, or products and services that are part of the materials that goes into the spacecraft build. And we've launched the Space Mains business program

that actually takes them through those opportunities. Then comes the phase of the companies that are already in existence, so they've been operating in the space sector or feeding tangentially into the space sector, both locally and globally, but require a bit of upskilling or require redirection to be able to feed into that level of production or tangential industries, especially when it comes to manufacturing and production of various parts that can go into the space sector. And again, we work on capability and capacity. So we actually fund a lot of the risk and offtake a lot of the risk and be able to provide them with an opportunity to build heritage by flying hardware or being part of, in terms of

engineering services, the development of our upcoming mission. And that enables us not only to look at the local market and local capabilities, but look at extensive partnerships. Another program that we've looked at is furthering on our international partnerships and furthering on engagement with the private sector globally, especially with large corporations, because to build an overarching end-to-end ecosystem, you need to plug into the global supply chain. And the only way to do that is to ensure the partnership is ingrained very early on in your development process. So one of the programs that have been launched on the back of our space fund is the CERB constellation of synthetic aperture radar satellites. Now, the model that we're taking this is working with a local company in the UAE,

partnering up with a global corporation to build that symbiotic relationship through the funding of this program and creating the equal opportunity of design and development that feeds into each other's logistical supply chain, but also leans in on each of the two entities, both international and local's capabilities and capacity. And that's just sort of quite simplistically how we're running the end-to-end and being able to meet the objectives of development of capabilities, locally fostering international relations, and also building up in terms of the pipeline of demand creation for the space sector within the region.

How do you decide the type of projects you're going to work on and what those partnerships are going to look like with each of those projects? So we look at it from a program to program perspective. We have a space science and technology roadmap. It fits in on our overarching research and development program within the country and also fits in with our commercialization and advanced technology development programs. Again, that is at the national level.

So we've identified the technologies and we've identified which parts of the subsectors within the space industry is there is sort of room for entry. So the burden of entry and the risk of entry is quite low, relatively speaking. So based on that, we start designing programs. So our exploration program was designed to build in capabilities that we currently don't have

in the country. Our Earth observation, so the spacecraft that I spoke about, the CERB constellation of spacecraft was designed in terms of demand for products and services that come out of it. We also have an entire vertical that actually focuses on increasing demand for space products and services. There's a lot of data that's currently available on Earth, but utilization, for example, in climate change applications, in agriculture applications, in marine coast monitoring applications is not as extensively used. So we also fund the downstream enablement program

and support for acquiring data and analytics capabilities to be able to get value out of space data. So it's not only hardware based, but we also look at the analytics capabilities within the country. And then underlying all of that is how do you, we always try to address the question of through all of these programs, how do we decrease the cost of starting a business here? And how do we decrease the natural overhead that exists within the space sector today? And one mechanism to do that is to create infrastructure as a service. So we're looking today at designing a program with a few partners for providing, for example, ground station and ground segments and operations as a service. And then same thing

with regards to your clean room facilities where you would design and develop. So those are also areas that we look at. So it's not only the programs themselves, it's the enabling ecosystem and infrastructure that needs to be very well understood and very well understood into where the investments should go and how you should be able to facilitate the growth of the private sector here. You're moving very quickly. How quickly has the program grown? And I guess how quickly based on how you're measuring it has this space economy within the country,

within the region grown? So it has been quite a rapid growth. I've started working in my career in 2009 within the space sector our design and development capabilities were only three years underway during that time our commercial space was there at that time again from the early 2000s so not not a very long time you're talking about a bit over two decades of investments uh the space sector. So it has been a fast and rapid growth for the space sector and the space industry here in the Emirates. But it comes naturally because we started our space sector

and our space investment at a time where cost of access to space was rapidly decreasing. New opportunities, again, for access to space was rapidly opening up. And then the cost of spacecrafts and the design and development mechanisms again, were have, have gotten to a point where the risk has been lowered significantly since then, since the nineties and with the advent and advancements in technologies. So we benefited from great failures in the past within the space sector and new

opportunities of growth that has been driven by the global space community to be able to enable the rapid growth that we've gone through. In terms of just costing and values, we've seen just year on year almost 76.8% of total expenditure on R&D in the space sector. We've seen an increase in scientific publications, roughly an 80% increase between 2020 and 2021. We've also seen a growth in the expenditure of commercial space sector of well over 40%. And that shows a very healthy space sector. We have 80 entities today operating in the UAE space sector.

We are working quite actively with individuals and companies that are willing to enter into the space sector and, again, fostering partnerships. So there is great investment that's going into this. We've started our own fund as a space agency that's well over $800 million over the course of the next 10 years. And the country has invested over the course of the next 10 years. And the country has invested over the course of the last 10 years, $9.8 billion into the sector. And this investment will continue down the line with

regards to the programs that we currently have in the pipeline, in development, and also in the planning as well. Do you think this would have been possible before? I mean, I have these conversations so often, this idea of the democratization of space because of what commercial capabilities and now the cost to get to space and that falling, but that has enabled. And I wonder if you think that this template would have been able to be applied, you would be able to do this if it were 10 years ago or 20 years ago or a different time period where we didn't have so much commercial activity? No, if we had started, I think, so if I take the starting points around 2006, if we had started five years prior to that,

I don't think we will be where we are today. The timing of starting this, the rapid expansion that we saw in the from 20 around 2010 over the course of that decade and the state of the space sector then allowed us to be where we are today. Any earlier, I don't believe that we would have had the right growth trajectory and the right focus areas in terms of development, nor the right partnerships in place. This democratization of space widening up the entry into the sector and disruption there was a lot of technological disruption that happened over the course of the last decade and a half where new people entering into the space sector brought in a completely different mindset of design and development and took it away from the typical heavy bespoke design and development approach

to a more lean engineering approach that doesn't take a lot of historical baggage in the way to be able to develop that. And it's because of that sweet spot that the UAE came into that we're able to be where we are today. And now I understand that this creates jobs, it diversifies and grows the economy. But the innovation to the technology that you expect to glean from this process, whether it's on the human space exploration side, or whether it's communications satellites, or whether it's asteroid belts, or even the partnership with the iSpace partnership

with Japan, which didn't work, but I realize you're already setting ahead on another lunar lander possibility. What do you expect all of this is going to bring back, I guess, to the economy, in addition to the creation of jobs? So return on investment is what we're looking at, and hence why we're ensuring that any financing of these programs down the line start going into the private sector locally and fostering partnerships globally in terms of return. So it is direct returns on investment on the economy. So your typical exploration missions have an amazing ripple effect. So any human space flight program, any scientific exploration program always has great implications when it comes to,

for example, for us, our risk appetite increased significantly. And that's quite remarkable considering the advancements that we need to have in technology in other sectors. And we've seen advancements over the course of the last just two years in the UAE entering into artificial intelligence, into driving the agenda there,

and also driving capabilities down that realm. So that has been an extensive ripple effect that the space programs usually create in terms of mindset and appetite for risk. Then once we go into our current programs, it's more about growth of the space sector itself and growth of the space industry itself and having direct impact on the economy and not only indirect impact on the economy. What we're estimating is over the course of the next two years to have this industry

to be about one to $2 billion into our economy and then start growing from there. But laying down the foundational work is quite important to be able to build a very robust ecosystem that doesn't need to rely only on public funding, but can also rely on investments and demand creation globally to be able to increase its footprint in the global sphere. Now we see as space becomes, gets built out and becomes a bigger part of the economy back on Earth, and we are also seeing it as critical infrastructure and as contested domain. And you see that in the US, for example, with the standing up of the Space Force and this idea that it becomes a warfighting domain. How is the UAE

approaching that, especially as we do see geopolitical tensions flare here on Earth? So through diplomacy, we believe strongly that space should not be in the rapport of any politician, nor should it be something that is brought into any form of geopolitics. The reason for that is the area of space that we all need to use and rely on for our daily lives. And that's where new communication spacecrafts exist today, where our Earth observation and data driven sort of spacecrafts existed always. And that's low Earth orbit is congested. It will continue to get congested. And if we are not able to coordinate and speak to each other appropriately and utilize the right channels of diplomacy, we will lose a valuable resource around Earth that is finite and

not infinite. We always think of space as infinite, but the area of space around Earth that we require our spacecrafts to be in is indeed finite. The other aspect that comes to it is we do believe strongly in the importance of dialogue. And we've launched a platform to be able to continue engaging last year through the Abu Dhabi space debate that looked at all these different areas of contention and all these sort of areas

that we're not really publicly speaking about. And this is an annual event that we'll hold every other year. So our next event will be held next year in 2024. And what we've brought together is the Space Force, the defense sector, the commercial space sector, the civilian space entities, so space agencies from around the world, scientists, and also foreign ministers, ministers of foreign affairs from countries around the world. The reason for that is if we're not discussing this all together, if we don't understand how the shared resource is going to be used and how it needs to continue to be used for peaceful uses. We will enter into conflict zone.

We believe that this is an area that should not be conflicted and it's an area that should be shared for the betterment of humanity and not for the propagation of geopolitical situations happening here on Earth today. We do see this war between Israel and Hamas right now. You do have international partnerships, including I2U2 that involves Israel. Is there any risk that some of these relationships change or evolve given everything

that is happening on Earth? So it's the same, like I said, science and technology, the space sector for us is not part of a geopolitical movement. So most of our partnerships today in space and also in science and technology need to remain ongoing, regardless of any political situation. So we're not holding back on anything. The current partnerships that we have in place are continuing down the line and creating new opportunities for collaboration and coordination needs to continue down the line. Science is just a beautiful language. So is space, of bringing nations together from so many

different backgrounds. It has taken that role for decades past. Unfortunately, some countries and some nations around the world today are politicizing that. We're not going to jump on that bandwagon of politicizing science, politicizing technology, politicizing space, we would rather take a step back and ensure that that remains a common language for humanity and continues partnerships on that realm. I do wanna talk a little bit about your background because as you mentioned,

it is one of the youngest space agencies in the world and you've risen through the ranks very quickly and very successfully as well. And just love to hear a little bit about how you got here. I started working in the space sector completely by accident. So it was at the beginning of what is today known as the Muhammad Rashid Space Center, which is a local research center that is set up to develop capabilities within engineers at the time that I started. And I started working on our device that's one device that to program as a computer engineer. And I slowly went through the ranks started working in around 2013, move from our

Earth observation program to our newly created space exploration program around the same time as the space agency being created and starting to work sort of on the elements of what then became our emirates mission to mars or emirates mars mission the hope probe and then continued on i was appointed in 2017 in parallel to completing my work in the space sector under the emirates mars mission as a minister of state for advanced sciences to expand the portfolio of the space sector under the Emirates Mars mission as a minister of state for advanced sciences to expand the portfolio of science and technology within the country and also start infusing research development policies and prioritization and eventually also funding for research and development

all the way to commercialization in that field and start chairing the space Agency in July of 2020. Is there a certain project you are most excited about? There's quite a few programs that I'm quite excited about. I think all of us here at the Space Agency and at the space sector also in the UAE with various entities are quite passionate about what we do. The mission to the asteroid belt is, I think, the most exciting.

The MBR Explorer, it's a highly complex mission. It pushes the boundaries even further than the Emirates Mars mission, which is a good natural progression of even increasing complexity on this spacecraft utilizing our past knowledge of of exploring mars but the interesting element is the enablement so um it shows sort of a closed loop in terms of uh purpose and objectives where we started off our exploration program to develop science and technology capabilities and today with our next next mission we're bringing this sort of full circle to actually transfer that capabilities onto the private sector and be able to advance capabilities there. And that ensures that capabilities doesn't remain within the remit of a single entity, but becomes the remit that moves on to the scope of the overarching ecosystem.

And that for me creates a very healthy environment for growth and continued support for a sector. So I think that summarizes what I'm really excited about. The second is our continued advancement in science and technology and our strong belief on the importance of research and development as a key driver for growth for our country. And that's an area that I enjoy working on thoroughly with my colleagues, both across government and also within the commercial industry here in the country. Final question for you. What do you think, and not just in the Emirates, but across the world, across the globe, what do you think the space economy looks like 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now?

So 10 years from now, I believe we would have globally unlocked the potential of commercial use of low Earth orbits. And that's both spacecrafts and also human space flights to low Earth orbit from a commercial perspective. Exploration will continue on, I think, to the moon and beyond as the overarching global program. I'm optimistic about global collaboration. So diplomacy having a key role in addressing the issues of space debris and addressing the issues of any form of deconfliction in space in that realm. 20 years from now, I think that requires a lot of changes. Just the pace of growth that we're seeing at the space sector and the various elements that are coming into play

makes it, I think, difficult, at least for myself, to predict in 20 years where the space sector will be. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.