Professor Russell Boyce

COSPAR 2021 Chair

Colleagues – we find ourselves at the close of COSPAR 2021. In one way, at the end of a journey. At a deeper level though, simply the close of a chapter in the ongoing story of global space research – but a chapter that marks a pivot from an old way of doing things, towards what we must do as the world adapts to the long term implications of a global pandemic.

Allow me to recount to you some of the highlights of this chapter; to acknowledge some of the challenges we faced along the way; and to reflect on what I truly believe to be the deeper significance of this week. During the events of the week, we all engaged with an extremely high quality COSPAR scientific program. There were 615 sessions, each delivered twice; over 2,000 scientific presentations; and three excellent workshops led by our anchor sponsor Lockheed Martin. Over 2,000 delegates were active on the platform each day. From the app, there have been over 2,000 downloads, more than 117 thousand page hits, and the number keeps rising. The assembly website has had over 11,000 users accessing content.

Alongside the scientific content, over 60 young future space research stars, many of them women, thirsty to become self-aware and to become the best leaders they can be, took part in some world-class leadership training. COSPAR 2021 has made a concerted effort to engage and assist the next generation.

And the COSPAR-K STEM space adventure, including the COSPAR Teach the Teachers program, engaged virtually with well over 600 school kids and teachers and the public. All of this signals that international space research, in a rich variety of ways, has a very bright future in the years and decades to come. However, the successes have not been without challenges. There have been technical challenges, teething problems with the technology, and with some of the implementation approaches and the manner in which available resources were able to be allocated across sessions. There was also misunderstanding by the chairs, speakers and delegates, as to their part in the process and as to the capabilities of the platform to enable the desired outcomes. These issues led to considerable frustration early in the Assembly.

Together we - the organisers and the entire delegate base worked together on being part of the solution – responding energetically to the challenges through a continual process of engagement, communication and implementation of improvements to functionality and process. Quickly, the challenges were tackled one by one, and your experience of the Assembly and the richness of your engagements with each other, stepped up and up, session by session and day by day.

So let’s step back a little to reflect. Was COSPAR 2021 been a success? I say yes, for the following reason.

2020 disrupted and changed the world, probably forever. As a result of COVID-19, the conference sector was shaken up. Many conferences were cancelled, while many others simply moved their programs onto 11 platforms such as zoom, which offered the web-based presentations we are all used to, but which were very unlike the real experience of gathering together in a venue, and which we know were enormously frustrating to most conference attendees across the globe.

For COSPAR 2021, we decided to take on a huge (and risky) challenge. We decided to invest in an approach that would be a first significant step towards the future of large scientific gatherings. The implementation had to be bespoke and we had to scramble to develop it. What we were able to implement was a very good step towards replicating the in-person conference experience. The virtual platform sought to replicate the complex opportunities of a physical convention centre. The app provided the navigation tool for the program. Getting used to this implementation at the start of the conference was, for the participants, not unlike the somewhat chaotic settling-in period at the start of any conference. And of course, there was the technical troubleshooting and the need to boost information transfer that I referred to earlier. Just like a large face to face event, the implementation and the experience rapidly improved from day to day.

COSPAR 2021 was a deliberate effort to be an early adopter of disruptive technology and approaches to position COSPAR in a good place in the early upheaval of a global sector. Did we make mistakes, and could we have done it better? Absolutely. The early implementations of disruptive approaches are rarely perfect, and the virtual conferences of the future and the communities that embrace them are going to keep learning and improving. But we can be super proud of what has been achieved in this conference. Via the technology, you had many rich engagements with the program and with each other, in a venue-like platform; you experienced some exciting offerings in the parallel workshops, on other disruptive technologies, on law and ethics, and on leadership; and you helped the development of a wonderful STEM legacy. You did all this in your time zone. In fact, the stats are showing us almost equal proportions of delegates on the platform split between the two time blocks. And you’re able to access all of the content on-demand until the end of 2021, rather than just the content you could physically tune into across the course of a week. That access is via both the app and the platform, and it includes the opportunity to keep interacting between speakers and delegates via the Q&A function. Despite the pandemic, the life and energy and interaction across our global space research community will be more vibrant throughout this year as a result.

Some may say we shouldn’t have gone down this path. In fact, we took a very large first step towards the conferences of the future, and despite some obstacles along the path, it was a very successful first step. I am looking forward to seeing how future COSPAR assemblies take us further on the journey.

Some sincere thank-yous are in order. Thanks to our sponsors and supporters – our anchor sponsor Lockheed Martin, the NSW State Government, the Australian government and its various space-related agencies, the Australian Academy of Science CNES, JAXA, Microsoft, and the University of New South Wales. Thank you to the incredible efforts of the Local Organising Committee, to the wonderful team at ICMS Australasia, to our scientific program chair Professor Iver Cairns, and to the COSPAR President Len Fisk and the COSPAR Secretariat. All of you have pulled some huge hours and worked tirelessly throughout the last week as we have gone on this journey. Thank you to the members of the COSPAR Council, the Commission Chairs, Main Scientific Organisers and Deputy Scientific Organisers, for your efforts throughout the week, in responding to the challenges and assisting with the solutions. Finally thanks to all of you, the entire delegate base, who have demonstrated the exceptional international cooperation that our space research effort depends upon.

On behalf of the Australian space research community, we are privileged to have played the role of host of the 43rd Assembly. Thank you for joining us here in Australia for what I am sure is a pivotal chapter of COSPAR’s story.

Lennard A Fisk

COSPAR President

So, was our adventure into a Hybrid Assembly worthwhile? Absolutely. It is a reality that all future COSPAR Assemblies will have to be hybrid. We need to learn from COSPAR 2021, build on what went well, and change what didn’t. I am grateful to Russell Boyce, chair of the Local Organizing Committee, Iver Cairns, the Chair of the Program Committee, and their Professional Conference Organizer, ICMS Australasia, for having the courage and foresight to recognize that we must transition our Assemblies from what worked in a pre-pandemic world to the realities of a post pandemic world.

I have been President of COSPAR for six and a half years, and during that time I have been responsible for three Assemblies. Each, in varying degrees of severity, experienced a disruptive external event. The worst of course was COSPAR-2016 in Istanbul, which was cancelled due to a military coup. However, before the coup, the Assembly was a failure because terrorism in Europe and Turkey had reduced attendance to just a few hundred participants. We even tried at the last minute to have some virtual participation, but it was too late and proved unnecessary because of the coup. COSPAR-2018 in Pasadena was an excellent in-person Assembly, but as often happens visa problems kept key participants from attending. And now we have COSPAR 2021 which was completely disrupted by an unexpected pandemic. As a matter of good business practice, we need to make our Assemblies more robust to inevitable disruptions from external circumstances. That means that in the future all Assemblies will have to be hybrid, or at least with the capability to be hybrid.

Our next COSPAR Assembly is in Athens in July 2022. While I have every hope that it will be primarily an in-person Assembly, there will have to be a virtual component as well. Our future world is too unpredictable. COSPAR-2022 needs to be hybrid so that no matter what external event befalls us we can have an Assembly that is an unqualified success. Thus, we have to take the lessons from COSPAR 2021 and apply them to COSPAR-2022. And we need to begin planning and preparing now. Not three months in advance, as we were forced to do for COSPAR 2021, but now, 18 months in advance of COSPAR-2022. We need to engage with the organizers and participants of COSPAR 2021, not only to learn what could have been done better, but to have them participate in implementing COSPAR-2022. We have to examine new technologies that may become available to make hybrid Assemblies better. And we need most of all to test and verify the platform for COSPAR-2022-Hybrid, so there are no surprises and no confusion when we go live in July 2022.