A collaborative research proposal on space infrastructure led by TU Delft has received funding of nearly €2 million from NWO, plus a little over €500,000 in co-funding from several partner organisations. Tanja Masson-Zwaan, an assistant professor in Air and Space Law, is involved in the project as a co-applicant on behalf of Leiden University.
This project is awarded under the KIC call 'Robust and resilient space infrastructure for a safe Netherlands' and is titled: Resident Space Object Tracking for Fusion, Inference and Characterisation.
Last summer Masson-Zwaan was involved in the preparatory group for this NWO KIC call, and partly because of that, the legal aspects became an essential part of the call. 'By recognising that legal, ethical, and strategic security frameworks play a major role in increasing the resilience and protection of space infrastructure, NWO has emphasised the importance of an interdisciplinary approach in solving societal issues. We are pleased that our expertise will bring an important contribution to this project, and that we can appoint a postdoc to conduct research on this topic in the coming years.'
'Recognising the importance of legal, ethical, and strategic security frameworks, NWO highlights the value of an interdisciplinary collaboration.'
Modern society relies heavily on space-based infrastructure for communications, transportation, financial services, and many other essential applications. However, this infrastructure faces growing risks from the accumulation of space debris over decades of space activity. At the same time, existing space traffic management systems are struggling to keep up with the rapid increase in satellite launches.
The RSO TraFFIC project focuses on maintaining and strengthening the Netherlands' technological and scientific capacity in the space domain. The project aims to modernise the systems that support safe space operations by developing advanced sensor technologies for collecting more comprehensive and higher-quality data, innovative algorithms for integrating and analysing these data, and a coherent legal and governance framework for managing Earth orbit as a shared resource in the public interest.
