Sustainable Development Goals vs Space – 1/2

How the Outer Space could help us to reach the World’s ambitious targets

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All UN member states have a lot to do to accomplish their mission in reaching the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. The first deadline is 2030. Is it feasible? Are these countries doing already enough? What can be done to accelerate this process? Let’s see…

Many people know them, many do not. Sustainable Development Goals are “a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere”, as stated in their dedicated UN website. In a few words, they are a list of seventeen commitments that all the nations have subscribed in 2015 to solve the big troubles of our world. They are not legally binding, of course, and the UN are relying on each single country to take ownership of the goals and implement them by 2030.
After five years, the UN stated that good progress has been made, however, the planned actions have not advanced at the right speed required to reach the targets within the agreed deadline.
2020 should have been the starting point for the initiative named “Decade of Actions”, aimed to speed up the delivery of the global goals. However, something else has distracted the world and we all are aware about that is. The COVID-19 crisis has already put in danger sustainability gains achieved so far in and the UN has urged that a “transformative recovery” must be pursued by nations to address the crisis itself, reduce the risks of other similar crisis and relaunch the SDG initiatives.
What could be one transformative element to help driving such a dramatic change? Outer Space is a particularly good candidate. The potential it could unleash is so huge that, if exploited in the right way, it would be of great help in achieving those much-needed results.
The UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, or UNOOSA, has already done an exercise to understand how space has been helping the achievement of the SDGs (Space4SDGs). However, those contributions could be far more effective if space technologies were pushed to a much higher level.
Here below we will dive into the SDGs, one by one, and suggest some of the contributions that space could bring to them in the short and in the long term.

SDG 1 – No Poverty
Earth Observation technologies (presented already in the article Observing Earth From Space) are helping already in forecasting natural disasters to better coordinate aid provision, in optimising the sustainable utilisation of natural resources and providing efficient support to vulnerable populations.
However, the biggest contribution could come from space resource mining.
Even if not signed by the most important space-capable countries, the UN Moon Treaty introduced a very important principle about space resources: they “are the common heritage of mankind”. In a sense, it means that the wealth generated by their exploitation must be shared between all countries, no one excluded.
The matter is not at all easy to handle, since only the resources in the asteroid belt could be worth trillions of dollars and, as a consequence, they could generate serious issues in the world economy, if not managed carefully. A potential simple solution could be to introduce a license with specific caps to mine in space and a tax for the precious resources brought back to Earth. We could call it the “Space Tax” framework.
Who or what should handle such a huge bureaucratic power? As advocated by the Moon Treaty itself, it should be an “international regime”, possibly an expression of the United Nations themselves (why not directly the UNOOSA?). All the proceeds should then flow through the various UN programs and agencies, also feeding these SDGs and related initiatives. It would be extremely important to avoid giving money directly to local governments, since, especially in the poorest countries, the benefits would never reach the population…

SDG 2 – Zero Hunger
Poverty and hunger are very often the sides of the same coin. Hence, all Earth Observation technologies supporting SDG 1 are already providing benefits even to this goal. They are key in optimising crop productivity through increased efficiency in the use of existing resources and in improving livestock management through enhanced monitoring and identification of suitable grazing.
The Space Tax, proposed above, could be used of course to support SDG 2, fueling programs to sustain developing countries.
Nevertheless, there are other additional and important contributions. To survive in space, there are several projects running to understand how to produce crops with very scarce resources, such as light, nutrients and water. One of the most interesting one is called Greencube, a micro-garden contained in a cubesat (a kind of satellite with small and standard dimensions) that will be placed into orbit in 2021, with the aim of growing plants in space’s extreme environment and managing all the scarce resources contained in it. What will be learnt from this experiment will be of great help also to improve crop production in other environments with very scarce resources. This is just an example of the various experiments that are or will soon be performed in space for crop production!
Finally, in the distant future, farming stations in space could be built with the purpose of producing food for humans living in space and also for those living on the Earth. The limit will be just their dimensions.

SDG 3 – Good Health and Well-being
It might sound repetitive; Earth Observation applications are key tools also for this goal. They are used to identify the ecological, environmental and other factors that contribute to the spread of vector-borne diseases, monitoring disease patterns and defining areas that require disease-control planning. Monitoring air quality and traffic from space is even providing useful information to take actions and mitigate conditions that could harm health and well-being.
Another key element supporting this goal is micro-gravity. Our beloved and almost twenty years old International Space Station is the perfect laboratory to run many life science experiments and studies, from new drug development to stem cell utilization, to fight against cancer. These studies cannot be run successfully on the Earth’s surface because the effect of gravity impacts negatively many chemical and physical processes, such as the artificial growth of crystals, just to mention one of the most known.
In the future we could also think to treat specific diseases directly in space, building special hospital stations to use micro-gravity condition as a direct treatment of specific diseases. Can you imagine that? Instead of standard invasive therapies, it could be enough to get into space for some time to get healthy again. Even if it might seem so, this is NOT science-fiction! For example, a very interesting study highlighted that cancer cells are suffering from the lack of gravity, which prevents them from joining together in cancer tissues. Discoveries like this can be impressive game changers for the medicine of the future!
What else? In the near future we could see also autonomous driving enabled by GPS system, that could decrease significantly the risk of car accidents, or 3D printed human organs produced in microgravity that can be used for transplants.
Not enough? The checkmate will then be to move heavy and polluting industries from the Earth to the Outer Space, eliminating definitely the root cause of many diseases.

SDG 4 – Quality Education
One of the issues of bringing education all around the world is that many students are physically far away from the schools they would like to attend. High-speed internet could help them to take advantage of remote learning and e-learning solutions. However, if a place is far away from schools, it is often far away from the internet infrastructure. What could fix this situation? Soon said: satellite internet constellations, like Starlink from SpaceX, Amazon’s Project Kuiper and the British Oneweb, will very soon provide connectivity all over the world, bringing particular benefits to the remote communities, actually cut out.
Another element boosting this goal is the access to the space environment for educational purposes. Just to cite one initiative amongst many, an ESA funded project called Dream Coder 2.0 is actually providing a group of Italian students with the opportunity to develop and execute code on a platform installed on the International Space Station, allowing them to learn how to interact with the station itself and its main operative parameters.
Space development itself is a huge flywheel for education, since it needs more and more STEM students to work on the new technologies and make new scientific discoveries. It will also boost studies in law and economics to establish new regulations, new business models and supply chains. In addition, the space environment itself allows us to run experiments that could not be conducted on Earth, as already mentioned regarding SDG 3.
In a few words Outer Space needs education to be conquered as much as education needs Outer Space to improve!

SDG 5 – Gender Equality
First, the physical differences between men and women are irrelevant in space: astronauts can be male or female, there are no gender requirements, Extra Vehicular Activities (or EVA) included. In fact, there has already been the first all-female EVA outside the ISS and nobody noticed the difference. All activities have been performed perfectly as planned. The NASA Artemis program itself is aiming to land the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024.
In general, all STEM studies are not gender specific, even if in the past, they were considered a male domain. However, with the increase of requests of students in these fields, many more women are involved. With the further growth required by space technology development, this effect will be even magnified.
UNOOSA itself has launched a specific initiative, called Space4Women, aiming to speed up the already ongoing gender equalization in the space economy.

SDG 6 – Clean Water and Sanitation
This goal is about water management in all its forms, from sourcing, to distributing, using, and purifying. The immediate contribution of space is again the information coming from Earth observation, enabling a better monitoring of water quality and availability, a precise weather forecasting to prevent the effects of floods and droughts and much more.
However, water is considered the new oil in space: the price for a liter of water in space is around 20.000 $. This is why it is extremely important to develop all the technologies that can enable to recycle all the possible water in space (actually on the ISS more than 90% of water is recycled) and to improve them to get closer and closer to full reusability. All the technologies developed for this purpose will also provide many benefits in recycling and purifying water on Earth, removing pollutants and providing clean water to all.
For this goal too, there is a dedicated UNOOSA portal, named Space4Water. Its vision is to enable all stakeholders involved in the space and water communities to access data and knowledge and to realize the full potential of these two worlds combined.

SDG 7 – Affordable and Clean Energy
One of the most known space application, the Global Positioning System, or GPS, is also a big contributor to this goal. Thanks to its extremely precise timing, the GPS signal is a key element in the management of the so called smart grids, which are the new electrical grids allowing the integration of renewable energy resources and energy efficiency resources in the global electrical grid.
Also Earth Observation applications are supporting this SDG, monitoring the critical infrastructures of the electrical grid, providing weather forecast to predict the production of renewable energy sources and so on.
Furthermore, if we think that every hour our beloved sun radiates more than enough energy on Earth to meet global energy needs for a whole year, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that, for this fact alone, space can support the achievement of this goal in a very effective way! It could be even a game changer in power generation. Scientists came to the same conclusion already decades ago, developing a brand new concept called Space Solar Power. Generally, it consists in putting special satellites into orbit, full of solar panels, that could transform solar energy into electricity. This electricity could then be beamed back to the Earth’s surface and be used in the electrical grid. If the concept seems easy to understand, its practical realization is full of engineering problems, as well as economical disadvantages. However, it is a technology that, with the right level of funding, could be developed just in years, not in centuries: it is only a matter of solving technical issues. Japan, China, Russia and, obviously, the US are already working on several projects related to this and you can bet that before this decade is over, we could see prototypes of powersats over our heads.
Last but not the least, in the future we could exploit an element of the lunar surface, the Helium-3, that is one of the most valid candidates as fuel for the future nuclear fusion reactors (as described in the article “A Moon of Opportunities 1/2”), which will most likely free humanity from any energy production issue.

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Oh wow, we have already dealt with a lot of stuff! And we are only just halfway to covering all the SDGs! As you have seen, these goals are extremely challenging and touch upon many of the serious problems that we are facing today. Other important topics will be covered in the next post, to have a complete picture of the entire SDG program. However, what we can already realize is that space was, is, and will increasingly be an important ally in supporting human development without destroying our planet. Becoming Spacepolitans is not only a wish, but day after day it is starting to be a real necessity!