Just over a month ago, a unique gathering occurred at the Holiday Inn Golden Mile in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The event, facilitated by four visionary leaders from the Laboratory for Space Research (LSR) at the University of Hong Kong, the European Chamber of Commerce, the Harilela Group, and BDJ Capital, brought together over 30 senior stakeholders from top institutes, commercial interests, big business, academia, major chambers of commerce, and finance, legal, investment groups and insurance groups. The aim was to develop a concise set of serious policy suggestions for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government to exploit the NewSpace economic opportunities.

NewSpace is the growing private space industry that includes companies developing and launching small satellites, building space habitats, and exploring new frontiers beyond Earth’s orbit. The diverse attendees discussed, deliberated, and defined the scope of NewSpace opportunities for the HKSAR and identified key priorities relevant to all stakeholders. These were then distilled into a serious submission of eight policy recommendations, successfully submitted to the HKSAR government on April 3. It has been very well received. We can see how far the dial moves now, but the signs are encouraging.

In parallel, much has been made lately of the low-altitude economy (LAE) and the opportunities it brings the HKSAR. The LAE encompasses activities and services in the lower regions of Earth’s atmosphere. This has considerable potential to reshape industries, urban spaces, and our daily encounters with technology. The tremendous advances in artificial intelligence, scalable, interdependent networks, and how we interact with these systems are at the vanguard of all this. It is exciting and challenging but achievable. However, there is one piece of joined-up thinking that does not seem to appear and that is that there is no LAE without the high-altitude NewSpace economy that provides all LAE systems with their telemetry so they know where they are to a high degree of accuracy at any moment.

These two areas are intricately linked. One thing is sure: If we seize these opportunities, Hong Kong can immediately boost its GDP by up to 5 percent in the coming years through the NewSpace and related LAE industries. This is by leveraging our superconnector capacity, mighty insurance securities pillar, investment and fintech excellence, and use of English as the international language of aviation, aerospace, commerce, banking, and much else. This GDP growth estimate is based on a similar NewSpace policy to what we propose, as adopted by the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Luxembourg is a close analog to Hong Kong in several respects, based on its financial focus, small land area, and educated population, but without our mini tertiary education superpower status, access to formidable and concentrated talent, and adjacency to a world-class manufacturing hub. Hence, we can do much better. This is especially true given our opportunities to link to the burgeoning China Space Program, which is the second in terms of rocket launches. Nowhere in Europe (Luxembourg) or Singapore is even close to this advancement of SpaceTech that we can leverage.

However, the elephant in the room for all of this is the question of the sustainability of the space environment and, particularly, the low Earth orbit (LEO) ecosystem situated 200 to 1,600 kilometers above the Earth’s surface and the orbital home into which thousands of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites are being launched and where China’s own, soon-to-be-competing, Thousand Sails satellite constellation and others are being placed. Continued access to the LEO affects and influences much of humankind’s ability to monitor and manage our planet sustainably via the key tools of remote sensing satellites. Only the wealth of global “eyes in the sky” enables us to accurately measure and follow the growing impacts of climate change on every planetary ecosystem in granular detail as we move ever further away from a sustainable future.

The impactful Space Sustainability Conference held at HKU from Dec 2-4, and jointly organized by HKU-LSR and the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne, provided inspiration, motivation and support that has enthused many (including among the 70-plus international senior conference participants and field leaders from 21 countries), to consider that Hong Kong is the ideal place to establish a globally important space sustainability hub and NewSpace hub. We can use our globally respected expertise in compliance, regulation, and the rule of law, together with our prowess and reputation as an investment powerhouse, global financial center, and investment and talent magnet, and together with elite university technology incubators to provide the necessary multicomponent framework. These would be effectively and collaboratively deployed to help regulate and fund the enforcement and remediation of this issue for global benefit, which is needed to safeguard the future of the NewSpace economy. According to the World Economic Forum, this will be worth more than $1.5 trillion by the middle of the next decade.

The LSR is also at the vanguard of a significant international proposal for a global R&D space sustainability center as part of joint efforts to establish the HKSAR as a global NewSpace hub. We firmly believe that the HKSAR, as a Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area powerhouse, has an opportunity to become a world leader in this rapidly emerging high-tech industry through swift and coordinated action between government and private enterprise. This is for technology and opportunity today, not tomorrow, through proactive engagement in the NewSpace economy for the HKSAR to capitalize on the current and relevant opportunities for tech advancement and economic growth. Indeed, we cannot tackle sustainability in the broadest sense of securing our planet as a viable ecosystem without access to the data these satellites transmit to Earth. They provide weather monitoring, cloud cover measures, sea level temperature, sea level rise, ice cap melt, forest destruction, desert encroachment, and myriad other parameters that form the basis of monitoring and understanding the health and sustainability of our planet. These data are vital for any serious attempts at managing and moderating our impacts, sustainable development, and safeguarding the NewSpace economy’s future. However, all this capability and much else of modern life we take for granted (such as the space-based internet, the internet of things, and supporting efficient logistics and energy management, including the LAE) is under direct threat from the so-called “Kessler syndrome”. This is a cascading catastrophic collapse of the LEO environment as a viable ecosystem to host all satellites and spacecraft due to the impact of more serious amounts of space debris.

I am honored to be invited by the Chinese Society of Astronautics to the China Space Conference in Shanghai from April 23-25 to speak on the key issue of space debris. This is a sensitive but increasingly hot topic where China can play an internationally essential and leading role. China is not responsible for most of the debris in LEO — that is the legacy of decades of Russian and American space launches of all kinds, but it has contributed. It could now show the world that it is not only a responsible space-faring power but one that can put global issues ahead of purely national ones for the good of all concerned.

The author is director of the Laboratory for Space Research, the University of Hong Kong.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.