Who are we ?

Cosmos for Humanity is a non-profit NGO based in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. We aim to defend an environmentally and economically sustainable access to outer space for humanity. Faced with the problem of space pollutions and space debris, we are all responsible: governments and the space industry, but also us, citizens and companies.

Today, without us really being aware of it, humanity tends to depend on satellites as much as it depends on electricity: if tomorrow all satellites disappeared, our civilization would falter.

Similarly, our efforts to combat global warming and the pursuit of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals depend on our satellite capabilities: it is now essential to maintain them.

What are our missions ?

1. Develop an indicator (the Outer Space Footprint - OSF) that allows to evaluate the environmental impact of the use of satellite data on the whole value chain: from launchers and satellites operators to end-users, citizens and companies. This indicator is currently being designed in partnership with CNES (the French space agency).

2. Fund the development of an ecosystem dedicated to the sustainable development of space activities. Researchers and startups are currently struggling to find funding because space sustainability is not "hype" or "profitable" at the moment. We need to help them.

3. Promote the incorporation of orbit protection as the 7th EU environmental objective so that OSF documentation is made mandatory for European companies (NFRD / CSRD directives) and that sustainable space activities are considered as "sustainable activities" in the sense of the European Green Taxonomy.

Our "MVP" ?

A non-profit NGO recognized as being in the public interest in Switzerland that allows companies to specifically finance the sustainable development of space activities by benefiting from advantageous taxation.

Our long term objectives :

1. Create a citizen-led eco-label dedicated to studying the outer space environmental impact of companies. Our goal is to create a new way of looking at consumer labels, without the use of trusted third parties and in particular auditing firms that have conflicts of interest with companies.

2. Develop a consumer-chain, thanks to the Cosmos ICS, dedicated to the certification of our label so that the certification can be carried out in a transparent, independent, traceable and unfalsifiable way.

3. Encourage other teams to fork our stack to see other sister labels emerge on the same model for ocean preservation, forest preservation, or simply to verify carbon footprint data provided by companies and make sure it is consistent.

Updates since GR15 and Alpha Round :

• We got the 3rd place in the Swiss ranking of the European Commission’s Cassini Hackhaton with a small tool to visualize on a map the space debris falls listed in the last 10 years.

• We have delivered the second part of our partnership with CNES concerning the OSF. This part is about the general use case of the OSF and of our label, and 4 adoption scenarii.

• We recruited 3 interns to support us this summer, partially thanks to the Alpha round funds received by the “Act Now !” Climate advocacy & activism bundle. Valentina and Rebecca will support us in the field of law and public policy to refine our work on the 3rd part of our CNES partnership. They will also be responsible for making our work and our DeSpace x ReFi perspective accessible to the Italian web3 community. As for Antoine, he will make his first steps with us as a web3 dev in the Cosmos ecosystem!

• We participated to our first ReFi event IRL! (in March 2023, during the Paris Blockchain Week).

What we will do next :

• Participate in the translation of "Greenpilled" into French in order to make the documentation accessible to the ReFi communities in West Africa. These communities could indeed develop by having a particular link with Space thanks to the use of dMRV tools and analysis of satellite imagery data from projects such as Shamba.

• Create educational content to make the English-language studies on "Space as a Commons" accessible to the French, German and Italian-speaking communities to develop the ReFi x DeSpace community in Switzerland, France, Germany and Italy.

• Deliver the 3rd part of our partnership with CNES and publish our report on the OSF concept.

• Operationalize our DAO using the tools offered by DAO_DAO on Juno.

How your donations will be used :

• Securing funding for two interns starting in October.

• Creation of educational content related to the OSF, ReFi and the Commons in French, Italian and German.

• Participate in the funding of a team of researchers currently working on the management of outer space as a Commons and the economic impact of space debris.

First French New Space Conference, 7-8 of July 2022 Cosmos for Humanity's Chairwoman, Claire Elss, debating the issue of a European ESR label to support the sustainable development of space activities with Andrea Vena, ESA's Chief Climate and Sustainability Officer and Laurence Monnoyer-Smith, CNES' Head of Sustainable Development.