Private donors Dale and Patricia Hatfield have given the University of Colorado Boulder $2.5 million to establish a professorship within the university’s new Colorado Space Policy Center.

CU Boulder is launching the Colorado Space Policy Center, which is a research center dedicated to providing evidence-based advice to policymakers regarding space policy decisions in the United States and around the world.

The goal is to help decision-makers navigate an increasingly complicated and crowded space environment.

The university announced on Tuesday that the donation will be used to establish the Hatfield Endowed Professorship in Space Policy and Law within the Colorado Space Policy Center. The professorship, which will rotate to a new person every two years, will drive teaching and research on space policy and law.

CU Boulder aerospace engineering professor Marcus Holzinger will be the first to hold the professorship position.“It’s a singular honor,” Holzinger said. “I’m very honored to be selected for that role. The first person to be selected for any professorship has a lot of responsibility to set the tone and the standards for that professorship, especially since it’s a professorship that (rotates).”

Dan Baker is the director of the new Colorado Space Policy Center. He stepped down from his 30-year role as director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics so he could lead the new center.

He said he has wanted to do this space policy work for more than a decade.

“There are many who are involved in policymaking who don’t have a deep understanding of issues … that they should know more about when they’re going to make complex decisions about where the space program is going,” Baker said.

The center aims to be a nationally and internationally recognized center for excellence for space policy analysis, formulation and advice to policymakers.

“Its mission broadly is to use the inherent capabilities at CU Boulder and to build on the ecosystem of space and aerospace stuff that’s here in the region to conduct research about policy matters, but also to be a venue to bring experts together and to give advice to industries, government and academics,” Baker said. “It’s really geared toward looking at the rapidly changing space landscape that we see.”

Holzinger has done various space-related work throughout his career, including on space debris and norms of behavior in space.

Space debris, also called space junk, is any uncontrolled human-made object in space that’s no longer usable.

There are nearly 1 million pieces of human-made debris floating in space that threaten human space exploration and scientific missions.

Norms of behavior are ideas about what should and should not be done in space, which is complicated because it involves corporations, nations and anyone who owns and launches space vehicles.

“In that situation, especially in the current geopolitical climate, it’s very difficult to come to a consensus on what should or should not be norms of behavior in space,” Holzinger said.

But he wants to find a way to ensure that democracy and the sharing of political power translate into space as well. He wants to ensure humanity is developing space with “the best parts of us,” like values of exploration and discovery.

Holzinger said he’s incredibly excited to jump into the world of space policy.

“(At the end of the professorship), I would like to have generated several policy-like papers and circulated them amongst policymakers in D.C. and potentially the United Nations, and I would like to meaningfully contribute to our nation’s space strategy,” Holzinger said.

The goal of the center and professorship is to help address the legal and policy challenges of space activities while advancing knowledge and preparing leaders to make informed decisions regarding outer space governance.

The donation will also fund research, course development and conference attendance, and the two-year rotating structure of the position is specifically designed to encourage collaboration across CU Boulder’s engineering, law and business schools.

One area the Space Policy Center plans to tackle is the overcrowding of satellites in low Earth orbit.

“It’s an increasingly dense, collision-prone kind of world in lower Earth orbit now, and the possibilities for disastrous collisions are increasing rapidly,” Baker said.

Other topics of interest include space commercialization, international space relations and the interplay between human space exploration and robotic exploration.

“These are pretty core issues with the new rapidly evolving space world that we are looking at,” Baker said.

Donor Dale Hatfield, who’s funding the professorship, is a pioneer in telecommunications policy and is known for his leadership in government and academia, according to a release.

He began his career as chief of the Office of Plans and Policy at the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C., before moving to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

He then founded a Boulder-based consulting firm before rejoining the FCC as chief technologist, eventually serving as chief of the Office of Engineering and Technology. He is now a distinguished advisor at Silicon Flatirons and an adjunct professor at CU Boulder.

Dale Hatfield and his wife, Patricia Hatfield, have supported the university for years, including an endowed professorship and scholarship fund for the ATLAS Institute, scholarships for the Lattice Scholars program and support for CU Boulder’s law school.

“As humanity ventures beyond our planet, space law and policy have emerged as a new frontier, offering vast opportunities to shape the future of space exploration and utilization,” Dale Hatfield said in the release.

“The realm of space beckons a new generation to establish the legal and policy frame that will govern our cosmic endeavors.”

Baker said there’s no better place for this space policy work to happen than CU Boulder, citing the university’s strength in aerospace and many space-focused companies, institutes and labs in Boulder and across the Front Range.

He said having a center like this will inherently lead to a better space program and enhance national security.

He envisions that the center could, in the future, regularly bring in prominent speakers, hold training sessions, offer a certificate in space policy and hold youth programs.

“It really has interested me greatly to be able to offer to our senators, our congress people, our colleagues in agencies, to offer to them very thoughtful and well thought out advice about what needs to be done and what the pros and cons of taking various steps would be,” Baker said.