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

It will be 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 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 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.

“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.”

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.

One area the Space Policy Center plans to tackle is the crowding 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.

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.