14th Annual International Symposium “The Public Face Of Space”

During each academic year, the International Space University (ISU) organizes a three-day symposium as an interdisciplinary, international forum to help both the users and the providers of space-related systems to move forward from the discussion of problems to the formulation of innovative solutions.  As an independent organization, ISU has developed a winning formula for a "different kind of symposium":

• Addressing all aspects of the subject - policy, business, legal, scientific, technical, etc.
• Creating ample time for discussion
• Fostering constructive dialogue among different sectors of the space community, or between different communities, that do not often interact in more specialized symposia.

At each of the past several events we have attracted close to 200 participants from agencies, industry and academia in around 30 different countries.

ISU’s next symposium, the fourteenth in this series of annual events, will address space promotion, education and outreach in a very broad way. In the symposium program we shall also include considerations of public awareness and expectations, as well as workforce development and capacity building, all with the goal of producing recommendations for ways forward towards a sustainable space program.

The attached Call for Papers indicates how we have structured the next event and describes the overall scope and the suggested content of each of six half-day sessions. The program will include invited contributions from leading experts in the field plus presentations and posters selected on the basis of abstracts submitted in response to the attached Call for Papers by the deadline date of 2^nd October 2009. We look forward to receiving your abstracts and we hope that many of you will join us here at ISU Central Campus Building in Strasbourg, France to participate in discussions of this important topic.