Speaker
Description
Keywords: Value Focused Thinking, VFT, Planetary Defense Strategy, Brazil
ABSTRACT
Recognised as a leader in Latin America, whether for economic, political or territorial reasons, Brazil has worked to ensure its autonomy in the space sector, despite budgetary constraints and operational difficultie. This is made possible by the National Policy for the Development of Space Activities (NPDSA), established in 1994, which establishes objectives and guidelines for national space programmes and projects, with the National Space Activities Programme (NSAP) as the main ten-
year planning and programming instrument. The PNAE's mission is to plan internal actions for national development and the use of space technologies to solve problems and benefit Brazilian society. An analysis of the PNAE shows that there is no mention of any initiative related to risks of a sidereal nature, perhaps Planetary Defence. In Brazil, planetary defence is a topic limited to a few academic research
groups or a few groups of amateur astronomers. It is well known that the high cost of space infrastructure and technologies makes it impossible for many countries to participate in space-related initiatives, and in the specific case of Planetary Defence, the subject is also not very well understood or disseminated. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to present possible alternatives for planetary defence initiatives that the Brazilian government can implement, taking into account its limitations, before the project is launched. The method chosen to structure this complex problem was Value-Focused Thinking (VFT), which comes from Soft Operational Research, in the subfield of decision making. The method was applied to a group of space-related stakeholders that had previously been identified using a systems engineering approach called Contextual and Behavioural Centric Stakeholder Identification.