Space Exploration Architecture and Design Framework for Commercialization

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new decision-making framework for space exploration that incorporates incentives to promote commercial participation, analyzing interactions between government and industry to optimize infrastructure development.

Contribution

It introduces an incentive-based decision-making framework for space exploration that extends game-theoretic logistics design to include commercial-government interactions.

Findings

Incentive mechanisms can enhance cooperation between government and commercial players.

The framework effectively models stakeholder interactions in lunar habitat deployment.

Results indicate mutual benefits for government and industry through optimized incentives.

Abstract

The trend of space commercialization is changing the decision-making process for future space exploration architectures, and there is a growing need for a new decision-making framework that explicitly considers the interactions between the mission coordinator (i.e., government) and the commercial players. In response to this challenge, this paper develops a framework for space exploration and logistics decision making that considers the incentive mechanism to stimulate commercial participation in future space infrastructure development and deployment. By extending the state-of-the-art space logistics design formulations from the game-theoretic perspective, the relationship between the mission coordinator and commercial players is first analyzed, and then the formulation for the optimal architecture design and incentive mechanism in three different scenarios is derived. To demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, a case study on lunar habitat infrastructure design and deployment is conducted. Results show how total mission demands and in-situ resource utilization system performances after deployment may impact the cooperation among stakeholders. As an outcome of this study, an incentive-based decision-making framework that can benefit both the mission coordinator and the commercial players from commercialization is derived, leading to a mutually beneficial space exploration between the government and the industry.