The rapid pace of space innovation has sparked exponential interest in space’s economic and exploratory potential. This surge is introducing new complexities to account for—not just involving the physics of spaceflight or the objects operating there, but also the growing number of stakeholders making investments in and conducting commerce across the space enterprise.

The Aerospace Corporation is advancing pathfinder concepts for digital trade spaces, creating a shared foundation for the space industry to navigate these complexities, significantly increase efficiency, expand creative possibilities and make integrating end-to-end more achievable for the pioneers deploying new capabilities into evolving space ecosystems.

Shaping a Digital Approach for the Space Enterprise

A common and coordinated approach to engineering and commerce can contribute to efficiencies across U.S. space agencies and the commercial sector to accelerate investment, development, deployment and the evolution of space systems. Evolving a realistic digital ecosystem can enhance cooperation and drive further advancements for the space community to collaborate on integrating systems, data, standards and commercial activities within that digital ecosystem.

“The goal is to bring together this community into a digital commons and establish a foundation for a total set of digital environments for the cislunar ecosystem that is greater than the sum of all of the parts,” said Dennis Paul, Aerospace’s senior project leader for economic and market analysis who co-chairs the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ space ecosystems development task force. “This will help the user community plan more effectively, allow the investment community to understand the return-on-investment and value chains at play and enable the commercial sector to close the business case.”

An effective digital commons for cislunar commerce will require multiple elements of technical and systems infrastructure that can operate at the scale of an entire industry sector: 

• A digital engineering environment that represents the entire physical cislunar ecosystem, helping aggregate market demand for specific capabilities and services;
• An innovation accelerator to help bring those capabilities and services to market more quickly;
• A digital marketplace, where participants can directly conduct business-to-business transactions.

This endeavor will require collaboration by participants from across the space sector, consistent data governance models, and use of cutting-edge technologies, including AI-powered agents for legal, policy, and economics requirements.

“We're really focused on data management, governance and sharing,” said Paul. “Innovators will want to secure their intellectual property to varying degrees, and there will be limitations and quality differences, but we want as much data to be shared as possible. This is extremely critical to building an open, neutral digital enterprise, which organizations operating their own digital twins can use to improve their capabilities.”

First Steps into a Digital Ecosystem

The community is already buying in. A coalition of organizations across the government, commercial, academia and research sectors, including Aerospace, has formed an exploratory coalition called LUNAverse (coined by Studio 52, one of the coalition’s digital development partners) to create a foundational marketplace for developing cislunar space. Through a series of workshops, beginning in July 2024 at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and continuing this year through separate events at NASA Ames Research Center, Space Symposium 40 and ASCEND—these organizations have discussed various applications and requirements for an effective digital environment for a cislunar ecosystem.

Early partners in this effort include several of the organizations involved in the DARPA 10-Year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) Capability Study, which aimed to foster commercial collaboration toward an era of interoperable lunar infrastructure. LunA-10 resulted in a digital cislunar environment complete with engineering and physics models for astrodynamics, gravity, lighting, Line of Sight, illumination and more. The effort brought together digital models of rockets, lunar landers, rovers, power systems, ISRU plants, railroads and other infrastructure to study the first 10 years of the emerging lunar economy.

LunA-10 successes are enduring through collaboration driving formation of LUNAverse. Digital engineering concepts and tools that emerged from LunA-10 may one day serve as a common engineering environment for multiple contributors. For example, Aerospace can run multiple instances of digital engineering tools within high-performance computing environments, testing and integrating models from tools like the Aerospace Cislunar Modeling Environment (ACME) that could then port or interface into an instance of other tools also running in the shared environment. Likewise, commercial or academic innovators can test digital twins and tools within their own environments before integrating them into a digital commons.

As an enterprise-level modelling environment, ACME will enable Aerospace to collaboratively work towards developing a digital twin of the lunar environment. The video above demonstrates the analysis for a PNT simulation on the lunar surface for a notional future mission involving a NASA commercial partner.

Taking Giant Leaps Forward, Together

If adopted by a wider community, such as the LUNAverse consortium, common engineering environments could be governed to preserve participating companies’ innovation capabilities while allowing them the opportunity to share interface and interoperability data with peers. In doing so these developers can facilitate interoperability between and among the technologies and capabilities they are building when deployed to space. Through application and experience, the LUNAverse effort may serve as a pathfinder for guiding development of evolving space ecosystems in other regions of space, including Mars.

“Just as the Moon is a physical proving ground for other regions of space, the LUNAverse is a proving ground for the concept of digital engineering ecosystems,” said Ron Birk, principal director of space enterprise evolution at Aerospace. “The U.S. government is in. Academia is in. International partners are in. The linchpin is the commercial sector—a critical threshold of innovative companies building and delivering capabilities comprising evolvable space ecosystems. They’re in the game and driving progress.”

The next LUNAverse workshop will occur in late October at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Organizations interested in participating in future LUNAverse workshops can contact CSG@aero.org.