A Roadmap for Building a Commercial Space Ecosystem Based on Historical Analysis of Establishing Physical, Financial, and Legal Infrastructure in New Economic Environments

Falling barriers to entry, high potential profits, and the laissez-faire regulatory environment are driving rapid growth in the space industry. The problem with uncontrolled growth is that individual actors usually act independently and in their own self-interest. In the space sector, this creates a textbook ‘tragedy of the commons’ scenario where these actors inadvertently create a plethora of negative externalities in a shared common space, like the proliferation of space debris. While in the long term, space will be an extremely lucrative frontier with several potential value streams including extractive, scientific, constructive, and existential, we are not there yet. In order to avoid these dangers and effectively utilize these advanced value streams, humanity needs to build up our financial, legal, and physical infrastructures for new space development. The purpose of this paper is to turn the lofty dream of space development into a prescriptive action plan for building quality infrastructure to control, encourage, and protect productive growth. The investment in building a raised bed garden is a good metaphor for infrastructure development because it is not the end product, rather it creates fertile ground for future development. Physical infrastructure, like the walls and lattices of a garden, provides structure and helps to support and foster rapid new growth. Legal and policy infrastructure, like planting guidelines, helps to define boundaries and best practices. Financial infrastructure, like water and nutrients, supports long term growth and sustainability. Taken together all three encourage productive growth and minimize negative externalities through standardization, capacity building, and sustainability. This paper asserts that the same systems and structures used in terrestrial infrastructure development are also necessary for productive space development. Infrastructure development has a rich historical record, from the uncontrolled expansion of the gold rush to trade expansion after WWII to the multiple attempts at building the Panama Canal; each of these examples have demonstrated how humanity deals with growth on a large scale and what methods were effective. This historical record is an excellent overlay for framing the strengths and weaknesses of current space development. The methodology of this paper is to build out a nine-block grid created by the confluence of the three types of infrastructure and the three metrics of effectiveness: standardization, capacity building, and sustainability. This formulaic approach is meant to condense and sort information into a targeted action plan, based on historical best practices, to transition humanity to a new economic ecosystem, this time, in space. The resulting matrix will be critical for enabling well-informed decisions for interdisciplinary stakeholders to support safe, economically productive, and sustainable space infrastructure for realizing the dream of space development.