Closing the Silicon Gap: A hierarchical autonomous architecture for lunar industrialization

Long-term lunar infrastructure is limited not only by launch mass, but also by the difficulty of reproducing complex terrestrial supply chains on the Moon. This paper defines the “Silicon Gap” as the gap between the components needed for autonomous lunar growth and the smaller set that an early lunar ISRU system could realistically manufacture. In the proposed partition, high-complexity electronics, reactor-related hardware, precision sensing, communication, and actuator elements remain Earth-supplied, while bulk structural materials, simple energy-storage elements, deployable infrastructure, and selected low-complexity spares are treated as locally producible within a reduced-order model. To address this constraint, the architecture concentrates high-complexity functions in a protected “Broodmother” (BM) manufacturing and control node, while repetitive field operations are assigned to simpler “Constructive Automata” (CA). Continuous power is provided by a compact sodium-cooled fission module, represented by a nominal electrical cap of 40 kW e within a 150 kW t h design envelope. These values are architectural scenario parameters instead of validated reactor specifications, and the model does not validate radiator design, MRE/VDM/MSE process physics, or manufacturing tolerances. A reduced-order simulation couples energy supply, material inventories, manufacturing queues, agent deployment, and simplified failure/recovery behavior. Model-level success is defined narrowly as energy closure, avoidance of scheduler deadlock, local production of represented parts and infrastructure, bounded CA failures, and completion of staged bootstrap milestones under stated assumptions. The results indicate that a hierarchical ISRU-driven bootstrap layer is architecturally plausible within the model, but should be interpreted as conceptual system evidence rather than engineering validation. The main contribution is a structured system hypothesis and reproducible framework for evaluating reduced-resupply lunar industrial architectures.