Digital Exploration of the Forever Frontier that is Space: Pathfinder for a Future Space Economy?

New paradigms that quantify and document an increasingly “digital” era of exploration within the dominantly digital economy present opportunities to think and act in new ways over the upcoming decades, especially within the space domain. The concept of a “forever frontier” FF, that is defined here as “Space,” can be merged with “digital exploration” to construct the concept of digital exploration of the forever frontier that is space (DEFF-S) as a framework for evaluating strategic business opportunities in space that today are either unimagined, too hypothetical to be attractive, or not measurable with existing metrics and approaches. Through DEFF-S, we can avoid the setbacks, and missed opportunities of unimagined futures especially involving space as a boundless frontier, by embracing an exploration inspired toolkit, mindset, and digital language approach that limits what has been called “equilibrium thinking.” We suggest that DEFF-S, and its more generalized variant DEFF-X, represents an efficient and effective architecture for evaluating pathways in various emerging business domains (including space) with direct application to the evolving digital economy. Specific examples of potential outcomes for this approach guided by consideration of the role of civil space (NASA) from now into the 2040’s and beyond are discussed.