CISLUNAR INFRASTRUCTURE REGIMES: From Mission-Centric Sorties to Networked Flow Economies

Space architecture literature contains rich mission plans and subsystem studies but no system-level theory treating the Earth–Moon environment as a persistent infrastructure network. Planning is mission-centric: nodes are waypoints visited episodically rather than sustained service providers. This structural silence leaves critical questions unresolved: at what transport cadence and buffer capacity does an accumulation of missions cohere into a qualitatively different infrastructure regime? Which minimal node configurations effect that transition? We develop a regime-centric framework formalising three discrete cislunar infrastructure regimes — Exploratory, Proto-Industrial, and Industrial — each defined by minimal configurations of Persistent Service Nodes (PSNs) and flow-capacity edges. We introduce a Named Binary distinguishing Mission-Centric (MC) from Network-Centric (NC) cislunar operations, formalise the transition conditions in terms of launch cadence threshold λ*, depot utilisation threshold u*, and buffer scaling exponent β, and prove that each regime transition is a qualitative structural change rather than a continuous gradient. We derive the Strongest Formulation of the cislunar regime claim using the conditional-mechanistic-consequential-honest template, ground the framework in the Internal-Geometry Threshold (IGT) theory of self-referentially self-maintaining systems, confirm structural invariance across three independent engineering domains, and specify a fully pre-registerable Collapse Counter-Scenario (CCS) with quantitative thresholds. Four distinguishing predictions are stated that no mission-centric planning framework makes. Weil Protocol practitioner review is required before submission and is documented as incomplete.