Space Infrastructure Supermodularity

NASA states a goal of enabling a competitive future lunar economy. There is consensus that infrastructure is key to the foundation of any economy, and typical priorities are power, communications, and transportation. This article proposes that coordinated multi-agent systems may be important to space infrastructure development for its impact on the structure of systems development, operations, and the resulting economy. The nature of the exploration architecture problem, with high mission investment demanding high capability requirements across all systems, includes many domains that are not the reason or core focus of each mission developer. Classical multi-agent coordination includes human work groups and while it encompasses cooperative and competitive contexts, NASA programmatic policy language suggests a goal of cross-incentivization, or supermodularity in terms of economics and game theory - implying a competitive environment. How can we define methods of encouraging strategic complementarity and discouraging the pursuit of substitutive strategies? Here, we use an example of physical modularity to illustrate potential methods of achieving these goals and describe how it may be functionalized - such as through cross-domain modular interface standardization. The cross-cutting nature of this example expands the potential of autonomous coordination, which may be necessary for spatial and temporal optimization of resource and capability utilization, to lower system costs and achieve higher system efficiency. It also promises to extend autonomy to higher levels of abstraction - such as with the ability to describe and execute objectives at a mission level.