Session 12. 1. B.

Outer space infrastructure development presents unique challenges and opportunities in managing legacy systems within a rapidly evolving environment. Contributing to the debate of governing coupled infrastructure systems, we apply Eric S. Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" model to illustrate a space infrastructure development evolutionary path to resilience and robustness called ‘Cosmolocalism’. We build our argument upon Raymond’s model's main conclusion for producing software: bottom-up open coordination mechanisms can produce more reliable and innovative solutions than top-down rigid models.

The ‘Cathedral’ model, epitomized by the Soyuz and Apollo programs during the Cold War, represents centralized, proprietary technology development. Since the 2010s, the boom of commercial space exploitation known as ‘New Space’ has provided a platform for ‘merchants’ (e.g., SpaceX) to ‘enter the cathedral’, increasing the speed of space technology launched into orbit. The principal trajectory of the current 'Cathedral-New-Space' model is the Artemis Accords, a geopolitically polarized platform aiming to create the space infrastructure necessary to exploit the Moon. This situation comes with new challenges in ‘social’ (regulatory paralysis and stakeholder polarization) and ‘natural’ (accumulation of orbital debris) infrastructure.

In contrast, the ‘Bazaar’ model operates as decentralized and collaborative technology development favouring shared and publicly available knowledge and problem-solving through broad community participation. This model is emerging from ‘soft’ and ‘human’ infrastructure development, leaning on what gradually discovered blueprints of technology production and governance similar to what happened in open-source software development.

To conclude, we introduce cosmolocalism as a bazaar-like framework for producing shared space infrastructure. Here, globally shared digital commons combine with local production capabilities. A noteworthy case of cosmolocal space infrastructure development is the ESTCube-LuNa consortium, developing propellantless interplanetary solar wind propulsion technology. Started by a group of space enthusiasts, it evolved into a network of research centres sharing resources to locally produce space technology.

Over a dozen nations have expressed plans to engage in robotic and human missions to the Moon. The Artemis campaign explicitly aims for sustainable exploration, and its current plans include crewed and robotic operations on the lunar surface. With growing interest in lunar surface exploration and sustainability goals, it is important and timely to explore what lunar surface sustainability means. Based on a survey among diverse stakeholder groups, we derive insights into the different dimensions of lunar surface sustainability.
We use the coupled infrastructure systems framework for evaluating lunar surface sustainability. By understanding the interactions of diverse actors in the operations and political economy of moon missions, we aim to identify critical trade-off situations. We will apply the CIS framework to the lunar south polar region, a location of interest for multiple governmental, commercial, and other actors.

Combating environmental degradation requires global cooperation. Institutional designs for such efforts need to account for human behavior. In this talk, I will use the voyage of the Titanic as an analogous case to learn from, and use behavioral insights to identify critical aspects of human behavior that serve as barriers or opportunities for addressing the global environmental challenges we face. Based on an analysis of existing international organizations focused on how human behavior and institutions intersect, I will describe a set of public goods that may help us mitigate aspects of human behavior that act as barriers to collective action and leverage behaviors that promote it. Finally, based on insights from this analysis applied to existing institutional solutions for global environmental protection, I will present a set of institutional design features that, if adapted to better account for human behavior, could lead to more effective institutional solutions to global environmental problems.