Lex Mercatoria Deal-making Between Small Spacecraft In The Outer Solar System

Improved technology and demonstrated use cases have increased interest in small spacecraft swarms. Such swarms could be used to increase the number and location of sensors available for deep space exploration, lowering mission costs, and providing increased opportunities for scientific activity in the Solar System. They may also cooperate economically (e.g. to share scarce resources).

Communicating with spacecraft is inherently challenging, requiring both expensive onboard communications equipment and, historically, direct access to ground stations. NASA’s Mars Cube One (MarCO) mission in 2018 provided relays between the InSight Mars lander and Earth-based ground stations, proving that small spacecraft can be used to facilitate communication between Earth and exploration missions. Onboard communications requirements can be reduced if we imagine a future in which a “neighbourhood” of small spacecraft communicates directly with each other (e.g. via laser links, through emerging technologies of point-to-point and mesh networks).

While spacecraft communications has traditionally been carefully controlled, small spacecraft could cooperate with each other economically in ad hoc and trusted ways, even if their ownership or country of origin differ. Blockchain technologies have been recently proposed to address such cross-jurisdictional concerns, including for space operations in Earth orbit. However, existing blockchain implementations have been recognised as limiting their applicability to space operations (e.g. due to excessive energy usage and significant communication bandwidth requirements between blockchain nodes). The authors propose blockchain properties that would allow lex mercatoria data exchange and economic operations between spacecraft in deep space with limited computational and communications capabilities.