For the Moon, DARPA’s strengths are not in developing infrastructure but instead architectures for interoperability. (credit: ESA/P. Carril)

DARPA’s real lunar opportunity: Build the operating system, not the outpost

by Michael B. Stennicke
Monday, November 17, 2025

When DARPA announced new programs on lunar logistics and autonomy, most headlines focused on spacecraft and hardware. Yet the real frontier the agency can shape is architectural, not mechanical.

The organization that once seeded the Internet can now do something comparable for the Moon by defining the protocols that will allow autonomous systems to coordinate, account, and trade without continuous human supervision.

A third industrial world

Lunar operations cannot rely on terrestrial command structures. Latency, radiation, and cost make constant oversight impossible. Once equipment is on the surface, it must detect, decide, and repair on its own. That is not strategic independence; it is merely a longer supply chain.

DARPA’s comparative advantage has never been building hardware; it is building architectures that let hardware cooperate.

Mining companies understand extraction and capital scale; launch firms understand access. The missing domain—the one that will determine who truly controls production—is the machine domain: fleets of autonomous miners, smelters, and fabricators operating on local inputs and governed by software rather than sovereignty.

Why DARPA is the catalyst

DARPA’s comparative advantage has never been building hardware; it is building architectures that let hardware cooperate. Just as ARPANET connected isolated computers into a resilient network, DARPA could now prototype an Interplanetary Industrial Protocol (IIP) linking lunar assets into a single economic fabric.

The agency’s mandate should not be to construct another base. It should be to define an open Lunar Operating System: frameworks governing how autonomous units communicate, meter resources, and self-govern in a zero-trust environment. This would ensure interoperability before national or corporate silos harden.

From hardware race to system design

A lunar operating system would rest on three technical pillars:

Autonomy: self-healing, learning control systems able to re-plan tasks and recover from faults without waiting for Earth.
Recursion: manufacturing processes that reuse local material to fabricate spares and expand capacity, enabling exponential growth instead of linear scaling.
Protocolized governance: cryptographically verifiable ledgers metering every joule and kilogram of output, allowing transparent trade, insurance, and audit among machines.

Together these create industrial deterrence by design: Resilience through architecture rather than defense through force. A network that repairs and rebalances itself cannot easily be coerced or cornered.

Strategic payoff

For the United States and its allies, seeding this architecture would be a strategic multiplier. It embeds openness and accountability—the hallmarks of the free-market order—into the industrial DNA of space before authoritarian models take root.

Instead of racing to claim regolith, the US could define the standards by which regolith is processed and exchanged. That approach leverages DARPA’s strengths: interoperability, pre-commercial R&D, and risk tolerance. A Phase 0 program might build simulation environments, data schemas, and security models; later performers could deploy prototype nodes on the lunar surface under Artemis or Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) missions. The deliverable would not be a single installation but a reference model any operator can adopt.

Avoiding a new Cold War in space

If the first Space Race was about presence, the next is about persistence. Hardware can be copied; architectures shape economies. Defining the operating system of lunar industry is how the United States can ensure long-term access and stability without weaponizing the frontier.

DARPA’s legacy is not rockets or weapons, but instead systems that outlast them. From GPS to ARPANET, its greatest contributions turned experiments into global infrastructure. The Moon offers the same opportunity on a larger stage.

The race will not be won by who lands first or digs deepest, but by who writes the rules the machines follow. That is the architecture DARPA should fund: an operating system for civilization beyond Earth.

Michael B. Stennicke is founder of Vitruvian Space Systems and author of the Industrial Economics of Civilization Expansion (IECE) series. The views expressed are his own.

Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted.