Six Hypotheses for Accelerating the Lunar Economy (SHALE)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) supports a future model where the United States Government civil space activities, international governments, and commercial industry can rapidly scale up lunar exploration and commerce, enabled and supported by the deployment of an efficiently combined, integrated lunar infrastructure framework.

An integrated framework would upend the current technical paradigm, whereby each lunar lander or activity must organically support all required resources for survival such as power, communications, and data storage. In November 2023, to support civil space and United States commercial space goals in accordance with the National Cislunar Science & Technology Strategy (2022), DARPA launched the 10-Year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) study.

LunA-10 studies the business and technical case for non-terrestrial technology concepts designed to move away from individual scientific efforts within isolated, self-sufficient systems and toward a series of shareable, scalable, resource-driven systems that can operate jointly. LunA-10 focused on creating monetizable services for future lunar users in a mass-efficient manner, while complementing existing NASA and its international partners’ lunar investments.

Specifically, this could support NASA’s Moon to Mars Infrastructure Objectives[1] of creating “an interoperable global lunar utilization infrastructure where U.S. industry and international partners can maintain continuous robotic and human presence on the lunar surface for a robust lunar economy without NASA as the sole user.” This model for operations is envisioned to advance the responsible and safe use of the lunar/cislunar environment. DARPA envisions the continuation of this model.

While DARPA’s traditional purview has been programs in support of national security, as America and its allies return to the Moon, DARPA will support United States Government civil space activities to develop technology purely for non-military applications, to include use by civil space activities on the surface of the Moon. This RFI will not result in hardware or technology delivered to the Moon by DARPA. [1] See NASA Moon to Mars Objectives, September 2022 (p.9), https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/m2m-objectives-exec-summary.pdf