There’s a common failure mode in thinking about space exploration where we get caught up in the engineering challenges—delta-v calculations, radiation shielding, life support systems—while missing the meta-level coordination problem. 🧵

I write about tech + humans + philosophy. Farcaster OG. FID 3305 founder of /theindex 

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/

I want to think about an alternative framework: what if we model space exploration as a multiplayer game with imperfect information?

The Game Structure
The playing field is our solar system, and each player represents a space-faring entity. We have:

• State actors (NASA, ESA, CNSA)
• Private companies (SpaceX, Blue Origin)
• Dark horse candidates (that guy on Reddit who swears he can build a fusion drive using only Arduino components and pure optimism)

Financial capital can be converted into technical capital through R&D; technical capital can be converted into social capital through successful missions; and social capital can be converted into financial capital through public support and funding. 

But these conversions aren’t guaranteed or linear.

Failure Modes
The game gets interesting when we look at failure modes. Unlike chess, where a lost piece is just a lost piece, space exploration failures propagate in complex ways:

Catastrophic Failures (e.g., Challenger, Columbia)
• Direct cost: High
• Social capital impact: Complex and non-linear
• Secondary effects: Industry-wide regulatory changes

Technical Failures (e.g., Mars Climate Orbiter)
• Direct cost: Medium to high
• Social capital impact: Low unless catastrophic
• Technical capital impact: Can actually be positive if lessons are learned

Financial Failures (e.g., various space tourism ventures)
• Direct cost: Variable
• Social capital impact: Negative spillover effects on entire industry
• Meta effect: Changes in funding landscape

What’s interesting is how these failures interact with player strategies. SpaceX’s early failures were buffered by private capital, while NASA’s failures faced intense public scrutiny. This creates different risk tolerances and strategy sets for different players.

Victory Conditions and Nash Equilibria
The game has multiple possible victory conditions:

1. Scientific achievement (first detection of extraterrestrial life)
2. Commercial success (profitable space-based industry)
3. Political achievement (national prestige)
4. Humanitarian achievement (species backup on Mars)

These victory conditions are fundamentally different games being played on the same board.

This creates what we can comfortably call the “Space Race Prisoner’s Dilemma”:

• If all players cooperate, we maximize the chance of achieving the harder victory conditions.
• If any player defects to pursue easier victory conditions, they gain advantage.
• If too many players defect, the harder victory conditions become effectively impossible.

Feedback Loops Between Victory Conditions

Achieving one victory condition can dramatically alter the game for others. For example, commercial success in asteroid mining could increase financial capital across the board, but it might reduce political urgency for Mars colonization.

The Meta-Game and Regulatory Capture

The most interesting aspect isn’t the game itself, it's the meta-game of rule-setting.

Players spend significant resources trying to shape the rules:

• SpaceX changed launch vehicle reusability from “impossible” to “expected.”
• Blue Origin uses litigation to shape regulatory frameworks.
• NASA influences international space law through soft power.

This creates a dynamic where players must decide how to split resources between playing the current game well versus changing the rules of future games.

We can actually test some of these models against historical data:

The Original Space Race (1957–1969)
• Two dominant players
• Clear victory condition
• Strong external motivation (Cold War)
• Result: Rapid progress followed by stagnation

The Commercial Space Era (2000–present)
• Multiple players
• Diverse victory conditions
• Weak external motivation
• Result: Slower but more sustainable progress

Concrete Examples of Coordination Success and Failure

Take the International Space Station (ISS): a rare example of sustained cooperation, despite geopolitical tensions. Contrast this with the breakdown in collaboration over lunar exploration programs like Artemis, where national interests often dominate.

Explicit Mechanism Design

Instead of treating these dynamics as emergent properties, what if we explicitly designed mechanisms to:

• Align incentives between players
• Create stable cooperation equilibria
• Reward meta-game improvements that benefit all players

Some concrete ideas:
• International prize funds with multiple victory conditions
• Regulatory frameworks that reward technology sharing
• Public-private partnership structures that align national and commercial interests

Coordination Across Time Horizons

A major challenge is aligning players with different time preferences. Governments prioritize election cycles; companies focus on ROI timelines. Explicit mechanisms must address these mismatches to ensure progress doesn’t stall.

Ethical Considerations and the Real Coordination Problem

The core insight is this: space exploration isn’t primarily an engineering challenge—it’s a coordination problem wrapped in an engineering challenge wrapped in a financing problem.

The real game isn’t space itself. It’s creating stable mechanisms for long-term cooperation on high-risk, high-reward projects with uncertain payoffs. Space exploration just happens to be the most visible instance of this class of problems.

This raises ethical dilemmas: Should space be militarized? Who decides how celestial resources are distributed? Without coordinated answers to these questions, we are inevitably going to turn space into another arena for Earth-bound conflict.

Maybe the first question isn’t “How do we get to Mars?” but rather “How do we design systems that make long-term cooperation the dominant strategy?”

Additional reading: For more on mechanism design in multi-player games with imperfect information, see: Why Wargaming Works

Additional reading: For more on mechanism design in multi-player games with imperfect information, see: Why Wargaming Works 

https://www.professionalwargaming.co.uk/Why-Wargaming-Works.pdf

I've been writing The Expeditionist on X and Substack. Hope it's interesting to folks on Warpcast as well. 

https://theexpeditionist.substack.com/p/the-great-space-filter

Each player starts with three types of capital:

1. Financial capital (measurable, transferable)
2. Social capital (what NASA calls “public goodwill”)
3. Technical capital (which, crucially, depreciates when unused)
This already gives us interesting dynamics.