Emerging efforts towards permanent human settlements in space introduce a wide range of issues that are beginning to strain our current capacity to govern the course of off-world development. Concurrent with the technical problems typically associated with long range human spaceflight, long term life support and resource challenges burgeoning settlement efforts have also given rise to legal, political, cultural, economic and social challenges that are beginning to make space issues relevant to a wider range of stakeholders. In the past technical and social issues associated with space activity were relegated to separate domains, but as settlement efforts progress these issues are proving to be closely interrelated and thus should be treated holistically as not only a monumental technical design challenge, but also a social project of an unprecedented scale. While many methods exist to help actors asses technical design architectures, the international community lacks a meaningful context within which to explore the emerging soft, "social-space" issues that settlement raises such as the potential consequences of altering legal frameworks, the effect of governance design on human behavior, and many broader economic, social and cultural issues. What the international community needs is a high-profile, participatory forum to bring together and actively engage key groups that are becoming increasingly important to the process of settlement, but at present are under-represented within the space sector. Some of these actors include small but emerging space nations, the citizen-science community, the social sciences, humanities and arts disciplines, the venture capital and entrepreneur communities, interest groups that play a key role in advocating for change and most importantly, the public at large. Space analogs provide a potentially useful environment within which to explore these relevant yet emerging issues, but are typically designed to mimic space agency exploration architectures and culture. Adapting some current analog designs to better evaluate social-space issues could generate applied insights at the interface of theory and practice through collaboration and open access to research, allowing stakeholders across all sectors to better align incentives for the equitable development of outer space. This paper proposes a design template for a low cost international, interdisciplinary and intercultural social-space analog network that can explore difficult social issues by enabling the widest possible range of stakeholders to participate in constructing the emerging meaning of off-world human settlement.
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