Webinar: Overlap – Multi-actor simulation of lunar ground missions
11:00 EDT featuring Vic Paulson, discussing her work on Designated Lunar Areas (DLAs) and Overlap, a digital simulation sandbox for testing DLA governance regimes at the lunar south pole.
Although the lunar activity accelerates, the governance frameworks being written for surface coordination today have never been tested against the conditions they will face. Multiple actors, incompatible frameworks, high-value terrain, and no enforcement authority are the operational realities that proposed DLA rules are poised to tackle. Without empirical data on how real stakeholders behave under governance pressure, those frameworks rest on assumptions.
Overlap addresses this directly. Players take on the roles of real lunar actor types like national blocs, commercial operators, and emerging space states, and make asset deployment and resource extraction decisions under different DLA governance configurations. Every move is automatically logged, while a facilitator captures not just what players decide, but the reasoning behind each decision in real time. Overlap aims to generate behavioral data on how governance rules perform under pressure, where informal workarounds emerge, where infrastructure is beneficial to share, and which actor types are most likely to establish a foothold. The simulation is specifically designed to surface the gap between stated positions and actual behavior.
Vic Paulson is a PhD student in Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech, where her research spans space governance, in-situ resource utilization, and the policy dimensions of lunar resource development. Her engineering background grounds the simulation logic in the operational inputs like asset classes, surface constraints, resource dependencies, that governance frameworks will ultimately have to contend with.
Join us for a discussion on what behavioral data from real stakeholders can tell us about how DLA governance frameworks actually hold up when theory meets the surface.
