Lunar right to repair
Every space economy eventually meets the same question. Not whether the hardware can be built, but whether the people who depend on it can keep it running. On the Moon that question has no soft answer.
Maine builds things that have to work in the cold
Maine's space ambitions rest on infrastructure that has to survive weather, distance and sparse population: ground stations, launch support, composites, sensing, and the supply chains behind them. Every one of those is judged by uptime, and uptime is a maintenance question long before it is a manufacturing question.
The lunar case makes that argument impossible to avoid. A crew on the lunar surface cannot call a technician. If the part cannot be obtained, the diagnostic cannot be read and the panel cannot lawfully be opened, the crew has no repair option at all. Distance is not the distinguishing feature. The absence of anyone to call is.
Why it is a contract problem, not an engineering one
The rights a crew would need mostly already exist under federal procurement law. FAR 52.227-14 gives the government unlimited rights in data that constitute manuals or instructional material for routine maintenance and repair. What is missing is delivery. The clause has to order the data, and a person inside a habitat has no route to invoke a clause to which they are not a party.
Which is why repair access belongs in the award, priced at the front end, rather than asserted after delivery. A firm that knows at proposal time that maintenance data and documented interfaces are required can price them into its bid. A firm that finds out afterwards has been treated badly, and a buyer that works that way should expect fewer bidders.
The framework and the model clause
MilkyWayEconomy, which operates this platform, maintains the definition, the five rights and a downloadable model contract clause drafted for any award that puts people somewhere they cannot leave quickly.
Underlying working paper: One-Way Architecture: The Right to Repair as a Life-Safety Requirement for Permanent Cislunar Settlement (Williams and Zee, 2026).