Interstellar Distributed Self-Driving Laboratory: An Architecture for Autonomous Discovery, Local Manufacturing, and Co-Evolution of Executable Material Knowledge

Space exploration is usually framed as the movement of spacecraft, people, or material between destinations. This paper explores a different systems architecture: a distributed network of autonomous scientific-manufacturing nodes in which bulk matter remains predominantly local while validated technological knowledge propagates between nodes as information. Each node combines a self-driving laboratory, an adaptive manufacturing core, metrology, recycling, repair, and local resource processing. Nodes discover and experimentally validate new materials and functional structures, encode the resulting process–structure–property knowledge into machine-executable manufacturing packages, and transmit those packages to other nodes. Because feedstocks, equipment, radiation, temperature, gravity, and other boundary conditions differ between locations, receiving nodes do not merely reproduce recipes: they adapt and revalidate them. The resulting technological lineages can therefore diverge and later exchange improvements. The proposal deliberately builds on established prior work in self-replicating space industry, distributed self-driving laboratories, and interstellar relay networks. Its proposed contribution is their integration into a single architecture in which locally embodied technology and transferable executable knowledge co-evolve across physically distinct extraterrestrial environments.