  In the emerging space economy, autonomous robotic missions with specialized
goals such as mapping and mining are gaining traction, with agencies and
enterprises increasingly investing resources. Multirobot systems (MRS) research
has provided many approaches to establish control and communication layers to
facilitate collaboration from a technical perspective, such as granting more
autonomy to heterogeneous robotic groups through auction-based interactions in
mesh networks. However, stakeholders' competing economic interests often
prevent them from cooperating within a proprietary ecosystem. Related work
suggests that distributed ledger technology (DLT) might serve as a mechanism
for enterprises to coordinate workflows and trade services to explore space
resources through a transparent, reliable, non-proprietary digital platform. We
challenge this perspective by pointing to the core technical weaknesses of
blockchains, in particular, increased energy consumption, low throughput, and
full transparency through redundancy. Our objective is to advance the
discussion in a direction where the benefits of DLT from an economic
perspective are weighted against the drawbacks from a technical perspective. We
finally present a possible DLT-driven heterogeneous MRS for map exploration to
study the opportunities for economic collaboration and competitiveness.
