Summary

  • At ARIN 58, Alison Wood said she had asked government space agencies and commercial operators what they need from an address system. Feedback warned that building a separate RIR could carry substantial cost.
  • Wood raised a second route: future IANA space could be divided by celestial region and handled through existing RIRs. The meeting also exposed the sequence of technical, community and institutional decisions still ahead.

The Moon did not send ARIN an invoice. Alison Wood brought the next best thing: feedback that creating a new regional Internet registry for space could be expensive. She had contacted several government space agencies and commercial operators to ask how they expected networking to work. At ARIN 58, she put two institutional shapes on the table: build a dedicated registry, or divide future IANA address space by celestial region and let existing RIRs distribute it.

That is a different question from drawing lunar prefixes on a slide. The current ARIN-2026-1 draft still describes both IPv4 and IPv6 allocations for networks beyond geostationary orbit. Wood told the meeting the IPv4 part was expected to fall away, while technical work and feedback continue. She described the timing as a chicken-and-egg problem: missions need design assumptions early, yet the technologies and addressing needs are still taking shape.

The room made the choice harder. Kevin Blumberg challenged the use of ARIN’s policy forum for work he saw beyond its present scope. Others wanted a place to collect requirements before mission designs harden. Wood kept asking for operator input. When a speaker sought consensus in the room, she pinned down the word: agreement among participants about a problem is not an Advisory Council decision to advance this draft.

ARIN CEO John Curran then listed the doors a future ARIN service would pass through: technical allocation at the IETF/IANA level, RIR executive coordination, a community decision and Board support. Those are separate decisions with separate owners. Wood’s outreach supplies something the diagram cannot: a way to discover which service future operators will actually use before the institution gets built around an imagined customer.

There was no quoted budget for a new space RIR and no operator roll call. The useful choice is already visible. Every added institution has a running cost; every shortcut through existing registries needs a clear assignment of work. Wood carried that earthly problem into a discussion with its head in the stars.