Watney Was Lucky Heirloom, or Nothing Two of Everything, and a Quarantine The Gas Nobody Budgets For Light Is the Throttle Top of the Loop, Bottom of the Loop Life in the Barrel

Commission It First Bones Don't Travel Well Blow the Rock Like Glass Sixteen Inches of Steel Launch the Parts, Not the Ship

Send the Robots First

Earth’s atmosphere, layer by layer Where the satellites are The neighborhood: our solar system Earth and the Moon, to scale Where the Voyagers are The Milky Way, and where we are in it Everything we can see, and where we are in it The price of the ride From the galaxy to the Moon

Worms: The Backbone of Civilization Wet the Ground and Wait Fish, Salt, or Dirt The Box Nobody Tested The Workforce Nobody Hired

Grind the Asteroid, Print the Part Powder or Wire Built for Earth, or Built for Something Bigger? A Thousand Garages Thirty Thousand Volts and a Piece of Tin Foil Out the Side of the Mountain That’s Not a Rocket, It’s a Freight Train Cold, Vacuum, and a Hundred Thousand Joints Powder or Plate

Send the Refinery, Not the Ore A Message in a Bottle, Thrown Hard Refuel It or Strip It

One Press or Ten Thousand Cast It or Print It

Mission Watch: September 2026 Mission Watch: Late September 2026

Air and Atmosphere

PL-1 · Lunar oxygen plant PL-2 · Airlock pump-down and gas recovery PL-3 · Martian atmospheric nitrogen separator PL-4 · Whole-habitat leak detection PL-25 · A single-occupant emergency oxygen pod grown from one plant PL-33 · A redundant, whole-habitat oxygen supply, not a single system PL-34 · Waste disposal and CO2 scrubbing for a closed habitat, on its own PL-37 · A UV-C scrubber loop for nitrous oxide

Food, Soil and Biology

PL-5 · Closed nitrogen loop for a sealed farm PL-6 · A worm colony that ships and survives PL-7 · A beehive for a rotating room PL-8 · Grow lights that let a plant sleep PL-9 · Wind for a sealed forest PL-15 · A list of which animals earn a berth — and clean stock to fill it PL-16 · A crop list where every plant pays rent twice PL-17 · The medicinal plants, and who still knows how to use them PL-18 · A way to get live animals there — is shipping embryos the only answer? PL-19 · A seed-saving program for one air volume PL-20 · The crop table — every candidate scored against every loop

Launch and Transport

PL-10 · A ground-based mass driver PL-11 · An orbital catch tug PL-21 · A mountain flank that can take a mass driver exit PL-22 · Closed-loop cooling for a mountain’s worth of electromagnets PL-23 · An orbital tug that can actually catch a freight pod PL-24 · Lunar launch and support facilities for avatar robots PL-29 · A positioning satellite constellation for a new planet

Habitat Structure

PL-14 · A sealed habitat we run on Earth first PL-27 · Inspecting and insulating a hundred thousand joints across a multi-wall hull PL-31 · A shaft drilled up through a mountain for a lunar base PL-32 · A load path for a spinning sphere versus a spinning tube

Materials and Manufacturing

PL-12 · Asteroid regolith to printable metal PL-28 · Printed stainless parts that survive vacuum cold-welding and metal fatigue PL-35 · An affordable large-format printer or CNC machine for garage panel-making PL-36 · A durable way to personalize a panel for generations

Robotics

PL-13 · Robots that build the barrel PL-26 · A robot that clips onto its own rail without wheels or magnets PL-30 · Remote-controlled robots that work through real signal lag

The Gas That Doesn’t Leave A Capability Is Not a Possession