Articles

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

Departments

Life Support Systems

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

Habitats

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

Robotics

Send the Robots First

Ground School

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

Soil and Survival

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

New Technologies

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

Resources

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

Trade-offs

One Press or Ten Thousand Cast It or Print It

Mission Watch

Mission Watch: September 2026 Mission Watch: Late September 2026

The Punch List

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

Life Lessons the Hard Way

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

Editor’s Letters

October 2026 · Build the Thing 1995 · From the Editor

About

Pioneers

The ones who paid with their lives

Valentin Bondarenko The crew of Apollo 1 Vladimir Komarov Michael J. Adams The crew of Soyuz 11 The crew of Challenger The crew of Columbia

The ones who saw it first

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Robert Goddard Hermann Oberth Sergei Korolev Wernher von Braun Gerard K. O'Neill Carl Sagan Ed Bass Elon Musk

The ones who went

Yuri Gagarin Alan Shepard John Glenn The Mercury Seven Valentina Tereshkova Alexei Leonov The sixteen who flew Gemini The crew of Apollo 11 The twenty-nine who flew Apollo The Biosphere 2 crew

The ones who never left the ground

Katherine Johnson Margaret Hamilton Gene Kranz and the flight controllers The seamstresses of ILC Dover

Contact

The neighborhood: our solar system

The Sun in the middle, the eight planets and Pluto on their orbits, looking down from above — and the dashed red loop is Starman, the car SpaceX launched in 2018, placed where it is today. Tap a planet to read about it. Press play to set them moving at their true relative speeds, and switch to true scale to see how empty it all is.

Orbits are stretched so the inner planets can be told apart. Planet sizes are not to scale.

Ground School is published open: take it, build it better.