A hundred tonnes of material from an asteroid are delivered to orbit around Earth or the Moon in one year

The second route to off-Earth material at scale. Some near-Earth asteroids take less energy to reach and return from than the Moon's surface, and some are rich in water or metal. Two agencies have returned grams from asteroids; a company that brings back a hundred tonnes a year has made asteroids a supply rather than a sample. It is the route The Expanse's Belt is named for, and the one that does not depend on a lunar program lasting.

The test: what counts as it having happened

In one calendar year, at least one hundred tonnes of net mass of asteroid origin (rock, water, metal, or products made from them, excluding any Earth-supplied content and counting the same material once) are delivered to an orbit around Earth or the Moon, or to another stable location in the Earth-Moon system, and received and used by a customer there, reported by the operator with independent confirmation.

Settled by: The operator's public accounting, confirmed by the customer or an agency

The odds, by how long I live

baselineto 2071 ± 8	moderateto 2080	strongto 2095	radicalto 2136	openno deadline
8%	13%	25%	45%	55%

Each column is a different guess at how long I live, from current trends (baseline) to open-ended. The number is the chance this happens before that deadline, assuming everything it depends on happens first. As of 2026-09-25.

Why these numbers: First estimate, 2026-09-25, proposed by Claude with the node and accepted by John 2026-10-02. The first asteroid-mining companies of the 2010s folded without a customer, the total ever returned from asteroids is well under a kilogram, and every trip takes years; a hundred tonnes a year needs an industry nobody is yet building. Low by 2071, rising in the long windows where a Belt economy would make it ordinary.

What this one is worth

If this happened tomorrow and nothing else changed, the chance that I live and work off Earth by 2071 goes from 0.5% to 0.5% (too small to tell apart from chance). If it turned out no, the same number goes to 0.4% (too small to tell apart from chance).

Longevity scenario	baseline2071 ± 8	moderate2080	strong2095	radical2136	openno deadline
The headline as it stands	0.5%	1.2%	3.8%	11%	15%
If this settled yes now	0.5%	1.3%	3.8%	11%	15%
If this settled no now	0.4%	1.2%	3.6%	10%	15%

This is what the site says in advance, before the thing happens. When it does, the ledger entry that records it quotes this figure beside what actually followed, so a reader can see whether the prediction held. Worked out at the run 2026-10-11-scan by holding this step at each outcome in turn and playing the whole tree out again, 20,000 times per scenario. That is a throw of the dice, so a move smaller than about 0.10 points is inside the noise rather than a finding.

The last check

Once a week the tree is read against the news, node by node, against the test above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every check ever made on this node is on the Radar page.

2026-10-04 Nothing new

No asteroid material delivery was reported; AstroForge's Odin lost contact after its February 2025 launch, its Vestri lander is still ahead, and Karman+ aims for a first launch in 2027.

Notes

Added 2026-09-25 as a route under L-off-earth-material-delivered-at-scale (candidate 7 of docs/proposal-function-over-route-2026-09-25.md, approved by John 2026-09-25). The counting rules (net mass, Earth-supplied content excluded, counted once, received and used by a customer) are copied from the lunar route so that the two are like for like. No hard dependency is drawn: slow solar-electric tugs could do it without the fast-transit or refilling steps.

Think this is wrong, missing something it depends on, or badly estimated? Open an issue about it, or read how feedback gets folded into the tree. The record itself is data/L-launch.toml in the public repository.