Ten tonnes of cryogenic propellant are kept in orbit for six months and then burned

Refilling ships in space has two halves: pumping propellant across, and keeping it cold for long enough to be there when the ship needs it. Liquid oxygen and methane boil away in sunlight, and nobody has kept tonnes of them in orbit for months. Storage proven by use, a depot's worth kept for half a year and then actually burned, is the unproven half of every architecture that sends people beyond low Earth orbit on refilled ships.

The test: what counts as it having happened

At least ten tonnes of cryogenic propellant (liquid oxygen, methane, or hydrogen) are held in orbit aboard one vehicle or depot for at least six months with less than five percent of the starting mass lost to boil-off, measured and reported by the operator, and the stored propellant is subsequently used in an engine burn, confirmed by the operator and independent tracking of the burn.

Settled by: The operator's mission record and independent tracking

The odds, by how long I live

baselineto 2071 ± 8	moderateto 2080	strongto 2095	radicalto 2136	openno deadline
80%	85%	90%	95%	96%

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 2026-09-20.

Why these numbers: Zero-boil-off hardware has been ground-tested for years and long-duration storage flights are on the manifest of the lunar programme, so the first six-month demonstration is a matter of a decade or so; the residual is that architectures move to fast tanker cadence instead of long storage and nobody bothers to prove six months. Proposed by Claude 2026-09-20 with the node's addition, accepted by John.

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 0.0% (−0.5 points).

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%	4.0%	11%	15%
If this settled no now	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%

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 3 checks

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.

2026-10-11 Nothing new

No ten-tonne, six-month cryogenic storage flight has occurred or been dated. Reported work is ground testing of zero-boil-off cryocoolers and the planned LOXSAT-1 demonstration.
2026-10-08 Nothing new

No ten-tonne, six-month storage has occurred; LOXSAT (a small liquid-oxygen demonstration on Rocket Lab Electron) has slipped repeatedly and its launch status could not be confirmed, and it is far below ten tonnes in any case.
2026-10-04 Nothing new

No ten-tonne cryogenic storage in orbit was reported; the nearest effort, NASA and Eta Space's LOXSAT, is a roughly 135 kg satellite technology demonstration with a nine-month plan, far below ten tonnes, and a full-scale depot is not expected before 2030.

Notes

Added 2026-09-20 under step 27, items 10 and 52 (docs/reviews/2026-09-19-rulings.md, ruled 2026-09-19): Gemini's leaf with Astra's 'and subsequently used in a burn' added, so the node is storage proven by use; Astra's hundred-tonne scale stays with L-orbital-propellant-transfer-at-scale, which this node gates.

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.