The tree · Launch · Happens to the world · Could be decided within 5 to 20 years
A tonne of propellant made from off-Earth material is fired in a rocket engine
The first product of lunar or asteroid material will be propellant: oxygen from the rock, oxygen and hydrogen from ice. A tonne of it, made off Earth and actually fired, is the step between a reactor on the surface and a hundred tonnes a year delivered to orbit, and it is where the chemistry, the mining, and the storage all have to work at once for the first time.
The test: what counts as it having happened
At least one tonne of usable chemical propellant (oxidiser, fuel, or both) is produced from material extracted off Earth, at a site off Earth, and is fired in a rocket thruster or engine, confirmed by the operating agency or company with independent confirmation of the firing.
Settled by: The operating agency's or company's record, with independent confirmation
The odds, by how long I live
| baselineto 2071 ± 8 | moderateto 2080 | strongto 2095 | radicalto 2136 | openno deadline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50% | 62% | 78% | 90% | 93% |
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: Oxygen has been made from simulated regolith in the lab and a small demonstrator has flown to Mars; a tonne made and fired on the Moon needs a surface plant and a customer for the first product, which is a lunar outpost's second decade. Even odds by 2071. 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% | 1.4% | 4.0% | 11% | 16% |
| 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 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.
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2026-10-04 Nothing new
No propellant has been produced off Earth and fired; ISRU demonstrations remain ground work or planned flights, such as OffWorld's Prospector 1 scheduled for late 2027.
Notes
Added 2026-09-20 under step 27, items 11 and 53 (docs/reviews/2026-09-19-rulings.md, ruled 2026-09-19): raised by Gemini as a missing node; a dependency of L-lunar-material-delivered-to-orbit-at-scale, whose conditional was raised at the same time so that the first-tonne difficulty is priced here and not twice (the double-counting note from item 53).
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.