The tree · Motive · Happens to the world · Could be decided within 1 to 5 years
A commercial customer pays for a service performed in orbit, other than communications, imaging, or navigation
Satellites already earn money by relaying signals and taking pictures. The new thing is paying for work done in orbit: computing in an orbital data centre, manufacturing crystals or fibre in free fall, testing materials. The first sizeable paying customer is the sign that orbit has a second economy, which is what makes megawatt spacecraft and orbital assembly worth building.
The test: what counts as it having happened
A company publicly reports, by financial filing or audited statement, at least ten million 2026 dollars of revenue earned in a single financial year (revenue earned, not contract value) from a non-governmental customer not affiliated with the provider, for computing, manufacturing, or processing performed in orbit.
Settled by: The company's financial filing or audited statement
The odds, by how long I live
| baselineto 2071 ± 8 | moderateto 2080 | strongto 2095 | radicalto 2136 | openno deadline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 85% | 90% | 93% | 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 September 19th, 2026.
Why these numbers: Orbital-compute contracts are already announced and the bar is one company, one year; the earned-revenue and private-customer clauses cost a little time, not the outcome.
What this one is worth
Nothing. The headline number does not rest on this step at any remove, so however it turns out, the chance that I live and work off Earth does not change. That is not a judgement that it does not matter. It is what the tree says: this step feeds a tier above the one the headline asks about, or sits beside the equation rather than in it.
What the ledger says about this step
- Forty-one steps had their criteria tightened so that two readers would agree when each has happened, with no number moved for that alone 2026-09-20 The tree itself changed
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.
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2026-11-01 Nothing new
No filing or audited statement reporting ten million dollars of earned in-orbit computing or manufacturing revenue turned up in the window, only trade coverage of Kepler and Starcloud compute offerings with no disclosed revenue. Nothing bears on the criterion yet.
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2026-10-25 Nothing new
No company has filed ten million dollars of non-government revenue for in-orbit work. Varda (private, Series D of $251 million) and Starcloud (raised $250 million in August 2026) disclose funding, not revenue; meaningful Starcloud compute revenue is not expected before 2027.
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2026-10-18 Nothing new
No company has filed ten million dollars of non-government revenue for in-orbit work. Varda and Starcloud have disclosed funding and no audited revenue; Starcloud's paying compute customers are expected in 2027.
Revisions
| Date | Field | From | To | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-19 | resolution | 'by contract announcement or financial filing', any customer, nominal dollars | revenue earned, not contract value, in 2026 dollars, from a non-governmental customer not affiliated with the provider, by financial filing or audited statement | Step 27 outside-model review, items 22 and 82 (docs/reviews/2026-09-19-rulings.md): a grant or test contract cannot resolve an economic milestone, and a contract award is not earned revenue. Decided September 19th, 2026. |
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The record itself is data/M-motive.toml in the public repository.