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 September 20th, 2026.
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 September 20th, 2026 with the node's addition, I accepted.
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 2 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.
-
2026-11-01 Nothing new
Only ground prototypes (NASA solar carbothermal May 19th, 2026, Blue Origin April 2026) and small ESA payload plans (50 to 100 grams) found. No off-Earth propellant production or firing since September 27th, 2026.
-
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 September 20th, 2026 under step 27, items 11 and 53 (docs/reviews/2026-09-19-rulings.md, decided September 19th, 2026): 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 estimate is wrong?
Here's how to tell me, and
what happens next.
The record itself is data/L-launch.toml in the public repository.