Engineering

Permanence by Design

The orbital platforms we design today will remain in service long after every agency that funded them has ceased to exist.

When I first walked through the assembly bay at Meridian Station in 2019, every structural member was sized with a 150-year fatigue margin. Not because anyone expected the station to last that long, but because the team believed anything worth launching was worth over-building. That conviction — expensive, unfashionable, and profoundly correct — has shaped every design decision I have made since.

The Cost of Planned Obsolescence

We have spent six decades treating orbital hardware as disposable. Every module, every solar array arrives with an expiration date embedded in its bill of materials. The most expensive structure ever assembled by human hands was conceived with a thirty-year service window — and we watched that countdown expire in real time, module by module, bolt by bolt.

If we are serious about permanent presence beyond Earth's atmosphere, we must stop engineering for fiscal quarters and start engineering for centuries.