Twelve regimes · Earth orbit to interstellar space · ordered by Δv
Twelve regimes, ordered outward by the velocity budget to reach them - not by distance. Each is a place with its own energy source, matter inventory, compute regime, and answer to whether humans belong there. Δv, not distance, is what sorts the solar system.
Across all twelve Read the set side by side in the Destination Comparison, see what bounds each site in the Constraint Fingerprints and what damages it in the Hazard Fingerprints, and find where people go in The Presence Gate. The Four Topologies draw the same twelve as maps.
LEO · GEO · the near shore
The only destination with an ambulance. A survivable abort to a hospital in hours splits the whole map into places where humans are an engineering option and places where they are a liability.
EML-1 · EML-2 · LDRO
Nothing is manufactured here and everything passes through. Cislunar is the economic center of gravity for the same reason Singapore is — position on the corridor beats resources at the destination.
Shackleton · 89.9°S
A bimodal site: a hot pole on the sunlit rim for power, a cold pole on the crater floor for water and cryogenic compute, a mass driver on the corridor between them — and the first contested real estate off Earth.
Arcadia Planitia · −3 km
Cheap to reach because of the atmosphere and expensive to run because of it. Dust storms and a 40% winter solar floor make Mars nuclear-dependent from year one — a different architecture than the Moon, not a scaled one.
Cloud layer · 50 km · 1 bar
Cheap to reach, impossible to land on, and infrastructure regardless — nearly every outer-system trajectory takes a Venus assist. Fifty kilometres up sits the most Earth-like air pressure and temperature anywhere off Earth, directly above a surface at 460 °C and 92 bar.
Polar craters · the export of light
Expensive to reach and drenched in the one thing the rest of the system is short of. Roughly nine kilowatts per square metre, polar ice in craters that have never seen the Sun, and a 600 K day–night swing between the two — the largest thermal excursion of any surface anywhere.
Ceres and the near-belt archipelago
Not a field to be mined but an archipelago to be settled — a few thousand bodies worth visiting, most of them worth visiting once. The gravity wells are negligible, which changes everything except getting there — and whether anyone is aboard when it happens is the open question of the whole map.
Callisto — not Ganymede
Outside the Jovian radiation belts is the only address in the system that doesn't tax every kilogram with shielding. The first outer anchor: a bunkering node and a gateway to three other moons, run by machines that never come home.
Titan · 1.45 bar, 94 K
The only surface out here with a thick atmosphere, which makes arrival cheap and flight almost trivial at 0.14 g. Methane lakes and a nitrogen sky are the chemical feedstock the rest of the system has to import — Titan is the outer refinery, not the outer outpost.
Triton · retrograde, 38 K
A captured Kuiper body you can reach without crossing the Kuiper belt, orbiting the one giant whose atmosphere is worth scooping. Nitrogen ice at the surface, helium-3 and deuterium overhead, and an aerocapture gateway to everything beyond.
Mutually tidally locked binary
Two worlds locked face to face around a barycenter in open space, which makes the transfer between them nearly free — the cheapest two-body industrial pair anywhere. The last bunker before the dark, and the quietest place to point a telescope.
Alpha Centauri · Barnard's · 2100+
The only entry where Δv is the wrong metric. Beam-driven sails carry no reaction mass, so the cost sits in the transmitter rather than the vehicle — which moves the whole problem back inside the solar system, to whoever can build and aim a light source that large.