Experiments Board

The board

Experiments That Decide the Forecast

Ranked by leverage per dollar - how many decisions depend on the answer, how far the architecture moves, and what it costs to find out - which is why an archival study is first and the partial-gravity ring is fourth. Flight tests already on a program schedule sit at the bottom.

Showing 31 of 31

The garage servicing-rate trial is already ranked fifth, so it is not repeated in the added set. Rows come from one data array in the page source.

Cost

The Highest-Ranked Experiments Are the Cheapest

Ten of the 15 ranked experiments run on the ground, and two of them are reading records that already exist: maintenance logs from submarines, polar stations and offshore platforms, and the helium purge and leak-check history of launch vehicles. Neither needs hardware.

Three need flight: the partial-gravity ring, mixed-field galactic cosmic ray (GCR) radiobiology beyond the magnetosphere, and the landing-day static fire. The radiobiology is the one item that cannot be done on Earth at any price - no accelerator produces the full mixed field at once - and it sets the dose ceiling that sizes tour length, crew rotation and the training pipeline on Radiation & Human Health.

The landing-day static fire costs nothing extra: a landed Starship fires its hot-gas thrusters on locally made propellant while its own parked weight holds it down. The plant output ratio, added from The Solar System Industrial Network, is the highest-value unmeasured number on the site and can be estimated with analogue plants on Earth.

Two kinds of gate

Capability Gates and Decision Gates

A capability gate asks whether something can proceed at all; a decision gate asks whether it is proceeding with the right architecture.

The low-gravity excavation testbed is a capability gate: if a machine cannot react its digging forces, much of the industrial sequence stops. The maintenance-record study gates nothing before launch, yet it changes the machine shop, the spares inventory, the crew workload and the replacement stream at every destination. Cheap decision gates lose funding fights against critical-path hardware, an argument they should never have been asked to make. The ranking measures information value: how much uncertainty disappears per dollar.

Decisions

Some of the Cheapest Items Are Decisions, Not Experiments

Data on its way

Missions Already Flying or Scheduled

Some maps change without a new program. Mission schedules are not closure schedules.

An orbiter can map composition without saying whether a silicate falls inside a fiber-drawing viscosity window, and one Phobos sample site does not settle accessible water at industrial scale.

Not yet measured

The Instruments Nobody Has Pointed

Planetary science asks what a body is made of. This book asks whether we can build there.

The industrial question needs ore grade rather than elemental presence, mechanical strength rather than imagery, excavation energy rather than mineral identification, and processability rather than bulk composition.

China

Chinese Tests on the Board

Ice, resource use, Mars ascent and a crewed landing.

Four of the eight flight tests are Chinese. Chang'e-7 will make the second direct measurement of lunar polar ice after LCROSS at Cabeus in 2009, and every lunar water figure on the site rests on that one impact until it does. Chang'e-8 follows in 2028 with resource use and construction at the south pole. Tianwen-3 flies the Mars ascent and orbit rendezvous no other program has funded since Mars Sample Return was cancelled. Long March 10, Mengzhou and Lanyue carry the crewed landing before 2030.

Contested

Deliberately Not Claimed

The load-bearing uncertainties, tagged with the confidence they actually earn.

Record

Provenance and Data Sources