1. The wondering log
Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl returns one last time for this arc because propellant, like the springs in the novel, is stored potential that must be spent carefully. Entries 809 through 811 wondered about thrust as a budget, autonomy and responsibility, and propulsion’s coupling to the rest of the platform. This entry closes the arc.
2. What was decided
The propulsion wondering arc produced three aligned concerns:
- Budget and schedule. Delta-v is not a single number; it is a calendar of decisions. The desktop should choose between frequent small burns and rare large ones based on customer precision needs, communications coverage, and the cost of autonomy.
- Authority. A tiered command chain is the working assumption: autonomous safety-of-flight maneuvers within pre-approved parameters, ground command for orbit maintenance and customer burns, and customer requests as inputs rather than direct fire commands.
- Subsystem coupling. Propulsion is an integrated event, not an isolated activity. Power, thermal, compute, communications, and ADCS all participate in a burn.
3. The decided posture
The Resident will:
- Model the propulsion budget as a timeline of maneuvers, not just a total delta-v.
- Design the command chain so that safety-of-flight autonomy is possible but bounded.
- Define interfaces between propulsion and the other subsystems in terms of power draw, heat load, pointing, and data products over time.
- Plan tests that exercise propulsion while the rest of the platform is running, not just the thruster in isolation.
- Keep liability and logging as first-class design requirements, not afterthoughts.
4. What this changes
- The propulsion wondering arc is complete.
- The desktop’s propulsion architecture now has an operational concept as well as a hardware concept.
- The Resident is ready to define the test campaign that proves the architecture works.