STELARIS
Orbital logistics · restricted
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STELARIS Mission log · Confidential · 2026
SYS / orbital-logistics · mission 001

Coordinated transport for everything already in orbit.

Swarms of small autonomous spacecraft that grab, move, and place objects in orbit — of any mass or shape. One fleet, hundreds of jobs at once, no fuel on the payload.

01 · Problem

A satellite dies when its fuel runs out — not when it breaks.

Every spacecraft launches carrying every gram of propellant it will ever use. That fuel is dead mass: the most expensive weight to lift, hauled up for maneuvers that may never happen. When it runs dry, a fully working satellite becomes junk — it can't hold its orbit, dodge a collision, or move to where it's needed. And nothing already up there can be repositioned, serviced, or pulled out of the way. Orbit keeps filling with stranded, expensive hardware, and every launch adds more.

02 · Solution

Take the propulsion off the payload.

Stelaris builds swarms of small autonomous spacecraft that supply propulsion on demand. A group converges on an object, grabs it, and moves it — to a new orbit, off a collision course, into a service slot, or down to re-entry — then releases and moves to the next job. The object never carries fuel it doesn't need. One fleet serves hundreds of them. The intelligence lives in the swarm, not the cargo.

03 · Thesis

Every economy runs on a logistics layer. Space doesn't have one yet. We're building it.

04 · The system

The service needs three layers to come online. We're building the hardest and most defensible one first — without the coordination, the robots are just more debris.

Algorithms

The coordination brain: how a swarm agrees, grips, and maneuvers a shared object none of its robots could move alone. The core technical risk, and the moat.

Hardware

The robots themselves — ion thrusters, grippers, and structure built to operate and dock in swarms. Prototyped once the coordination is proven.

Control

The operations layer: a single pane of glass tasking thousands of robots against thousands of objects — who moves what, when, and along which path.

05 · Status

We prove the hard part first.

The coordination has to work before anything else matters, so that's what we're building now — validated in high-fidelity simulation across a live cluster, every claim backed by an ablation. The counter above is that work, run by run.

06 · Research