Reliable, multi-century power systems for hollowed-asteroid habitats — designed to support life support, manufacturing, docking, and all other operations with zero dependence on Earth resupply.
Provide continuous, safe, and highly redundant power for a permanent base that may operate for hundreds or thousands of years. The system must be restartable after long dormancy periods and gracefully degrade over centuries.
Power systems are installed after the asteroid is hollowed and sealed. The thick regolith provides natural radiation shielding for reactors or storage units. Excess heat is routed into habitat areas or used for material processing.
Requirement: Every hollowed asteroid base shall operate a single, unified, fail-operational power architecture (PGEDS-v1) capable of continuous, multi-century supply to all life-support, manufacturing, docking, and habitat systems with zero Earth resupply after seeding.
Rationale: Power is the foundational utility that enables all other base systems; it must be established immediately after structure and life-support integration.
Open Questions: None at v0.7
Requirement: The power architecture shall support micro-modular (0.1–100 kW), mid-scale (100 kW–10 MW), and astro-habitat-scale (10 MW–10 TW+) generation tiers, all hot-swappable via UMP hardpoints.
Rationale: Allows graceful scaling as the base grows from initial crewed operations to full industrial colony.
Requirement: Power systems shall incorporate N+3 redundancy at every critical node with automatic load-shedding and graceful degradation, maintaining ≥80 % nominal output even after two simultaneous failures.
Rationale: Ensures continuous habitability and operations across centuries, even during major faults or maintenance.
Requirement: The entire power architecture shall be capable of safe, cold-start restart after multi-decade or multi-century dormancy periods using only local ISRU-derived spares and stored chemical initiators.
Rationale: Supports future expansion, daughter-colony seeding, or contingency reactivation of legacy bases.
Requirement: All power-generation waste heat shall be captured and routed via UMP-THERMAL-001 interfaces for habitat heating, water distillation, and industrial processes.
Rationale: Maximises overall system efficiency and reduces auxiliary power demand in the closed-loop ecosystem.
Requirement: Every chamber, docking bay, and functional zone shall be served by standardised bidirectional power hardpoints (minimum 2 per UMP face) with automatic isolation and load-sharing.
Rationale: Enables rapid reconfiguration and expansion without rewiring.
Requirement: All critical power functions (isolation, startup, shutdown, load shedding) shall expose physical manual overrides and digital operator veto independent of automation.
Rationale: Preserves absolute human/post-biological command authority at all times.
Requirement: The power architecture shall be designed for ≥200-year service life with graceful degradation, field-repairable components, and pre-engineered TSP-v1 supersession pathways.
Rationale: Ensures the base remains powered as frontier energy technologies evolve without decommissioning existing assets.
Requirement: The power architecture shall accept and process ISRU-derived fuels, coolants, and shielding materials directly from on-site manufacturing and storage systems, enabling progressive independence from initial Earth-seeded stocks.
Rationale: Closes the power loop completely and supports true multi-century self-sufficiency far from Earth supply lines.
Requirement: Full crewed operations on the hollowed base shall only commence after the power architecture has demonstrated 180 days of continuous, fail-operational performance with explicit operator consent and integrated governance review.
Rationale: Protects biological and post-biological crews by ensuring the foundational utility is verifiably stable before human presence.