Scenario set · Orbital
Three Ways to the Asteroid Belt
Divergent paths for the off-world economy, and the choke points on each.
An off-world economy is not one future but several, and they diverge early. This scenario set walks three of them — a state-led path, a private-platform path, and a slow public-commons path — and traces where each one accelerates, stalls, or breaks.
Each scenario is built backward from a different answer to a single question: what is the first thing genuinely cheaper to make off the planet? The state-led path bets on strategic materials, the platform path on data and position, the commons path on shared logistics. The choice of first product shapes everything downstream.
The value of the set is not in picking a winner. It is in seeing which present-day decisions — on standards, on rights-of-way, on who funds the unglamorous logistics layer — appear as hinges in all three worlds. Those shared hinges are where attention is best spent today, regardless of which future actually arrives.