Independent · Concept and design stage
Modular rover and satellite architectures designed and published in the open.
One bet runs through all of it: off-world systems, and the programs that build them, should be modular, openly specified, and reproducible by someone who was not in the room.
I'm Vorpalwolf. I design modular rover and satellite subsystems, and the project-management methods that keep multi-year hardware work honest. No lab, no program office, no funding behind it.
That is why every design decision, mass budget, and dead end goes up here in full rather than into a slide deck nobody can check. Published reasoning can be argued with.
Work areas
Four problems, one shared constraint
Modular rover design
Rovers are built as one-off vehicles, so nothing survives the mission that funded them. I am specifying a bus with mechanical, power, and data interfaces.
Rover workModular satellite design
Smallsat buses are cheap to launch and expensive to change. I am writing an interface spec for structure, harness, thermal, and comms so payloads change alone.
Satellite workAI project management
Hardware programs fail on coordination long before physics. I write up where machine assistance helps requirements tracing and interface control, and where it manufactures false confidence.
EssaysMission architecture and settlement
Outer-system and long-stay settlement architectures are argued mostly in slideware. I write them as papers with stated assumptions, explicit trade criteria, and numbers you can check.
Papers
Featured work
Nothing here has been built yet
Modular rover bus interface spec
DesignMechanical, power, and data boundaries a payload must meet.
If the interfaces are wrong, every rover built on them is wrong.
Modular smallsat bus architecture
ConceptStructure, thermal, and comms revisable without touching the payload.
An argument on paper. Tell me where it breaks.
AI project management for hardware
ConceptWhere machine assistance helps requirements tracing, and where it fabricates confidence.
Written from failure modes, not tool demos.
Open source
Fork it, or tell me it is wrong
Designs, specs, and source go up on GitLab under permissive licenses: CC BY 4.0 for documents, MIT for code. Two kinds of help are useful right now: CAD and mechanical review of the structures, and firmware for the bus interfaces.
Repos on GitLabWorth an email: you have built rover or satellite hardware and think an interface here is wrong, you want to fork a spec, or you can review CAD or write firmware.
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