@LaceyPresley · Research archive
First-principles notes on crust, ice, power, Starship, and the silicon backbone that makes return possible. Lacey Presley’s public desk — essays, native Mars films, and dispatches from X.
Vehicle · SpaceX published figures · August 2026
Fully reusable. Methane and oxygen. Tankers in LEO, then Mars. The published vehicle is 124 meters of stainless and 33 Raptor 3s. This desk keeps the surface loads that vehicle still has to close.
Flight 13 · July 24, 2026 · 5:51 p.m. CT · Starbase
Starship / Super Heavy V3 · second V3 flight. 20 Starlink V3 satellites — first Starship deployment of the class. Ship guided on four flaps to the Indian Ocean, three-engine landing burn, intact heatshield seen for the first time.
Consciousness trapped on one world is a brief accident — a tiny candle in a vast darkness that could easily go out. The work is to keep that flame alive: ice that can be mined, power that does not die in a dust storm, a vehicle that is itself the escape system, and compute that can live in orbit. The TeraFab files live with the rest of the research.
This site is the public desk for that work: the Martian dichotomy as carbon tomb, the 20–30 meter ice inventory, TeraFab as logistics, and the 2026 cryogenic-refueling gate. Sourced from @LaceyPresley and the MarsForge community. The archive lives here so the argument can be read without the scroll.
On this desk
A rover wheel fractured an ordinary stone in Gediz Vallis. Inside: yellow crystals no mission had confirmed on Mars — native elemental sulfur.
Open on ScreenField notes
Curiosity · 12 min
Curiosity found the largest organic molecules yet confirmed on Mars inside a 3.7-billion-year-old lakebed. Reconstructing what radiation destroyed may matter more than what survived.
Consciousness · 12 min
Preserving and extending the light of consciousness — a tiny candle in a vast darkness that could easily go out.
Curiosity · 12 min
Curiosity’s wheel fractured an ordinary stone in Gediz Vallis and exposed yellow crystals no mission had confirmed on Mars: native elemental sulfur.
Dispatch
Long-form Mars posts as they landed on X, kept here so the argument can be read without the scroll.
Follow @LaceyPresley2026-08-19
Mars is a planet of two halves. A 32 km crustal gap is the scar that decided where the last oases could survive — and why the carbon cycle died.
2026-08-19
The light of awareness is not meant to stay trapped on one world. Multiplanetary life is the minimum requirement for durable consciousness.
2026-08-19
A general model spends capacity on every language and every domain. A single-domain model spends it on the mechanism. That is how orbital compute gets cheap.
2026-08-18
100 GW of orbital compute means a million tons of hardware a year. Land the booster or there is no server. Package the chip or there is no robot.
2026-08-15
20–30 meters global equivalent water. Hydrogen escape is a few kilograms of water per second. The ice we need for bases is not going anywhere.