Cislunar Foundry
The tonne is a systems test
A lunar propellant economy is not one machine. It is a dependency graph whose edges carry power, mass, schedule, and institutional responsibility. Prospecting has to reduce uncertainty before a site hardens. Power has to survive before excavation can become routine. Water has to become matched cryogens. A reusable tanker and depot have to preserve that mass through storage, flight, and transfer. One tonne is deliberately small: large enough to force the complete chain to close, small enough to keep the first campaign inspectable.
What the number means
The cost is conditional on the accounting boundary shown in the instrument. Buying a commercial service and funding the enabling stack are different questions, so they are never collapsed into one apparently precise answer. Expected mode is a deterministic baseline. Seeded risk is one reproducible history. The ensemble is an uncertainty experiment over the same event graph. None is a programme forecast.
Model boundary
EML1 is computed from a circular restricted three-body equilibrium, but the transfer arcs are illustrative. The campaign omits crew systems, full trajectory propagation, mature commodity markets, a second depot, and manual infrastructure placement. The evidence tab records what is observed, analogue-derived, or stipulated.