Horizon 3 Galactic compute
Every kilogram in orbit was refined somewhere first.
Nine subsystems on the standard spacecraft mass budget. Tiny tonnages, extreme concentration, and a supply chain with almost no substitutes.
Turn the model, pull it apart, click any component, or filter by a single mineral. Nothing here is a resource statement. It is a search image, which is a different and earlier thing.
Interactive
The exploded view
Drag to turn the model and scroll to zoom. Run the slider from assembled to exploded. Click a component to see what it is made of and whether we hold ground for it, or pick a mineral to light up every place it appears.
A real-time 3D model, built to the subsystem breakdown below rather than copied from any manufacturer. Proportions and part shapes are representative. The numbered component list under the model is the keyboard route through it, and the fallback if your browser cannot run WebGL.
How to read the four tiers. "Ground held" means we have lodged an application over ground selected for that mineral. "Co-target" means our ground is the right geological style to carry it and we intend to assay for it, but we have not yet done so and we make no claim that it is there. "Search image" means it is on our list and we are building the targeting method, with no tenure behind it. "Not pursued" means it is a real input and we have no position and are not looking.
Mass balance
What one spacecraft eats
Shares of dry mass on the SMAD budget, with absolute figures for a 500 kg class spacecraft. A cubesat and a large GEO bus sit orders of magnitude apart.
| Material | Share or mass | Principally in | Provenance | Our position |
|---|
Published = stated by a named third party. Derived = arithmetic on a published figure, with the step shown. Indicative = order of magnitude only, no source, shown so the component is not silently missing.
Subsystem mass shares after the standard SMAD (Space Mission Analysis and Design) dry-mass budget: payload 41 per cent, structure and mechanisms 20, power 19, attitude determination and control 8, command and data handling 5, thermal 2, telemetry and control 2, balance 3. Element content is derived from those shares and from published space-hardware practice, not from any operator disclosure.
The Honest Footnote
This is the weakest commercial case of the four and we should say so. A satellite is a few hundred kilograms; even a constellation of ten thousand of them is a rounding error against terrestrial demand for every metal on this page.
What makes it worth a page is concentration rather than tonnage. Germanium sits under every space solar cell, has no drop-in substitute, and has been under Chinese export control since 2023. We hold no germanium ground and are not pretending otherwise.
All seventeen Queensland applications are applications. None is granted. There is no mineral resource, no ore reserve and no JORC public report behind anything shown here.