These entries grew out of the research process behind the book.
At some point they stopped feeling like background notes and started feeling like pieces of writing in their own right. What is here is the cleaned-up version, not the whole pile.
Written under Kai Wrenbury. These are the questions I kept dragging back to the desk while the novel was coming together.
Trajectory and operations
I wanted one page that treated L2 as an operating environment rather than a scenic label. This entry is about the actual physics behind the setting: why Lagrange points are unstable, why halo orbits exist, and why station-keeping turns calm geometry into ongoing labor.
3 April 2026
Artificial gravity
The centrifuge notes kept expanding because artificial gravity is not a futuristic decoration; it is a force budget with human consequences. This entry distills the reading on RPM, radius, Coriolis effects, counter-rotation, and why a usable centrifuge has to be engineered for tolerance as much as thrust.
3 April 2026
Software and protocol
This one comes from my software side. It is not a claim that spacecraft should speak JWT, but a look at why signed message envelopes, bounded claims, and protocol discipline matter whenever communication has to survive delay, distrust, or asynchronous handling.
3 April 2026
Rescue vehicle
I kept Orion in the journal because it solves a specific hard-SF problem cleanly: how a real crew vehicle gets people out, keeps them alive, and brings them back without pretending transit hardware is a floating hotel.
3 April 2026
Standards and governance
The book leans on real standards cultures more than dramatic clause citations. This entry is about the NASA, ECSS, and JAXA frameworks that shaped the tone of the setting, and about the line between authentic institutional gravity and made-up paperwork jokes.
3 April 2026
Habitat engineering
The life-support reading kept collapsing toward three linked ideas: recover what you can, scrub what you must, isolate what is going bad. This entry pulls together the Water Recovery System, CO2 removal, and hatch discipline because they all answer the same survival question.
3 April 2026
EVA procedure
The more I read EVA procedures, the clearer it became that a spacewalk is mostly about pressure management and physiological timing. This entry is about suit pressure, prebreathe, airlocks, and why the checklist starts long before anyone opens the hatch.
3 April 2026
Rendezvous and docking
Docking only looks serene because standards, sensors, and alignment work have already done most of the job. This entry is about interface compatibility, relative navigation, capture sequences, and why good docking scenes feel calm instead of lucky.
3 April 2026
Signals and delay
I kept coming back to L2 communication because once I understood the delay, half the book snapped into focus. This piece is about signal lag, dish time, blackout windows, backup bandwidth, and what it does to a conversation when physics gets a vote.
18 March 2026
Habitat engineering
I stayed with life-support systems longer than I expected because the good problems show up before anything fully fails. This piece is about oxygen, scrubbing, water recovery, odd one-person operating conditions, and the maintenance burden that makes a station feel lived in.
4 February 2026
Trajectory and operations
Orbital mechanics kept stopping me whenever I tried to treat L2 as scenery. This piece is about halo orbits, station-keeping, rendezvous logic, and the way small missed corrections become bigger problems later.
12 January 2026
Software and control
My software background made it hard to believe in vague space AI for more than five minutes. This piece asks the better question: what kind of automation would a serious mission actually trust, and where would it draw the line?
28 March 2026