10For executives

Audience: decision-makers who want the thesis, the market, the moat, and the honest state of the program in ten minutes — no jargon required.

The one-liner#

Delta V Dynamics is "Figma for spacecraft mission design" — a browser-native, collaborative, beautiful platform for designing space missions, with real, verifiable physics, free for students and academics.

The problem#

Designing a space mission today forces a bad choice:

• A toy (games like Kerbal Space Program) — great intuition, but the physics isn't real and the output isn't usable.
• A fortress (Ansys STK ~five-figure desktop licenses; NASA's free-but-clunky GMAT) — genuinely powerful, but expensive, slow to learn, single-player, and built before the modern web.

Meanwhile the market is exploding: roughly 16,900 smallsats are forecast to launch 2026–2035. A whole generation of satellite startups, students, and researchers needs mission-design tooling that is affordable, collaborative, and fast. Nothing in the middle of that barbell exists.

The product#

A single browser tab that is, at once, a flight simulator, a rocket workshop, a mission library, an exoplanet-discovery lab, and a community — unified by one idea: every artifact is a forkable, shareable document with real numbers behind it.

Three differentiators:

1. Real, reproducible physics. The orbital mechanics runs in a Rust engine that produces bit-for-bit identical results in your browser and on our servers. Every result is verifiable and replayable — the foundation of trust (and of cheat-proof leaderboards/competitions).
2. A genuinely beautiful interface. A WebGPU-rendered Earth with a real day/night line and city lights, cinematic 3D — at a visual standard the incumbents structurally cannot reach.
3. Network effects the incumbents can't retro-build. Missions, vehicles, and discoveries are forked and improved like open-source code. A desktop license is a dead end; our community library compounds.

The market & users#

• Satellite-startup engineers — fast trade studies without the heavy desktop tools.
• Universities (students + researchers) — the free academic tier is a beach- head into the next generation of the industry; today's students are tomorrow's buyers.
• Space creators / media — gorgeous, accurate visuals for explaining missions.
• Commercial & civil-space contractors — collaborative, browser-based design.

The wedge is academia (free, viral, builds the corpus and the brand) → prosumer & startups (paid teams) → enterprise (orgs, compliance, precision).

The moat#

The incumbents own deep analysis breadth built over 30 years; we will not win by cloning their menu. We win the way the browser beat desktop GIS:

• Cover the ~20% of analyses that ~80% of missions actually need, beautifully and instantly.
• Wrap them in collaboration, community, forking, and (soon) an AI copilot — a platform layer a desktop tool cannot grow.
• Price academia at zero so the mission-data network effect compounds.
• Hold a reputation for honesty (every number labeled for trustworthiness) that becomes the brand.

The honesty brand (a genuine differentiator)#

Delta V has a constitutional Honesty Ledger: it always tells users exactly how much to trust a number — validated vs prototype, candidate vs confirmed, first-order link budgets. In a field where overclaiming is endemic, being the trustworthy one is a durable, defensible position with engineers and institutions. (See Fidelity & honesty.)

Where the program stands today (honest status)#

Delta V is being built as a sequenced program, S0 → S7 ("the Sovereignty Program"). Status as of this writing:

Plain reading: the hard technical core is done and verified — credible astrodynamics (S1), the satellite-operations bread-and-butter (S2), and a unique discovery room no competitor touches (S3), all wrapped in an elite UI and a working community (the Loop, ranks, forking). What remains is communications (S4), organizations & governance (S5), the AI copilot (S6), and professional-grade precision tooling (S7).

The one honest caveat: deployment#

The platform is currently on a private / dark deployment by deliberate release doctrine — no public launch until the moat is complete (mission library, forks, collaboration, community, and elite UI). The remaining gating work to "light up" the live site is a short list of founder one-time setup tasks (provision the database, deploy the API and discovery service, wire up auth). These are operational, not engineering risk. (Details in DEPLOYMENT.md.)

Why now#

• The smallsat boom creates the demand.
• WebGPU (production-ready since late 2025) finally makes desktop-grade 3D run in a browser tab.
• Rust → WASM makes near-native, deterministic physics run client-side.
• Industry consolidation (Synopsys × Ansys closed mid-2025) and a thawing appetite for design-tool IPOs (the Figma precedent) make a browser-native challenger timely.

Talk to us#

Partnership, investment, press, or a pilot: the Visitor Desk (/contact) routes your message to the team. For the full vision and economics, see the repo's VISION.md, PITCH.md, and CONSTITUTION.md.