Project Saoirse

The contest

The NSS Gerard K. O'Neill Space Settlement Contest. Run by the National Space Society, named for Gerard K. O'Neill, the Princeton physicist who formalized cylinder and torus colony designs in the 1970s. Inherited from the NASA Ames Space Settlement Contest when Ames discontinued sponsorship. 2026 received ~29,000 entries from teams in 31 countries. The Grand Prize goes to the single best submission across every category and grade level. We won it. Our team had competed for four consecutive years.

The settlement

Saoirse is designed for 10,000 residents at the Mars–Sun L2 Lagrange point — a stable gravitational pocket trailing Mars in its solar orbit, roughly 1 AU + Mars-Sun L2 distance from Earth. 50 pages, 75-citation bibliography. Each chapter owned by a specialist:

My chapter — PPE

I wrote the Politics, Philosophy & Economics chapter. There are three institutional designs in it that I'm proud of and would argue for in the lounge.

Exergy-denominated currency

Saoirse's currency is exergy — Sciubba's Extended Exergy Accounting, basically a unit of useful energy capacity. Every price tag is denominated in joules of recoverable work. In a closed-loop habitat the binding constraint isn't dollars, it's recoverable work; pricing in exergy means the constraint shows up on every receipt. The chapter walks through how you'd convert wages, rents, and tariffs into the unit.

Conservation market (FERC-745-style)

Borrowed straight from US energy regulation: FERC Order 745 compensates demand-response at the same rate as supply. Saoirse runs the same pattern in exergy — residents get paid to not run the dryer at 6pm. Conservation is a paid market activity, not a civic guilt-trip.

Tripartite executive, time-horizon-weighted voting

Three seats on the executive: an elected representative (accountable to the present), an appointed expert (accountable to the technical record), and a sortition citizen — randomly selected, rotated annually, accountable to the median resident. Votes are time-horizon-weighted. Decisions whose consequences land within 5 years: the elected seat dominates. Decisions whose consequences land 30+ years out: the sortition seat dominates. The expert seat is constant. The mechanism encodes a long-term discount correction directly into the voting rule, instead of relying on individual decision-makers to resist it.

(The sortition piece comes from a stack of papers showing randomly-selected citizens reason more like trustees-of-the-future than officials facing re-election. Real result, not hand-wave.)

Draws on Rawls for the veil of ignorance on seat structure, Nozick for procedural legitimacy of the sortition mechanism, and Landemore for the epistemic-democracy case. Citations in the report.

The team

Eleven people, each owning one or more sections. I led the team and wrote PPE. The engineering chapters were owned by specialists who knew their stack way better than I did. Faculty advisor: Ms. Simona Matei, Central Peel SS. Full roster in the report.

Press

• CBC RADIO ONE · HERE AND NOW TORONTO
  "High school students win national space contest"
  10-min interview · April 20, 2026 · listen ↗

ISDC, Washington DC — June 2026

Presented Saoirse at the Saturday Gala Dinner at ISDC 2026 in Washington, in front of ~300 aerospace scientists. Standing ovation. $5,000 USD scholarship split among the team.

mahimn · saoirse · grand prize 2026 · isdc upcoming