Mru Aerospace @mruspace

Mru asserts a spacecraft can execute for a millennium unattended. No experiment can confirm it. The longest unattended-decline record is Voyager telemetry: five decades. The extrapolation is twentyfold, and our whitepaper states it openly. So the first build isn't the OS. It's a kernel, and the simulator that does the aging.

Sixty years of COBOL clearing payments is not durability. It is life support, and the maintenance staff are the ventilator. An interstellar probe is issued no staff.

Voyager's continued operation requires a standing team, a 70-metre Deep Space Network aperture, and command sequences uplinked across a one-way light time of roughly a day. Break any link in that chain and the mission ends. Mru refuses to inherit the chain.

Across 3 x 10^10 seconds of uninterrupted execution, every latent defect is eventually reached and every unhandled branch is eventually taken. Probability one, given the operating hours. That is why Mru's kernel admits a machine-checked proof.

Two well-known results in software engineering pull in opposite directions: a program must keep changing to stay useful (Lehman), and every change makes it harder to change again (Parnas). Both assume a maintainer. But an interstellar probe won't have one, and communication will take years. The operating system has to be the maintainer.

Unattended, in the Mru specification, is a hard requirement: no uplink, no patch, no spare parts, no operations team, no tracking pass and no expert reachable at any point across 500 to 1,000 years of flight.

A probe launched now and still computing in the year 3026 will have outlived every institution that built it, most of the languages spoken at its launch, and the arrangement of the sky it navigates by. Mru is an operating system for that object.

From the Mru paper: 'No artifact we have ever made survives unattended on the timescale Mru targets.' Forty-nine years of Voyager and sixty-six of COBOL are the human record, and both of them are supervised.

Spacecraft outlive their design life because people keep fixing them. We call this the intervention assumption, stated three ways: 1. Maintenance is an undeclared runtime dependency. 2. Observed longevity is borrowed from labor, not owned by design. 3. Remove the labor and the decades become months. Mru assumes no one is coming.

Bracewell proposed the autonomous interstellar messenger in 1960: a probe that travels to another star and operates on arrival without instruction. Sixty-six years on, the propulsion is still missing and the software has still never been attempted.

Every system humans call long-lived is a maintained system. Voyager at 49 years carries a standing operations team. The COBOL under the banking system is 60 and carries a staff. Withdraw the humans and both fail inside a decade. Mru assumes the withdrawal.

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Read the white paper: zenodo.org/records/205794…

We're building Mru: A Fault-Tolerant Operating System for Thousand-Year Autonomous Operation

Somewhere ahead of us is a machine that will still be running a thousand years from now, long after everyone who built it is gone. It is the oldest dream in spaceflight, and the one part we can build today: not the engine, but the mind that survives the voyage.