Life-Support Funding Lab: TRL Maturation Under a Budget

Every space life-support subsystem — oxygen generation, water recovery, CO₂ scrubbing, waste processing — has to climb from a lab prototype (low Technology Readiness Level) to flight-qualified hardware (TRL 9), and that climb is paid for, year by year, out of a fixed program budget. This simulator lets you split an annual R&D budget across the four subsystems and watch each one mature along a real logistic S-curve: funding above a minimum "floor" drives fast progress through the mid TRLs and slow, expensive progress near flight qualification, while funding below the floor causes the subsystem to actually regress as its team and test infrastructure erode — the funding "valley of death" that has killed real hardware programs. A central 3D station model assembles module by module as overall mission readiness climbs, live readouts track cumulative spend and the single bottleneck subsystem gating the whole mission, and the collapsible section underneath spells out the governing equation.