Dmitri Savchenko is the chief engineer of Pobeda Station, the first permanent human settlement on Mars. In a May 2075 National Geographic feature, he provided the defining observation on the station’s power infrastructure: the Kuzmin reactor that powered the original excavation ran out of deuterium-helium-3 fuel in 2071, and the station now operates on solar arrays and a thorium molten salt SMR whose lineage traces directly to the Soviet thorium programme of the 1990s. “We arrived on the most advanced propulsion system in human history, and we have been running the lights on a reactor design my grandfather could have built in Cuba in the 2010s. There is a lesson in that I have not fully worked out yet.”
Asked whether Pobeda’s residents think of themselves as building toward the Pathfinder Fleet’s outer solar system horizon or simply surviving, he declined to offer a clean answer: “Ask me on a good week and I’ll tell you we’re building a shipyard for the outer solar system. Ask me during a dust storm and I’ll tell you we’re still, some days, just trying to keep the lights on that we replaced the good reactor with. Both are true. I don’t know yet which one is the real story of this place.”