Mikhail Orlov is the chief engineer of the Pathfinder Fleet, the joint Soviet-UN programme whose first two Kuzmin-powered frigates — Tsiolkovsky and Korolev — departed the Deimos shipyard on 8 March 2097 for the outer solar system.
His design philosophy for the two-ship configuration is the mission’s defining operational principle: “A ship that goes dark beyond the point where Earth or Luna or Mars can hear it is a ship that needs another ship nearby that can notice. Tsiolkovsky and Korolev travel as a pair for the entire mission profile. If one is disabled or lost, the other returns with warning, or renders assistance directly, depending on what is possible. Neither travels this route alone. That is the whole design philosophy in one sentence.”
He successfully defended the two-ship configuration against budget planners who had proposed a single larger vessel — a design decision that, at the time of departure, was publicly credited with making the mission politically and operationally viable where a single-ship programme might not have survived the eighteen-year construction timeline.