The ship that drinks from comets.
A three-minute film. Entered in the XPRIZE Future Vision competition, 2026.
Not selected
This film was entered in the Future Vision XPRIZE. On August 26, 2026, the selection team at Range, XPRIZE and Google named the Top 50 out of more than 2,500 entries. This film is not among them.
We are publishing it anyway, with the reasoning intact and the weak points named, because publishing what does not flatter us is the method. The full account, including what current launch plans imply for the ozone layer and what the FAA has proposed to stop measuring, is here: We Didn’t Make the Fifty.
The logline
A ship that leaves Earth on a column of steam instead of fire – drinking its fuel from the ice of comets and handing the sky back what older rockets burned – drives the price of orbit so low that any nation, and one day any person, can make the climb.
What you just watched
The film opens on the old way: a chemical rocket, all fire and violence, its launch pad drowned in a Niagara of water just so the machine can survive the noise of its own leaving. Then the frame turns. A different vessel waits at the water’s edge – a tall, calm, copper-and-white ship the people call the Kettle. It does not burn. It boils.
One ship, two ways to breathe: a patient cruise and a harder boost, both running on the most ordinary substance in the universe. It hoards no reservoir to survive itself, because there is nothing to survive. When it needs more, it does not drain a thirsty valley – it refuels from the ice already drifting between the worlds.
The thesis is one sentence, and the film delivers it as picture and sound rather than lecture: the thing a chemical rocket must destroy to survive its own noise is the thing the Kettle runs on.
But the real vision is the price. Built at scale, the Kettle is meant to drop the cost of orbit so far that space stops being the privilege of a few superpowers – first any nation that wants the sky, then one day the individual with a reason to go.
It is not a prophecy. It is a permission.
Who made it, and why
I am Tom Tait, 69. A few months ago I used this computer for little more than email and my football pool. Then a podcast sent me to ask an AI a single question about robot remittances – if machines do our labour, where do the obligations of labour go? I have not stopped since.
I am not an aerospace engineer. I am a 69-year-old who decided, late, that the future is too important to leave to the people already certain about it. That question became the Inter Species Wisdom Project: a public venue called the Intelligence Commons, where claims about technology are tested in the open; the Hub, a tidal-powered data centre that draws its electricity from the moving sea, cools itself in the water, and shares back surplus power and fresh water; and the Kettle, the dream at the top of the ladder.
I made this film because optimism that ignores the cost is just advertising. The Kettle counts the cost – the water a chemical rocket destroys to survive its own noise – and then shows a way it is not paid.
Where the Kettle actually stands
Concept stage. Architecture defined, propulsion baselined against published NERVA-era test data and current NASA technical assessments, with the feasibility modelling as the first funded engineering question. The Kettle is a charter artifact and a direction of travel – not a build in progress, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
The claim it rests on is filed where anyone can attack it. We put our own exhaust on trial: Hearing #4 – The Plume asks whether a water-cooled nuclear rocket’s exhaust is too dirty to fly near Earth, against the convener’s own project, because the protocol has to cut both ways or it cuts nothing.
The engineering case – The Hearings
How the film was made
The Commons asks other people to disclose. So we disclose.
- Imagery: original work, generated and edited by the entrant. No recognizable third-party brand intellectual property appears in the film.
- Score: “Cosmic Blueprint,” an original track produced with ElevenLabs Music. Provenance disclosed rather than implied.
- Narration: a licensed synthetic voice (Sterling, ElevenLabs). No human performer is imitated.
- The orca signature mark: original art, commissioned from and purchased outright from the artist Zach Jenkins, and owned by the entrant.
Runtime 3:05, including a 15-second end card.
Corrections, challenges and seat requests: hearings@intelligencecommons.ca. If you think the Kettle is wrong, the Hearings are where to say so, and we will publish you saying it.
Inter Species Wisdom Project Inc. – A British Columbia Benefit Company – “Now that you know, what will you do?”