What if US and Chinese spacecraft square off near the Moon?
A cislunar US-China standoff is the mildest tail here (3-10yr, VIX +7.5): primes drift up on a long-dated budget read while broad equity softens modestly. No analogue — this is a slow-burn strategic-competition theme, not an event shock. The honest read is that markets cannot price a decade-out lunar resource claim, so the only actionable leg is a structural bid to space-defense and nuclear-thermal/PNT supply chains; treat the equity drawdown as noise, not signal.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 3–10 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. US and Chinese spacecraft maneuver aggressively near lunar orbit over resource claims. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Defense spending ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.