What if a heavy-lift rocket explodes with hundreds of satellites aboard?
A heavy-lift loss with hundreds of satellites spikes launch-insurance rates and stalls constellation deployment — a space-sector/insurance event, not an AI-capex bellwether move; the modeled Nvidia leg is a stretch. Rhymes with the 2023 launch-insurance capacity crunch after a run of satellite losses that hardened rates. Transmission hits launch insurers, constellation operators' redeployment costs, and component/satellite makers — barely touching AI semis.
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 0–6 months 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. A fully-loaded heavy-lift rocket explodes with hundreds of satellites, halting deployments and spiking launch-insurance rates. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▼ · Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.