A Unified Pathfinder Concept

This paper asks a specific question: if the propulsion gap identified in the Phase-Managed Handover System (PMHS — non-contact sequential magnetic torque transmission for deep-space gearboxes) and Powered Sundiver with Distributed Capture (PSDC — Venus-assisted solar perihelion trajectory and power-generation concept) papers were ever closed, and the Planetary Isochronous Life Model (PILM — heuristic for prioritising exoplanet targets by host-star age fraction and stability) were used to choose a direction, what would an uncrewed pathfinder mission built on this architecture actually look like — and how far, realistically, would it get within a human research career? The answer separates into four tiers, nested by distance and technology readiness. Two are real today: the Lunar Baseline Calibration Network (LBCN — Earth–Moon timing and correlation backbone) and the Heliocentric Infrastructure Relay Network (HIRN — six-node dual-ring relay system at 0.7–2.0 AU) both use only demonstrated chemical propulsion and the Oberth effect, the same maneuvers Parker Solar Probe already flies. Two are conditional on the unsolved propulsion gap: a relay/beacon network reaching the heliopause (~120 AU), the real trans-Neptunian object Farfarout (~133 AU), and the Oort Cloud (2,000–100,000 AU), which — if the gap closed — would complete in months to a few decades; and a pair of interstellar-direction pathfinder vectors, one toward Proxima Centauri (4.25 ly, clearing a human research career only at an extreme, still-unproven 1g tier) and one toward HD 137010 b (146 ly, a genuine NASA/Kepler-K2 candidate added to the Exoplanet Archive in February 2026 and selected here using PILM, which does not clear a human lifetime at any tier modeled). A further, less comfortable finding emerges from testing the architecture’s own internal logic: isolating PSDC’s specific contribution to a PMHS-driven beacon-deployment mission, under fixed and stated assumptions, shows PSDC’s velocity boost makes the mission slower, not faster, once a realistic Phase 1 duration is included — the boost is real, but it solves a different problem (mass-efficient orbital capture, PSDC’s own stated purpose) than the one being asked of it here (fastest arrival at rest). This revision adds a physical specification for the relay/beacon nodes (Project PSARB — Poloidal-Shielded Analog Relay Buffer: four-pillar architecture for data survival, thermal transport via Galinstan MHD loop, radiation protection, and bandwidth reduction) and checks whether the concentric-baffle-vessel fluid dynamics underlying PSARB’s thermal-management subsystem covers the flow regime that subsystem operates in. The finding is partial: the baffle-vessel study’s dimensionless area/resistance-partitioning argument transfers cleanly, but its empirical validation anchor (high-Reynolds separated turbulent shear flow) does not directly validate PSARB’s strongly magnetohydrodynamic Hartmann-flow regime. As with the PSDC–PMHS isolation, this paper’s contribution is showing exactly where proposed connections hold and where they need separate validation.