Design Graph

Premise

Aerospace programs lose more value to broken traceability than to broken engineering. A requirement gets refined, a part number gets revised, a test result gets entered against the old part — and by the time anyone notices, the program has been quietly designing against two different versions of itself for six months.

Digital-thread tools exist (Teamcenter, Windchill, 3DEXPERIENCE) but they're heavy, expensive, and structured around large-team configuration management rather than around how a small engineering team actually thinks. The premise here is that a graph database with the right schema and a thin web interface can deliver the part of the digital thread that matters — effectivity-aware traceability — at two orders of magnitude less weight.

Architecture

A Neo4j graph holds the program: requirements, parts, assemblies, test campaigns, ICDs, decisions, and the relationships between them, all versioned by effectivity (which configuration each fact applies to) rather than by simple chronology.

Graph

Neo4j (Docker)

API

FastAPI · 127.0.0.1:8001

UI

Next.js · 127.0.0.1:3000

Remote access

Cloudflare Tunnel

The current seed is a mock Mammoth spacecraft architecture — 148 nodes and 295 relationships across requirements, subsystems, and verification artifacts. That's enough scale to exercise effectivity queries and verify the graph schema holds up under realistic project shape.

Current state

Working prototype, running locally and accessible through Cloudflare Tunnel. A documented AI data contract lets agents read and write to the graph through a constrained interface — relevant because the long-term play is to have design agents reason about the graph directly rather than scrape READMEs.

The first internal program to commit to using it as its digital thread is Space Kangaroo; integration there exercises the schema against a real, evolving design rather than a frozen seed.

What's next

Two tracks. Public-facing: seed a parallel instance with an Apollo-era data set (or another program with abundant open material) and host it at design.dauntless.systems as a portfolio piece. Private-facing: move the working-graph instance to studio.dauntless.systems behind Cloudflare Access so working designs stay private without giving up the showcase.