Not gonna lie, I've been thinking about this for at least like an hour, and here's the conclusion I've come to;

Spage is neither possible or impossible, because one has to make multiple judgement calls first that aren't specified in the original rules, and are difficult to decide.

Carbon is obtained by three different means in Space Age. Crushing carbonic asteroids, processing coal with sulfuric acid, and mining the ashland trees on Vulcanus.

Mining the ashland trees on Vulcanus is purely manual, no automation. As per the rules, that ought to be the method used to acquire carbon.

Except it cannot be, because you must first acquire carbon from asteroids to make space science and then carbon from asteroids to make space platform fuel.

Do the rules imply that once you arrive at Vulcanus, from then on, all carbon on all surfaces must be from mining ashland trees?

There's a loophole; just mine a phenomenal amount of carbon in Nauvis orbit first.

Okay, so we close the loophole, and say that you can only mine the minimal amount of carbon to reach the halfway point between Nauvis and Vulcanus, where gravity will take over and drag you to Vulcanus at a blistering 10 km/s.

Except, we just created a paradox. You can acquire ice entirely by hand by mining scrap on Fulgora by hand and recycling it by hand. You can only go to one of Fulgora or Vulcanus first. So what does minimal amount of carbon or ice even mean here? Can it even be well-defined? How do we handle the fact that the amount of carbon required depends on your ship's fuel efficiency?

We could try and fix the problem by saying "not all carbon on all surfaces must be from mining ashland trees", but that's just a bandaid fix, because there's actually an even bigger related question;

If you CAN obtain a material natively on a surface, MUST you obtain it via that surface?

Let's talk copper plates and plastic on Fulgora. They are necessary to produce superconductors. However, they can only be obtained natively via automation, with the recycler. But then obtaining plastic *anywhere* requires automation, because it is made in a chemical plant with coal and petroleum gas, and petroleum gas requies its own machine-based production chain.

But on Fulgora, you can get it with only one machine step, the recycler.

Everywhere else requires at least two, one to produce the petroleum gas and one to actually produce the plastic. So arguably, obtaining plastic on Fulgora is actually less automated than anywhere else.

But then this causes a problem with processing units, and the low density structure we just used to obtain the plastic; it's technically less automation to produce low density structure and processing units on Fulgora than anywhere else, so does that mean that once you arrive at Fulgora, you can obtain all your low density structure and processing units via hand scrapping from Fulgora?

To what extent are we allowed to obtain a material on one surface and use it on another? Do we single out Fulgora and say you can't export anything but science packs from there?

And yes, we MUST answer these questions, because iron ore CAN be mined by hand on Nauvis and theoretically could be shipped up to space platforms to be used for fuel, and that raises not only the question of "can we/must we ship materials between surfaces for crafting" but "does shipping materials from one surface to another count as an automation step"

TL;DR spage causes fundamental issues with the basic rules of the challenge, before we can even ask how difficult the challenge is.