A relay blackout over the south polar corridor lasted only eleven minutes, but it was enough to expose how much lunar coordination still depends on a small number of trusted pathways.
During the interruption, power-routing telemetry held priority, archive verification traffic queued behind emergency maintenance packets, and two non-urgent service windows were dropped entirely. Nothing catastrophic followed, which is exactly why the event matters. The corridor did what it was designed to do. It simply did not have much slack.
The real lesson is that protected routes are still being treated as reliable because they fail gracefully, not because they are spacious. Operators can preserve the right traffic under stress, but every such event shows how close the system remains to procedural rationing.