Laser surface engineering offers a fundamentally different manufacturing route to spectral control than the paints, multilayer dielectric stacks, and lithographically patterned metasurfaces currently used for spacecraft thermal-control surfaces. Because the optical function is written directly into the bulk substrate and its native oxide rather than applied as a bonded layer, laser-textured surfaces eliminate the coefficient-of-thermal-expansion mismatch, adhesive embrittlement, and delamination risk that drive degradation of paint and second-surface-mirror coatings over repeated deep thermal cycling in orbit; they carry no organic binder to photo-degrade or outgas under UV and atomic-oxygen exposure, removing a known source of both optical drift and contamination of nearby sensitive optics; and they add no coating mass or separate application step, since the thermal-control function is generated in the same manufacturing operation as the structural surface itself. Laser processing is also inherently scalable to the complex, curved, large-area geometries relevant to next-generation platforms — including the far larger radiator areas implied by proposed orbital high-power-density applications such as space-based AI data centres — in a way that cleanroom lithography and multilayer deposition, both fundamentally planar processes, are not. Critically, because the optical response is set entirely by laser-processing parameters (fluence, pulse duration, scan pattern) rather than by material formulation or fixed layer stacks, the same tool and process can in principle be reprogrammed to deliver spatially varying spectral function across a single component — a capability with no straightforward analogue in paint- or deposition-based approaches. These are manufacturing and durability advantages, however, not evidence that laser processing can achieve the spectral selectivity itself: existing approaches can already deliver low solar absorptance or high thermal emissivity independently, and the open scientific question — which this Fellowship addresses directly — is whether both can be achieved simultaneously through laser-programmed multiscale morphology and chemistry, without one degrading the other as it does in current laser-blackening approaches.