Outposts in the Belt
By the second half of the century the free-fall
manufacturing industry was booming in the Earth-Moon
system. In the early years the raw materials required for
the manufacture of solar power satellites and the other
products of the orbital factories were shipped up-well
from Terra and Luna. As thoughts turned towards
building truly colossal structures in Cis-Lunar Space, it
became clear that launching raw materials from the
lunar railguns would be prohibitively expensive. Some
metals were already being shipped from Mars, but this
too would be uneconomic for building orbital cities. The
transnationals were forced to look beyond Cis-Luna and
Mars to the asteroids for a cheaper source of minerals.
The first asteroids to be mined were Earth-crossing
bodies nudged by nuclear rockets into Earth orbit. The
orbital corporations rapidly developed effective
techniques for mining and smelting metals in freefall.
The number of asteroids available for economically
feasible transfer into Earth orbit was very small however,
and the main belt contained much more differentiated
(and hence much more lucrative) materials. Driven by
this promise, the corporations dispatched a series of
mining robots and automated refineries to the main
belt. Each of the mining drones was equipped with a
mass-driver to return processed materials to Terra and
Mars.
During the 2070s it became necessary to send human
crews to the Belt to keep the mining operations running
smoothly. By the end of that decade, hundreds of
people were working among the asteroids. In 2085
Mitsubishi, Cyrax, Soyuz-Mikoyan and UNSA jointly set
up a permanently manned outpost on Ceres to serve as
a base for further exploration and mining. The first crews
assigned to the Belt worked for five-year terms, attracted
to the dangerous work by the prospects of high pay.
Gradually more and more of these people stayed, while
minority groups moved out and set up their own mining
operations and habitats.
The unchanging economics of orbital mechanics made
it much cheaper to ship cargoes out to the Belt from
Mars rather than from Earth. A three-way trade soon
emerged within the inner system. Earth exported to
Mars the low-bulk high technology goods that still
could not be manufactured by Martian industries. The
Martians exported machinery, habitats and supplies to
the outposts of the Belt. The Belters completed the
triangle by shipping processed materials and small
asteroids to Cis-Luna.
The extension of the human reach into the middle
regions of Sol System also provided the vehicles to
enable expeditions to venture to the worlds of the outer
system. A prime target for the transnationals was
Europa, a moon known to host complex biochemical
systems clustered around deep sea vents. The fierce
competition between Earth's biotechnology companies
was founded on headlong innovation, and novel
families of compounds were valuable commodities. In
2092, Transgene, attracted by this rich prize, established
an outpost suspended beneath the Europan global
icesheet.
Belt:
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Now
The future of Ad Astra
