Belters Guide to Asteroid Mining (IF)
Belter’s Guide to Asteroids
Prospecting in the Belt is equal parts skill, patience, and luck. The goal is to find what’s worth hauling or selling, while avoiding the risk of spending months on a dead rock.
1. First Approach From tens of thousands of kilometers out, basic classification is possible. Albedo and thermal readings tell you if it’s ice, rock, or regolith. A targeted laser can ablate a few milligrams from the surface for spectroscopy, revealing likely mineral content on the surface. You do this hundreds of times on an interesting target, getting surface samples from all over the asteroid. Space dust can also provide clues, especially about other mines.
2. Close Survey Docking to an asteroid means matching its spin — an unsteady rotator will require grapples or tethers. Once attached, the prospector takes depth readings:
- Ground-penetrating radar for internal layering and voids.
- Sonic mapping to measure density changes.
- Drill cores for physical verification and assay.
3. Selling the Claim If the body contains bulk deposits of useful metals, volatiles, or building material, it’s usually medium-value ore. The fastest profit is to sell the claim to a mining concern. They bring a tug to shift it into refinery orbit, or haul a portable refinery to it. The rock is bagged to contain debris, churned to powder, and fed into the processor. Unfortunately for you, these asteroids will always contain low quantities of more valuable finds, bringing profit you will never see and reducing the price you can sell your valuable finds.
4. High-Value Finds Gold, rare isotopes, exotic crystals, enriched deuterium or tritium — these are usually in small pockets. Belters mine these directly, cutting as little as possible to reach the target. This preserves the remaining mass for later sale. Such operations are careful and low-mass, relying on precision tools, micro-detonations, and vacuum-safe chemical processes. You really should use webbing to capture all dust to prevent micrometeors, but no everyone does this. This may come back to haunt them, as others may detect the unusual space dust and trace it back to its source and possibly claim-jump or just quietly steal anything that was left.
5. Claims and Cleanup Leaving an asteroid in worse condition than you found it is bad business — and makes enemies. Unused tailings are bagged or moved to a designated dump orbit. A clean, documented claim sells better than a stripped, drifting husk.