Belters Guide to Asteroid Mining (IF)

Hard Science-Fiction Setting

Types of Asteroid

Every rock has its own temperament. Knowing what you’re landing on saves lives and keeps your rig in one piece. Here’s the broad strokes — learn the details the hard way if you want, but you’ll only make that mistake once.

C-type (carbonaceous)

Structure: Usually rubble piles with deep regolith; some are solid cores under loose skin. Uses: Water ice, carbon for industry and agriculture, organic compounds. Hazards: Dust clouds from careless mining, weak surface cohesion — anchor wrong and you’ll pull the wall down on yourself. Mining notes: Drill light and slow, bag your tailings, and use electrostatic or vacuum collection for dust. Use harpoons or broad grapples for anchoring. Never rely on a single tie-down.

S-type (silicaceous)

Structure: Solid stony bodies, often fractured; moderate regolith cover. Uses: Building material, some metal ores. Hazards: Shattered interiors from old impacts — voids can collapse under load. Mining notes: Mechanical cutters and shaped charges work well. Watch out for flying shards in low gravity.

M-type (metallic)

Structure: Solid iron-nickel, sometimes with cobalt and platinum group veins. Uses: Bulk metals, high-value catalysts. Hazards: Strong magnetic fields can scramble tools; ricochets from cutting torches or impacts. Mining notes: Magnetic grapples and clamps work best. Use thermal cutting or big industrial grinders; wear mag-shielded instruments.

Icy bodies

Structure: Solid ice or ice-rock mix; surface may be dust-coated. Uses: Water, oxygen, hydrogen fuel. Hazards: Sunlight or waste heat can cause violent outgassing, spinning the body or throwing debris. Mining notes: Work in shadow if possible. Cut and bag in small sections; keep thermal load minimal.

Exotics

Structure: Variable — from solid crystal to volatile-rich rubble. Uses: Rare minerals, unique reactor fuels, superconductors, strange isotopes. Hazards: Anything from toxic vapors to radiation bursts to spontaneous shattering. Mining notes: Only go in with the right gear and a buyer already lined up. Treat everything as unstable until proven otherwise.

Hybrids

Structure: Mixed composition; regolith over metal, ice veins in stone, etc. Uses: Multiple resource streams from one site. Hazards: Unpredictable structure; what’s safe in one section can kill you in another. Mining notes: Survey in detail before cutting. Be ready to switch tools and methods mid-job.

Asteroid Mining

The Belt is the most important mining region in the Solar System, but these notes also apply to asteroid mining in other areas, such as near-Earth asteroids and Jupiter's trojans. Salvage around Mercury is done in a similar way — dangerous but particularly rich. The trojans of Saturn and eventually the Oort Cloud are potential future sites for asteroid mining.

Belt prospecting is high-danger, high-profit. A single rich find can make a crew wealthy for life — or paint a target on their backs if exploited unwisely. Prospecting in the Belt is equal parts skill, patience, and luck. The aim is to find what’s worth hauling or selling while avoiding months of work on a dead rock — or worse, being crushed, irradiated, lost in space, or driven to psychosis. A prospector’s reputation comes not just from what they find, but from how cleanly they work, how well they defend a claim, and how they relate to competitors. In the end, it is all about humanity versus a space that constantly tries to kill you, and humans are expected to aid each other even when competing.

1. First Approach New orbits and unsettled zones appear as mining expands. Distant targets hold richer secrets, but are far from help. From kilometers out, basic classification is possible:

• Visual observation over time reveals orbit and spin.
• Albedo and thermal readings reveal ice, rock, or regolith.
• A pulsed laser can ablate a few milligrams for spectroscopy, mapping surface minerals.
• Solar wind ions or X-rays hitting the surface may trigger faint X-ray emissions that hint at composition.
• Metallic asteroids can slightly deflect the solar wind — detectable to a sensitive magnetometer.
• Dust plumes from solar wind, collisions, or mining can be sampled and backtracked.

Every prospector has their own tricks and superstitions, often kept as closely guarded as the claims themselves.

2. Close Survey Docking means matching spin — easy for a slow rotator, but a tumbler needs grapples, nets, or harpoons. This is where your ship is in the most danger. Once attached, a full survey includes:

• Ground-penetrating radar for internal layers and cavities.
• Sonic mapping for density changes.
• Physical exploration of the surface of a solid asteroid for caves and fissures.
• Drill cores for assay and structure.

3. High-Value Prospecting Small, rich pockets of rare material — the kind worth keeping — demand precision. Belters cut minimal access tunnels, extract what their ship can carry, and preserve the rest for later sale. Tools include laser cutting, micro-detonations, and vacuum-safe chemical processes. This might require a supply trip, but dare you leave the claim? Dare you make multiple runs?

4. Registering and Selling the Claim Time to sell out. Spin state, stability, and proximity to trade routes can matter as much as ore content. Large deposits of common ore — nickel-iron, silicates, carbonates, or volatiles — are medium-value. The quickest profit for a large find is to sell to a mining company. They’ll bring a tug to move it to refinery orbit, or send a portable processor. The asteroid is bagged to contain debris, churned to powder, and refined. Smaller independent operations may buy smaller finds. They offer more reputation among Belters but have fewer resources.

5. Claims and Cleanup Leaving an asteroid in bad shape marks you as trouble. Tailings should be bagged or shifted to dump orbits. Netting or electrostatic collectors trap dust; skip this, and you risk leaving a trail to your claim — or creating micrometeors that get you lynched.

Jackpot Finds

Gold is no longer rare — Belt output dwarfs old Earth’s — but still valuable in electronics and plating. True jackpots are materials rare or costly to synthesize:

• Platinum group metals — iridium, osmium, platinum, palladium; vital for catalysis and high-performance alloys.
• Enriched isotopes — helium-3, lithium-6, other reactor fuels; long-lived radioisotopes for medicine and power.
• Exotic crystals — naturally formed semiconductors, superconductors, or optics; impossible or costly to grow in labs.
• Valuable rocks — bodies suited for use as shielding from sun storms, or to host habitats, bases, relays, or research sites. Spotting these requires broad expertise.
• Contemporary salvage — lost ships, drones, or station modules; value depends on intact systems, structural integrity, and legal claim resolution.
• Pre-Fall salvage — remnants of Dedalus-era projects; high-quality materials, specialized components, and rare engineering solutions from the last great wave of solar industry.
• Solar salvage — abandoned pre-Fall solar collectors and support trusses knocked from station orbit. Their panels can act as sails, sending entire structures drifting far across the system.