Ceres and the Asteroid Belt
Ceres
Orbital characteristics:
Distance from star: 414 million kilometres (2.77 astronomical units)
Orbital period: 4.6 years
Space stations: 1 (SPSS Demeter)
Physical characteristics:
Type: Cold dwarf ice-covered planet
Mass: 0.00016 Earth mass
Radius: 469.7 kilometres (0.0742 Earth radii)
Average temperature: 172 K (-101.15 °C)
Habitability: Uninhabitable
Societal:
Discovered: 1801
Colonised: 30 March 2103
Population: 1.5 million
Capital: Ceres Central
With a population of one-and-a-half million, Ceres is the World Union’s third-largest colony. Its dominating position in the Asteroid Belt has made it the second-wealthiest human colony after Luna. Ceres was the starting point for the colonisation of the Belt in 2103, and sought to fully implement the lessons of the settlement of Luna and Mars: psychologists and urban planners were involved from the beginning to ensure that habitats would have sufficient space for both privacy and healthy community living. Because of Ceres’ extremely low gravity, centrifuge rings like the Heneb Habitat were also installed perpendicular to the surface, to provide healthy, Earth-like gravity for long-term residents.
Ceres today is the transshipment point for at least 30% of the trade between Earth and the rest of the Belt. Ceres also has more fresh water than Earth in the ice deposits covering its surface, making it a major supplier of fusion fuels for the Belt. Initially dependent on the import of complex organics from Earth, the discovery of nitrates and phosphates on the asteroid of Minerva in 2113, in the same asteroid group as Ceres, has significantly increased the self-sufficiency of Ceres and the Belt as a whole. Ceres’ low gravity is such that even large ships can berth directly at the equatorial docks, and so it lacks the orbital cargo transfer facilities common at larger planets. Ceres is orbited by a single space station, SPSS Demeter, the headquarters of the Space Patrol Service’s Outer System Command.
Wealth has left Ceres looking for powers to match: since 2114, Chief Administrator Katja Förster has appealed for Ceres to move away from its status as a colony to one closer to that of a World Union member state. Förster’s Cererian Autonomy Party has become the largest and most electorally-successful such movement in any of the colonies, arguing for the right to tax trade passing through Ceres, as well as to conduct its own security patrols against Asteroid Belt piracy. For its part the World Union has viewed what it regards as Cererian nationalism with suspicion, seeing requests for powers to raise security forces as an unacceptable challenge to its exclusive right to police space. The Union is also wary of Ceres becoming a centre for a pan-Belt identity: while the other asteroid colonies have their own administrations, the Cererian Administration is informally regarded as a “first among equals” in the Belt owing to its economic pre-eminence. Institutions such as the Inter-Belt Cooperation Forum and the Asteroid Investment Bank are headquartered on Ceres, and Union politicians have in unguarded moments voiced fears of such associations evolving into an independent government for the Asteroid Belt.
The Asteroid Belt
Distance from star: 329-478 million kilometres (2.2-3.2 astronomical units)
Population: >3 million
Colonised: 2103-ongoing
The Asteroid Belt’s enormous reserves of easily-accessible ices, volatiles, and metals have vastly-reduced manufacturing costs in space, and promise to dramatically simplify the ongoing colonisation of Mars and Jupiter. The World Union’s determination to reach this mineral bounty, however, was the root cause of one of its earliest and greatest mistakes. In 2103, the progress of colonisation had stalled in the face of the disappointing conditions of Mars. Ideologically-committed to the cause of settling space, the government of Secretary-General Clémence Mireault began offering generous loans and subsidising launch fees with the explicit aim of “democratising” space by encouraging small mining firms to stake their own mining claims in the Asteroid Belt. Initially, this was a great success: dozens, then hundreds of small companies established claims in the “Rush to the Belt”, with service facilities on Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea becoming the seeds of new colonies.
By 2106, however, the experiment was clearly failing: even with subsidies, the costs of running an asteroid mining business were extortionate, and no small concern could possibly mine enough ore to recoup the costs of refinement and shipping, on top of fuel and living expenses. Claims were sold to larger conglomerates and corporations at a pittance. While some miners gave up and accepted bankruptcy, others resorted to crime: what had begun as smuggling goods past the beleaguered Space Patrol Service exploded into open piracy in October 2106, when a desperate miner jury-rigged a probe into a missile, fired the improvised weapon into an ore hauler leaving Psyche, and plundered its holds. The next few months were a bloodbath as the miners realised they could raid unopposed by the Space Patrol Service, then little more than a search-and-rescue and customs enforcement fleet. Clémence Mireault’s government collapsed in the face of the crisis, and her successor, Estevan Cardoso, oversaw a massive expansion and militarisation of the Space Patrol Service to deal with the pirates. Virtually every innovation in weaponry or ship design since has begun either in a pirate’s asteroid cave or as a Union response.
Today, the Asteroid Belt is a mix of booming industrial colonies, poverty-stricken mining concerns left over from the Rush to the Belt, and pirate bases. Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea are the Belt’s sources of fusion fuels, while Ceres is developing its own manufacturing and shipbuilding base. The metal-rich asteroid Psyche, owned entirely by a conglomerate of mining firms, is expected to become the Solar System’s single-largest source of metals in the next ten years. This flourishing economy is preyed on by endemic low-level piracy, which intensifies twice-yearly when Belt-based companies return cargos to Earth, known as to the Space Patrol Service as “pirate seasons”: some of these pirate groups, such as the Blackskulls, Red Chains, or Golden Masks, raid merely for survival and plunder. Others, such as the Vestan Guard, Eunomia Corsairs, or Void Brethren, are outwardly political and claim to be the legitimate representatives of those who the World Union abandoned in the Asteroid Belt. A minority element within the Cererian Autonomy movement advocates for a general pardon and reconciliation with Belt pirates, though the mainstream of the movement reviles piracy and demands greater powers to combat it.