Ceres Deepcore Mining Collective

The Ceres Deepcore Mining Collective began in 2141 as forty families sharing a single drill rig in the Occator basin. Today it is the largest worker-owned extraction outfit in the Asteroid Belt, with more than 11,000 member-owners and smelting stations on Ceres and Vesta. Every member holds one vote, and every major purchase, including each new hull, goes to a collective ballot.

The heart of the operation is a fleet of nine Leviathan Ore Haulers. Each 880-metre hauler carries 140,000 tonnes of refined metal and runs on deuterium fusion slurry at roughly 11.4 tonnes per 100 AU. With a flight crew of six and 22 aboard in total, a Leviathan replaces what used to take five older bulk carriers. At 760 million credits apiece the vote was close, but the members calculated a payback period of under seven years on the Ceres-to-Mars run alone.

Supporting the haulers are four Basilisk Salvage Tugs, used to nudge loose tailings and retired rigs out of the shipping lanes, and three Valkyrie Survey Corvettes that map candidate rocks with lidar and gravimetry before a single drill is committed. Deepcore prospectors say a Valkyrie pays for itself the first time it rules out a hollow rubble pile.

In 2185 the Collective completed the Vesta Ring Run, a nine-month convoy of four Leviathans that delivered 560,000 tonnes of structural steel to the Olympus Ring shipyards, still the largest single metal shipment in the Belt's history. Freya MacAllister, Halcyon's partnerships lead for the Belt, works with the Collective from our Ceres office.