Asteroid Mining

It's always difficult to decide which asteroid to Harvest. Too much iron or ice and it's worth less than one with some specific metals that are needed. I have been able to scan the common asteroids and register heavier elements. I Explored this cluster of rocks for a while, scanning, and the elements that are now coming up that don't make sense. I want to find out more, but it's a bit crowded for my ship to get in close.

My ship is a typical Asteroid harvester. It's big and round, like a giant basketball with clamps and directional thrusters around the equator. It's been my home for almost 3 years. It allows me to grab a rock much bigger than itself and carry it to a launch point. Then one of the big market transport companies grabs it and sends it in-system to the breaker factories to disassemble the profitable parts and use them to build more things on the moons of Earth, Mars, Saturn or the many space stations that now litter the solar system.

They say everything breaks down into simple repetitive tasks when you work. Boring travel from asteroid to asteroid just to find your "Motherlode" can take weeks. It's really lonely. Just to travel between asteroid clusters is time consuming. It used to be thought that automated collectors could just grab the asteroids and bring them where the elements were needed. It worked, but the quality and discernment of human judgement and observation was better. If you just wanted ice or iron, send out the robots. If you want rare earths and trace minerals or even crystals that you can't believe even exist, you need human beings. There are quite a few of us out here.

With any luck you hit the "big one" and it gets you your retirement fund when it cashes in. I've been looking and so far, I break even at best. No gold or platinum. Maybe some beryllium, Neodymium, Indium and trace minerals. I guess I'm going to have to take a closer look at this cluster up front and in person with a handheld scanner and my old friend, the rock pick. You be surprised to see how similar this kind of mining is to the old gold rush days a few centuries ago. there's even claim jumpers if, you can believe it

Yes, there are pirates of a sort that are too lazy to hunt for their own treasures and will just as soon take yours and your ship while they leave you to float in space. Mostly, it's boring single miners or pairs that can stand each other for long periods of time hoping to cash in on that Motherlode.

I guess this means I'll need to leave the ship and go out into space to tap on one rock at a time. This is not as difficult as it sounds thanks to the modern jet pack. Miniature ion engines that slowly take you from rock to rock while you calculate the return on each one so you can pick the best one to go back with you. If you find a rich enough cluster, you can register the location in the central processing office and stake a claim. Then you can go back and pick the cluster dry if it will bring you a profit.

I programmed the ship to stay in one place and I started to get into my space suit. Then I made sure the thruster pack was fully charged as well as loading the oxygen I'd need. I can make my own fuel and oxygen out here by finding an icy asteroid. My ship can break down ice into hydrogen fuel and oxygen. Any trace minerals just get sorted into useful additions to the hydroponics and algae tanks for food and biologic waste conversion. It's where the nutrition processing takes place. The algae cultures are grown with the right balance of nutrients to keep you at peak health. Add flavor packets, dehydrate some of it, press it into "steaks" or mock poultry and you sometimes forget its all processed. The food manufacturers on Earth learned how to process just about anything way back in the 1950's. Now we have machines that do it in every ship. It saved millions of lives during the global warming crisis. We don't waste any waste out here or back on the home planet.

I left the ship and started looking for the crazy readings I had in the ship scanners and began to weave through the mess of rocks. There! That way! I was acting like a bloodhound on the scent when I landed on one of the bigger asteroids in the cluster. The slightest extra push will send me flying into space, so I moved very slowly and carefully using a slight downward thrust to keep me grounded. Waving my scanner to get a better sense of direction. It seemed to be just under the dust ahead.

There is very little gravity on these rocks, so, my movements forward were slow and precise. Then I was standing on some irregular shaped pieces of strange metal and started to move away from the sharpest ones. Oh, yes, this was a find. Rare earths, interesting composites that were probably made in a sun hundreds of light years away or even in the aftermath of a supernova.

It took time and a lot of hard work, but I finally Isolated the find and strapped it to my ship. It was a lot bigger than I originally thought. It was more than one piece, and I had difficulty trying to figure out what to do with the organic compounds I found, so I put them in with the recyclers. The algae seemed to love them. The food they produced seemed to add extra energy to my step and somehow my mind was sharper than ever.

No one is going to believe the variety and mixtures of the elements I found. I don't even quite believe it. It's not every day you find an alien ship crash site and collect the technology that might just get humans to other star systems and galaxies. These engines I collected are really something. The power source was gone, but one of them lit right up when I tapped into the cold fusion plant. I'm definitely going to be rich on this find.