Why Ceres: The Case for the Belt
Summary Ceres is 940km in diameter, the largest body in the asteroid belt. Surface gravity 0.029g — low enough that departure costs almost nothing. Water ice confirmed in the subsurface. Mineral abundance sufficient to build, power, and sustain a permanent presence without a single Earth resupply mission. And carbonaceous chondrite composition throughout — carbon everywhere, in a location where carbon is the most important material in the solar system. It is not the closest destination. It is the right one. And Earth cannot afford to bootstrap this from its own gravity well alone — the physics makes it unaffordable at the required scale. ...