TerraCore Industries was the excavation and life-support side of early off-world capitalism: regolith processors, strip-mining crawlers, closed-loop water systems, and the contract law that converted all of them into labor discipline. Its first major patents came out of the Santiago School of Vacuum Geology, where Tomas Hede and Yara Mbaye developed the dry-refinery stack later used across Luna and the Belt.
TerraCore never romanticized expansion. It understood settlement as a mineral-rights problem with people attached. That realism made it a natural merger partner for Horizon Ventures, and many of the bureaucratic habits later associated with SolEx came from TerraCore’s audit culture rather than Horizon’s transport mythology.