TerraCore Industries supplied mining equipment and life-support systems for early off-world settlements. Its regolith processors and strip-mining crawlers extracted resources; its closed-loop water systems helped keep the workers alive. TerraCore used contract law to turn its control of this equipment and infrastructure into control over labor. For the company, a settlement began with the right to extract minerals, and its inhabitants were the people needed to do the work.
The company’s first major patents grew out of research at the Santiago School of Vacuum Geology. There, Tomas Hede and Yara Mbaye developed the dry-refinery stack later used across Luna and the Belt.
TerraCore approached expansion as a mining business, with little interest in romantic accounts of the frontier. Its combination of extraction and life-support administration made it a natural merger partner for Horizon Ventures, whose business supplied transport. Together they formed SolEx. Many of SolEx’s later bureaucratic habits came from TerraCore’s emphasis on audits, rather than Horizon’s stories of ships opening humanity’s future.