Ceres Control War
Date: 2688-2702
Location: Ceres and surrounding Belt logistics corridors
Primary actors: Aeronautics Unlimited, Orbital Forge, SolEx, PSC observers, Belt labor unions
The Ceres Control War was the conflict that proved the Belt could not be governed as a pure extraction ledger. SolEx attempted to fold Ceres and its connected Bloom infrastructure into a stricter throughput model just as Aeronautics Unlimited and Orbital Forge were building a more decentralized habitat-and-salvage economy around it.
Open fighting stayed within PSC permit structures more often than later myth remembers, but sabotage, labor mutiny, and enclosure politics did most of the decisive work. AU won not simply by fielding more ships, but by convincing enough engineers, dock workers, and cavity planners that SolEx administration would choke the Belt’s experimental culture.
The war established AU as the default architect of Belt civilization and made Ceres the symbolic capital of frontier industrial modernity.