Written by OC Wanderer, author of Destiny Among the Stars, a LitRPG sci-fi series set in the real stellar neighborhood. Published October 12, 2026.

Sco-Cen's rock starts out ordinary, and only a sample says what any one body holds. Sampling is possible in one place, the Sun's own neighborhood, so I want to set Sol beside a typical star of Scorpius-Centaurus (Sco-Cen for short).

I imagine a crew whose ship has just arrived at a red dwarf in Sco-Cen. Would they find more to build with there than Sol offers? Sol has a tremendous head start in this comparison: we have visited its worlds, brought pieces home and even made oxygen on Mars. Around another star, a glow of dust is an invitation to explore. It still leaves the crew's most urgent question open: can we turn what is here into what we need?

Sol's advantage is its measured variety

Imagine shopping for a settlement among Sol's small worlds. The whole main asteroid belt weighs roughly 3 percent as much as the Moon, yet that modest total contains very different kinds of material.12

Dawn's visits to Ceres and Vesta3 show why a prospector would care about those differences. Ceres is about 25 percent ice by mass, with carbonates and other salts in its bright surface spots. Vesta melted early in the Solar System's history, letting dense material sink into a core beneath a rocky mantle, much as on Earth. One offers an ice-rich world to investigate; the other records what heat did to the same young system's rocky ingredients.4

Closer to home, the Moon's permanently shadowed craters make me wonder where a crew would put its first drill. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's neutron detector found evidence of water ice in shadowed regions out to at least 77 degrees south latitude. How much lies there, and does dry dust bury it? Those unanswered questions determine whether a promising signal could become a water supply.5

Bennu gives us a lovely reason to keep asking what a distant survey might miss. OSIRIS-REx brought home 121.6 grams containing magnesium-sodium phosphate of a purity and grain size unprecedented in any meteorite sample. The spacecraft's instruments at Bennu had not seen it. Even after visiting an asteroid, we can bring a piece home and discover a surprise inside it.6

What could a red dwarf be hiding?

At 376 to 466 light-years away, Sco-Cen makes this a very different kind of treasure hunt. Most of its stars are small and faint. In Upper Scorpius, its youngest subgroup, the census peaks at red dwarfs of about 0.15 solar masses, roughly a seventh of the Sun.7 Our post on the nursery explores that wider population. About 22 percent of the smallest members, a group including brown dwarfs, still keep a disk of gas and dust, against under 10 percent above one solar mass. That leftover building material glows for our telescopes. I wonder what a survey ship would resolve inside a disk that we now see only from afar.

Sol gives that crew a reason to look beyond the glow. Judged by the dust from comet collisions, the Kuiper Belt ranks among the faintest tenth of comparable Sun-like systems.8 Yet its estimated mass is about 1.6 Moons, roughly 50 times the main asteroid belt.9 Dust brightness carries clues about the collisions producing it; converting that glow into an inventory of ice and rock takes a model. A faint disk could still be worth a closer look, and a brilliant one would leave plenty for a prospector to find out.

Destiny Among the Stars crew illustration for How Resourceful Is Sol Compared to a Typical Scorpius-Centaurus Star?

Can the crew make what it needs?

Now picture the settlement's oxygen plant. A supply of raw material becomes useful when the crew can turn it into something they would otherwise have to ship from home. On Mars, NASA's MOXIE experiment made oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the air: 122 grams over 16 runs, at 98 percent purity or better.10 The total is tiny beside a settlement's needs, but the achievement is thrilling: a machine actually did the chemistry on another world.

Destiny Among the Stars explores the same manufacturing problem. In Book 4, Chapter 211, Angelo tells Luca and Ryan that at four light-years from Earth there is no machine shop and no parts supplier, so a broken part means a long wait. His answer is that they need "the ability to make factories" before any factory.11 A Sco-Cen star sits 376 to 466 light-years from Sol, roughly a hundred times farther than Angelo's four, so every part made in Sol's workshops crosses that distance first. If small bodies with water and rock sit in convenient orbits near a settlement, a local processor could replace those shipments, and that Sco-Cen system would beat Sol for that settlement.

The first useful batch

Suppose the crew does reach that red dwarf. Its telescope survey has given it a star and a disk; now the glow can resolve into individual bodies, with gravity wells to navigate and surfaces to investigate. Bennu's surprise makes samples especially tempting. What does the rock actually contain, and can the equipment process it? A pilot plant would put that discovery to work, producing a first batch of water or parts and letting the settlement compare local output with the cost of importing it. MOXIE shows how much we can learn from a small machine working in the place we hope to settle.

In Book 5, Chapter 270, Ryan test-prints a replacement thruster valve on the crew's primary metal extruder, and it holds tolerance to a fraction of a millimeter.12

So how resourceful is Sol compared to a typical Sco-Cen star?

Sol earns its reputation through what we have already learned to find and use. A Sco-Cen system could beat it for a particular settlement if accessible material and workable processing made local production cheaper than shipping supplies across hundreds of light-years. That possibility is what keeps me imagining the crew at the red dwarf: their first useful batch might change which system they call home. I wonder what their survey would find.

If one Sco-Cen system did beat Sol, a ship would still have to choose a way to reach it through the gas and dust between. Which direction should it fly? What is the Lupus Tunnel, and is it a viable corridor for interstellar travel?

If you want to watch a crew build an industry from almost nothing far from home, start Destiny Among the Stars.

Endnotes

  1. Elena V. Pitjeva and Nikolai P. Pitjev, “Masses of the Main Asteroid Belt and the Kuiper Belt from the Motions of Planets and Spacecraft,” Astronomy Letters 44 (2018), 554–566, arXiv:1811.05191: main belt mass (4.008 ± 0.029) × 10⁻⁴ Earth masses (3σ), about 4 ten-thousandths of an Earth, from more than 800 thousand positional observations of planets and spacecraft. ↩

  2. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Moon Fact Sheet: Moon-to-Earth mass ratio 0.0123. Author calculation: 4.008 × 10⁻⁴ ÷ 0.0123 = 0.033, about 3 percent. ↩

  3. NASA Science, 4 Vesta: the second most massive body in the main belt, “almost 9% of the total mass of all asteroids.” ↩

  4. NASA Science, Ceres (Dawn): about 25 percent ice by mass; bright deposits of carbonates and other salts; internal differentiation. NASA Science, 4 Vesta: formed within 1 to 2 million years of the Solar System's birth, melted, and separated into crust, mantle and core. ↩

  5. NASA Science, NASA's LRO: Lunar Ice Deposits Are Widespread: widespread evidence of water ice in permanently shadowed regions toward at least 77 degrees south latitude, inferred from epithermal neutrons measured by the LEND instrument; “We can't accurately determine the volume of the PSRs' ice deposits or identify if they might be buried under a dry layer of regolith.” ↩

  6. NASA, Surprising Phosphate Finding in NASA's OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample, reporting Lauretta and Connolly et al., Meteoritics & Planetary Science: magnesium-sodium phosphate not seen in the spacecraft's remote sensing data; sample mass 121.6 grams (4.3 ounces). ↩

  7. K. L. Luhman and T. L. Esplin, “Refining the Census of the Upper Scorpius Association with Gaia,” The Astronomical Journal 160 (2020), 44, DOI: 1,761 adopted members; spectral types peak at M5, corresponding to about 0.15 solar masses at the age of Upper Sco (about 10 Myr); disk fraction about 22 percent for objects of 0.01 to 0.3 solar masses (this bin includes brown dwarfs) and under 10 percent above 1 solar mass. Author calculation: 1 ÷ 0.15 = 6.7, roughly a seventh. ↩

  8. J. S. Greaves and M. C. Wyatt, “Debris Discs and Comet Populations around Sun-like Stars: The Solar System in Context,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 404 (2010), 1944–1951, arXiv:1001.5177: the Kuiper Belt is “among the last 10% of stars” in dust level, from 70 μm Spitzer excesses of nearby FGK dwarfs. ↩

  9. Pitjeva and Pitjev (2018), arXiv:1811.05191: the Kuiper Belt total together with the 31 largest trans-Neptunian objects is (1.97 ± 0.030) × 10⁻² Earth masses (about 0.02), which exceeds the main belt “almost by a factor of 50.” Author calculation: 0.0197 ÷ 0.0123 = 1.6 Moon masses. ↩

  10. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA's Oxygen-Generating Experiment MOXIE Completes Mars Mission, 2023: 122 grams of oxygen in total, 16 runs, purity of 98 percent or better, and at its best 12 grams an hour. ↩

  11. Canon: Book 4, Chapter 211 (Angelo to Luca and Ryan). Sco-Cen distances of 376 to 466 light-years: our post on the nursery. Author calculation: 376 ÷ 4 = 94 and 466 ÷ 4 = 117, roughly a hundred times. ↩

  12. Canon: Book 5, Chapter 270 (Ryan's report to Luca; Sabrina had just rebuilt the manufacturing layout). ↩