Let's do the math. The 1.06 million tons of uranium reserves, combined with the associated molybdenum, copper, and other trace minerals... these aren't pure veins. They are embedded in bedrock. Extracting them requires excavating and processing at least two to three hundred million tons of raw earth!
And that is just a single resource node. Factor in the standalone iron, copper, aluminum, and titanium deposits scattered across the sector... they were looking at moving at least two to three billion tons of rock.
Fine, that sounds like a staggering amount of material, but that was just the small stuff. The real nightmare was the ice!
Geologists had mapped four massive sub-glacial lakes near the Martian North Pole. Conservative estimates put the volume at three thousand cubic kilometers of ice and water. That translated to roughly three hundred billion tons.
Three hundred billion tons of ice! Total mass of Mount Everest was 300 billion tons!
