Utopia One

Utopia One

Utopia One was the first NEAR colony, carved from a metal rich asteroid that orbited between the Earth and Mars. Twenty years after Anton Nedelin's corporation put the first drill into the surface of a rock whose name he and the IAU argued vehemently over, the habitable interior was ready for its first residents and Nedelin was a trillionaire from the metals he extracted.

The interior space was nearly two kilometers long and a kilometer wide, though slag rock left for structural integrity and shielding set the habitable surface 430 meters from the spin axis. It was a small habitat by later standards, but it would easily house twenty thousand people in great comfort.