Planet Crack is a term used to describe when a planet is literally split open to be mined for valuable resources. It is known that a large chunk is broken off with powerful lasers, and then brought inside a "Planet Cracker"-class ship via gravity tethers where it is then stripped and its ore content is studied. The USG Ishimura, owned by the Concordance Extraction Corporation, is the original and consistently largest of the planet crackers. Mining Vessels use gravity tethers to pull massive sections of the planet up to be processed from within the vessel's mining deck. Over the history of CEC's planet cracking endeavors, only one operation of three dozen has met with less than optimal results. Eleven years prior to the events of Dead Space, a mining operation of Wanat, presumably a mining