BELTALOWDA

From Instapundit, the Ceres colony.

The Finns are mooting that this colony wouldn't be on Ceres itself, even spun up like on The Vomit Zombie Book; the colony would be on an O'Neill rama orbiting Ceres. The key phrase is "space elevator" meaning: demetresynchronicity; ion ships can dock with the orbiter without bringing a thruster to land on the planet(oid). Eventually that orbit would host several such colonies.

UPDATE 11/14: Ceres at 2.77 AU would get 1.369 mSv / (2.77 x 2.77) = 130 nSv from our Sun; which is about twice what we get on Earth. Less protection from cosmic rays, mind. So about a Callisto level.

Ceres has the nitrogen, and the water, and the salt, and presumably other elements useful to life. The rama colonists mine these materials on Ceres and take the spoils up to the rama. Pekka Janhunen (pdf) thinks they'll have space elevators. Hop David was pretty sure they'd drill moholes.

As for average distance from Earth is comparable to that of Mars: for that, read "delta-V". Nobody in this field cares about distance, they care about delta-V.

I have to admit, it does make more sense than TVZB's notion: to spin Ceres itself, bodily. Spinning Ceres is about as practical as raising Phobos to mamerostationary, or raising Mercury to Venus-Hilda.