Tech-mining remains one of the most lackluster industries.
I'd suggest restoring some of its old production capability, turning out small amounts of metals, supplies, fuel, and volatiles*. (Why volatiles? So that a size three outpost colony with tech-mining can be used as a materials source for the Neutrino Detector.)
And then replacing the monthly random rewards with monthly progression along an event counter - instead of a guaranteed larger haul the first month it's working, let it build up towards a guaranteed haul - and then include in that haul some exploration notes: you get some stuff immediately, and you get coordinates for, say, a mining station or a research station or an orbital habitat, something you can go out and loot. (For extra fun, make these sometimes be coordinates for a station with guards - "This data points to a Tri-Tachyon research facility from the first AI war; it's likely that some of its automated defenses are still in operation.")
Salvaging other ruins would give you progress on the counter as well, justified as data pointing to specific coordinates, or access keycodes for old facilities, that sort of thing.
* I'd suggest something like ruins-size plus one for metals (2-5 units), ruins-size minus one for supplies & fuel (0-3 units), and ruins-size divided by two (rounding down) for volatiles (0-2 units), modified of course by alpha core usage, story-point improvement, or the industrial planning skill, as usual.