It kinda makes sence to make your missiles self destruct when they run out of range since you don't want bloody unexploded atomic warheads floating around your shipping lanes, also you wouldn't want enemies salvaging them for your tech...
Then again maybe a few should always get lost and if you're unlucky show up at the worst time, or you might get lucky and find an old precursor missile floating around to salvage..
Edit:
The Aurora wiki is a freaking mess, I must have wasted 2 hours looking for any reference to Colonising or moving stuff with freighters, eventually i just decided to poke around the interface systematically untill i eventually found what i needed on the F12 task groups page....
To sum up, the Wiki and the tutorials are missing some rather important information that a dense person like me might find useful, I'm sure the forum has that information but i couldn't find it either, maybe i could register to the forum and make some pages on the wiki myself...
Edit 2: So i'm playing my first game, i finally got a geoship out there and *sigh* everything in sol looks rather barren,
Mercury: Nothing
Venus: Neutronium 27,000k, Tritanium 8,000k, Sorium 3,750k, Corundium 33,755k
Earth 10-100k of everything, about 5-15 years Till it's mined out from the 400 mines i started with
Luna: Neutrinium 2,000k, Tritanium 200k, Vendarite 97k
Mars: Nothing
Phobos, Deimos: Nothing
Jupiter: Nothing
Metis: Nothing
Amalthea: Nothing
Thebe: Nothing
Io:Duranium 685k
Europe:Nothing
Ganymede:Nothing
Callisto:Sorium 278k, Corundium 2,742k
Himalia:Nothing
Lysithea:Nothing
Elara:Nothing
Ananke:Nothing
Carme:Nothing
Pasiphe: Carbomite 1537, Sorium 635, Corundium 924
Sinope:Nothing
Saturn: (oops, forgot to survey this one, it's queued after the rest of the moons)
Atlas; Nothing
Prometheus: Nothing
Pandora: Nothing
Epimetheus: Nothing
Mimas: Nothing
Enceladus:Nothing
Tethys:Nothing
Dione:Nothing
Rhea:Nothing
Titan: Nothing
Hyperion:Nothing
Iapetus: Nothing
Phoebe: Nothing
Edit : nothing on 11 moons of uranus or 8 moons of neptune, but some sorium on the giants themself (1.5 mil and 230 mill respectively)
Pluto: nothing
Charon: Neutronium 280k, Tritanium 230K, Mercassium 200k, Sorium 200k, Boronide 37k and Vendarite 87k (erk, my only mercassium deposit and it's 2 months away at 1500km/s ? well at least it's 0.9 availability unlike my only corundium deposits which are all 0.1 )
*facepalm* After giving orders to survey all the moons of my gas giants i give an order to also check comet 1 which is conveniently near neptune, i notice i have accidentally given the order to "move to comet 1" ok i think, i'll select it and click delete...... Oh wait that button says "delete all"
FUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Edit 3 : I seem to have broken my freighter, i had it shuttling infrastructure to mars, but when i set it to move automines to venus for that precious sorium it's just sitting at earth doing nothing, in the meantime My civvies got their act together and started doing it by themself. However i was experementing with refitting at my shipyard, perhaps my freighter is stuck because i had selected it as a target for refitting, despite not having anything i could refit it to?
"Praise the miners! We have struck : Carbomite 1537, Sorium 635, Corundium 924 on Pasiphae" ! X(