The real killer move came on the eve of the Spring Festival. From the Jiuquan Launch Center, 30 tons of lunar soil samples were launched into low-Earth orbit, and Xiao Zhen personally activated the prototype of the "space smelting furnace."
When the golden metal liquid solidified into a perfect sphere in a zero-gravity environment, the price of copper in the global commodity market fell by 5% - this marked the first time that humans had achieved industrial application of extraterrestrial resources.
"Do they think they've won the game by gambling on the African mines?" Xiao Zhen turned the lunar basalt paperweight, and a holographic map unfolded in the study.
The blue dots of light representing China's deep space probes have formed a spider web, stretching from the Martian asteroid belt to the icy ocean of Europa.
When the chess game on land comes to an end, the true chess players have already looked up at the stars.
The study door was suddenly pushed open, and Xiao Zhenbei rushed in holding a steaming monitoring report: "The Russians' Soyuz is tracking our asteroid probe!" Xiao Zhen laughed and motioned his eldest son to look at the screen - the screen showed that the "Volga-Yangtze River" jointly developed by China and Russia was slowly dragging a platinum-rich asteroid towards the Earth-Moon orbit.
"Remember, there are no permanent friends in the universe." Xiao Zhen lit a Cuban cigar and, through the smoke, looked out the window at the stars streaking across the night sky. "But there are eternal resources."
At this moment, in the deep space 300 million kilometers away from the earth, the Tianwen-4 probe is aiming a laser cutter at an asteroid with a diameter of 800 meters.
Its rich reserves of rare earth elements are enough to keep the Earth's existing industrial system running for 30 years - and in the core module of the probe, lies a tungsten steel nameplate engraved with the words "Huaxia Interstellar".
China Interstellar Mining Development Group is a space-oriented mining resource enterprise jointly invested by three state-owned giants including the Central Financial Group, China Airlines Space Exploration Company, and Huasheng Vale.
The main sources of technology are the research institutes under China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation and the joint research institute of China Airlines and Hong Kong Polytechnic University under Xiao Zhen.
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