Galactic Tech Empire

Chapter 436 Lunar Letters ([-])

6 month 10 day.

At this time, the Dongfanghong base expanded again, and the Xuanwu-class spacecraft had already transported all the materials carried by the Zhangzhou to the Dongfanghong base.

The Dongfanghong Base, which has abundant supplies, has finally completed the first floor of the main building, surrounded by 19 standard cabins, like a silver-white honeycomb.

In addition, Chang An and others have built a water resource extraction plant (three standard cabins), which is located in the planned third angle area.

The electric tracked vehicle slowly drove over from a simple road. Zhu Gang collected 10 tons of ice and soil from a water-rich soil layer. The electric tracked vehicle dragged a sealed bucket containing 10 tons of ice and soil.

In fact, there is not only water in these icy soils, but also some dry ice (carbon dioxide), and other minerals that can be used.

But now they can only extract water, and the remaining substances can only be temporarily stored.

"Chang team, the ice and soil have been transported." Zhu Gang shouted to Chang An through the walkie-talkie.

"Got it, the refining equipment is ready, you drag some ice over here, let's try the equipment." Chang An quickly replied.

Zhu Gang opened the truck body, and inside were storage boxes, each of which was made of fiberglass composite graphene material, with a standard storage capacity of one cubic meter.

The density of these ice and soil is between 2.4 and 2.5 tons per cubic meter, that is to say, a standard storage box contains 2.4 to 2.5 tons of ice and soil, but the gravity of the moon is only about one-sixth of the blue star, so the weight of a box is about Equivalent to about 0.5 tons.

Although it was a box of 0.5 tons, Zhu Gang could not move it down. He drove an electric forklift from the tool bay of the main base to move one of the boxes down.

Fork the box into one of the cabins, and Chang An is also inside. He pointed to an open reactor and said, "Gangzi, pour the ice into the reactor."

"No problem." Zhu Gang quickly operated the forklift and brought the box close to the entrance of the reactor. Then he got out of the car and opened one side of the box, and shoveled the ice and soil inside into the reactor with a shovel.

With a shovel down, the ice soil was very sticky. It took him more than ten minutes to shovel all the ice soil in the box into the reactor.

"Team Chang, I filled a cube of ice soil into it."

"Okay." Chang An pressed the shutdown switch of the reactor, and the reactor slowly closed, and then he activated the heating function. For ice soil, no complicated extraction process is required, and the water can be initially separated by heating.

Soon the temperature inside the reactor rose rapidly, and the ice and dry ice in the glacial soil began to change. Most of the ice turned into liquid water, a small part turned into water vapor, and the dry ice directly sublimated into carbon dioxide gas.

These liquids and gases are quickly pumped into a filter separation pipeline, and the water is quickly separated; the carbon dioxide and other substances after the water separation are pumped into another storage tank for storage.

[The reaction has ended, and 457 kg of pure water has been obtained...]
"Successful, the water problem of our base has been temporarily solved." Chang An said excitedly.

"However, this water refining plant is not perfect yet. The feeding system has to be delivered by Blue Star. There are also transport vehicles, mining robots and others..."

Suddenly there was a slight tremor on the ground.

"It's a moonquake." Zhu Gang opened the holographic wristband and called up the earthquake detection system of Dongfanghong Base. After reading the data, he said, "The epicenter was in the southwest of Ocean of Storms, and the magnitude was 2.4."

"These moonquakes are frequent, we must pay attention." Chang An said with some concern.

"Don't worry, the earthquakes on the moon are relatively small, but sometimes they last longer." Zhu Gang was not too worried.

Like the 2.4-magnitude moonquake this time, it is already a relatively large earthquake. Moonquakes are generally below magnitude 2, and there are at least thousands of moonquakes every year.

However, due to the lack of water and other liquid substances in the lunar strata, the energy exhaustion of moonquakes is very slow, which is characterized by small magnitude, long duration, and large spread.

Unless it is a huge asteroid impact, it is possible to cause a large-level moonquake, and the usual moonquakes are below magnitude 2.

This time the moonquake lasted for about 3 minutes, but this level of moonquake did not cause much impact on Dongfanghong base.

"Quansheng, is the base damaged?" Chang An asked Song Quansheng in the control cabin.

"Report, all systems are operating normally and have not been affected."

"Ok."

Reassured, Chang An quickly refined the remaining three boxes of ice soil with Zhu Gang, obtaining a total of 1854 kilograms of pure water.

In addition to the 3.2 tons of water stored in their base itself, this water is enough for the four of them to use for a period of time, and there is also a water circulation system in the base, which can recycle about 96% of the water.

However, if you want to extract fresh water on a large scale, the moon is obviously not ideal. Even if there is abundant solid water near the south pole of the moon, it is still not an ideal water source for large-scale mining.

The idea of ​​the Space Development Committee is to use the asteroids rich in water resources from the near-Earth asteroids as water resource mining sites, and the water resources of the moon as the self-supply of the local base.

The four in Chang'an were busy with the Dongfanghong Base.

On the other side, the Zhangzhou ship is already berthed in the berth area of ​​the New China Space Station.

A basalt-class spaceship, which is responsible for transporting materials to the ground of Blue Star, is quickly moving storage boxes one by one into the cabin of its own spaceship.

The driver was looking through the cargo list. This time, it was their fifth return mission to transport materials to the ground. The goods transported were mainly 20 tons of platinum, 20 tons of gold, and 11 tons of high-purity tungsten from the Iron Star No. [-] mine. .

The other is some samples and souvenirs.

At 6:10 a.m. on June 11, the Xuanwu-class spacecraft returned with a full load and quickly headed for the aerospace port in Bazhong City.

Although these gold and platinum did not flow into the market, the news that the Space Development Committee obtained a large amount of gold and platinum in outer space has spread like wildfire.

Over the past two months, the precious metal market has suffered catastrophe. The price of gold has plummeted from 314 Chinese yuan per gram in April to the current 1 Chinese yuan per gram, which is obviously unimaginable.

Platinum and silver prices also fell by about 87% and 41% respectively.

Anyway, the international investment in precious metals is a river of blood, among which the central banks of various countries are the real tears.

However, precious metals do not maintain their value, which has little impact on Dongtang and the Yinhe consortium. Dongtang Central Bank and Mars Bank have joined forces to repurchase many precious metals in their own systems.

If the Central Bank of Dongtang still cares about face, Mars Bank is much simpler and rude, directly announcing the abolition of the currencies of member countries such as the Korean Won, Japanese Yen, and Australian Dollar, and directly adopting the Mars Coin as the unified currency.

This time the currency unification plan directly made the previously looming territory of the Galaxy Consortium appear in front of all countries in the world.

The Central Bank of Eastern Tang also successfully incorporated their economies into the economic system of Eastern Tang by controlling Mobei Central Bank, Myanmar National Bank, Laoguo Central Bank, and Jianpuzhai National Bank.

Huayuan and Marscoin also guarantee each other's currency value, which is equivalent to the same currency system, and the power of Huayuan has begun to suppress the oil dollars.

(End of this chapter)