That night, the TBM smashed the last rock blocking the way at the southern end of the tunnel. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

The terrain of the North Pole of the moon is very complex, and it can be seen from satellite images that the south direction of the No. 1 crater is a flat valley, and on the left side of the valley is a crater no less than the No. 1 crater, and on the right is a three-ring moon-like crater.

At this time, the No. 1 pit has been officially renamed Beiyuezhou in the official documents of the northern capital, a very Chinese name, the small plain in the south is named Zhounan Pingyuan, and even the temporary code name of the Beiyuezhou base has been changed to the Beiyuezhou base, and it is planned to change it to Beiyuezhou City at a suitable time in the future, but it has not been officially announced to the public for the time being.

From the air, the Zhounan Plain is narrow and long, and it should be called the Zhounan Canyon to be more accurate. But in the middle of it, the Zhounan Plain is a flat river, that is, the visibility of the moon surface is super high, and you can faintly see the peaks sandwiched on both sides of the plain.

The height of the bottom surface of Pit 1 is slightly lower than the plain directly south of the crater, and when formulating the engineering plan, the designer deliberately raised the position of the south exit of the tunnel a little bit to avoid the south exit being too low.

The height difference between the tunnel mouth and the plain is only more than ten meters, and at this time, the roadheader and the Zhounan Plain are only separated by a gentle slope, and the rugged slope with a length of only fifty or sixty meters is crossed, and there is a plain below.

The TBM opened the south exit, but instead of withdrawing from the tunnel, it lowered the drill bit and continued to drive forward, crushing all the uneven rocks on the gentle slope until it reached the bottom of the hill before stopping the drill bit and turning to the side to stand by.

Two tracked lunar rovers with a height of nearly four meters, a width of no less than five meters, and a length of almost 10 meters opened a tunnel, and the tracks carrying the weight of the whole vehicle crushed all the way to the weathered rock, and slowly traveled to the plain outside the mountain.

These two large lunar rovers are lunar vehicles built by the mechanical team, although the speed is average, but the cruising range is more than 3,000 kilometers, and when fully loaded, it can carry five astronauts away from the base and carry out a half-month exploration mission alone.

The mission of the two lunar rovers is to prospect for minerals and find out the distribution of shallow minerals in the vicinity of Pit 1 in the shortest possible time.

The engine of the lunar rover is not advanced, it can only be said to be an ordinary level, the endurance on the earth is 500 kilometers are burned with high incense, but the gravitational force on the moon is low, and the fuel consumption is also less.

Then came out a few smaller engineering trucks, and seven or eight trucks with wide compartments, which drove into the plains, used buckets to collect lunar soil, and immediately drove back to the tunnel after filling the lunar soil, and drove directly into the separation workshop in the industrial area.

When it comes to resources on the Moon, the most famous is definitely helium-3, which has a maximum of 500 kilograms of reserves on Earth, but on the Moon, the average reserve per square kilometer is about 70 kilograms!

The separation workshop is mainly used to separate helium-3 from lunar soil, although humans have not yet mastered the technology of controlled nuclear fusion, and cannot use helium for fusion power generation, but helium-3 combined with heavy hydrogen extracted from the heavy water of glacial lakes can be used for the production of nuclear weapons.

For every ton of helium3 extracted from lunar soil, more than 6,000 tons of hydrogen, more than 1,600 tons of carbon and more than 70 tons of nitrogen can be obtained, and iron, titanium, calcium, magnesium, zinc, cerium, rhenium and other metals can be obtained in varying quantities.

Among them, cerium metal must be obtained through artificial synthesis, and the existence of natural cerium has never been found on the earth.

Even silica, which accounts for about half of the lunar soil, can be used to make glass and extract silicon elements.

The composition of lunar soil is diverse, and the extraction technology is complex, but the extraction of helium-3 originally requires the necessary treatment of lunar soil, and the other resources obtained are just by-products after further refining, and after apportioning the extraction cost, the extraction cost is not expensive, if the scale effect is used, it will be able to further reduce the price, and I dare not say that the price of cabbage will be pressed down, at least it will not be more expensive than the earth's manufacturing, and the manufacturing cost of scarce resources is lower than the earth's price.

Although the refining industry of the Beiyuezhou base is not yet large-scale, it is an excellent start, in the records of later history books, the tunnel breakthrough represents the Beiyuezhou base from the construction base as the center, to the industrial production as the center, is the first moon base construction turning point, in the history of human aerospace has written a heavy stroke.

However, in the midst of it, Ye Han, like all astronauts, did not realize the great significance of the tunnel breakthrough.

Refining lunar soil is a long-term and complex process, at this time, the main factor restricting the development of the Beiyuezhou base is no longer the grain output of the agricultural area, but the material output of the industrial area, the top priority is to find high-grade deposits as soon as possible, increase the steel output of the Beiyuezhou base, especially the output of low-temperature alloys, and lay the foundation for expanding the industrial capacity of the base.

In order to find a suitable mine for mining as soon as possible, in addition to the two prospecting vehicles sent in advance, the Beiyuezhou base concentrated resources to manufacture three prospecting vehicles, and went to various directions to carry out exploration tasks.

The prospecting vehicle is not a blind search, but a fixed-point exploration based on the results of satellite telemetry.

The exploration team sent by the Beiyuezhou base is the first large-scale exploration of the moon in the history of mankind, and the results will directly affect the next development plan of the base.

The operation of the prospecting vehicle could not conceal the satellite monitoring system at all, and the prospecting vehicle had just driven into the Yuenan Plain when the American satellite discovered the situation.

It is a well-known fact that the construction of the Beiyuezhou base is progressing faster than the international base, and the early launch of the exploration operation was expected by the Yankees, and Washington did not say anything about the matter.

But within a few days, the Yankees could not sit still, because they found that the Chinese prospecting vehicles were moving at an unusually fast speed, and each position they surveyed, they would leave the national logo in the most obvious position.

Where is this prospecting, it is simply enclosure!

How could the arrogant Yankees endure this breath and immediately arrange a press conference, in which the president of the United States personally delivered a speech protesting against the violation of the "Outer Space Treaty" by the Northern Capital in very tactful diplomatic language and demanding that the Chinese side immediately stop this practice.

However, after the United States explained its position on the international base, other countries participating in the international base program raised similar voices and protested from different standpoints, but the core of all the statements is only one: the moon is not the territory of any country, but the common property of all mankind, and China must stop insisting on going its own way.