A middle-aged expert who still looked relatively young gazed at the satellite orbiting Mars that belonged to Candy Technology and sighed.
"In just a little over a decade, Candy Technology has grown into a dominant force. It's the privately owned company that rose to prominence in the shortest time and grew the fastest of any I've ever seen. No, even state-owned enterprises have never risen so astonishingly fast."
At his words, everyone fell silent.
Candy Technology's research team had performed so exceptionally that government-affiliated researchers like them had found themselves in a deeply awkward position.
Who could have imagined that a company that had made its fortune with algorithms would quietly develop to the point where it could manufacture spaceships?
During the month-long voyage, almost every part of the ship had been open to them, apart from a handful of restricted core areas.
After a month of firsthand experience and observation, they finally understood that the Hope was far more advanced than anyone had imagined.
If they were to rate the Hope and the Vanguard, which had left Blue Star a year ago, the Vanguard would get no more than a passing grade. But by the standards of humanity's current technology and imagination, the Hope was nearly perfect.
Every functional room was an independent escape system. It wasn't that no one else had thought of such a remarkable design; the problem was that the moment they did, they immediately rejected the idea themselves.
Why? Because it wasn't practical. As an escape system, it would be difficult to meet even the most basic requirements.
Besides, when the countries had jointly built the Vanguard, they had already gone over budget. Adding this ingenious design would have driven costs to a level that every country would have balked at.
Yet Candy Technology had