Just as Nagaoka Keiichi was sinking into a despair as bleak as gray ash over losing an order worth tens of billions of yen, the Moon, more than three hundred thousand kilometers away, was filled with a festive atmosphere.
Under the watchful eyes of everyone aboard the Moon Palace spacecraft and at the Lunar Surface Research Station, Wu Gang, clad in a spacesuit, skillfully operated a heavy engineering vehicle connected to two pairs of mechanical arms, placing the assembled track component onto the T-shaped rail excavated by the tunnel boring machine.
"Beautiful work!"
Hearing the excited shout over the common channel, Wu Gang smiled faintly and skillfully worked the controls, steadily disconnecting and retracting the mechanical arms.
He had repeated the same operation countless times, so there was naturally no chance of making a mistake.
After backing the engineering vehicle up about ten meters, Wu Gang shut off the engine and narrowed his eyes as he gazed toward the horizon.
This track stretched for hundreds of kilometers, running almost perfectly straight.
Like a silver needle, it pierced the bright jade disc. It burrowed in from one side of the lunar soil, emerged from the other, and pointed toward the Earth-Moon Transfer Orbit.
According to engineering data released by the Lunar Surface Research Station, its maximum depth—the depth of the track's central section—reached one kilometer.
With the sturdy lunar surface as protection, this design could meet launch requirements while minimizing the threat posed by meteorites.
Simply put, they had bored through a satellite—though only through its surface layer.
Minerals mined from the Moon could be electromagnetically accelerated through this vacuum track running across the lunar soil's surface and launched directly toward the Earth-Moon Transfer Orbit, saving enormous amounts of chemical propellant.
Once lunar landings and lunar mining reached scale, this track