Forget copper. Upgrade your drives, go to blue systems, and collect activated indium. It’s plentiful on the right planets, and you can build a base to teleport there whenever you like.
Copper refines to half its quantity of chromatic metal - 10 copper= 5 chromatic metal.
Activated indium refines to 4 times its quantity - 10 activated indium = 40 chromatic metal.
Once you have a base in a blue system, restoring crashed ships becomes realistic, and fun.