The wheels of history quietly turned into the 2010s. Ice %Fire * Chinese

As of 2012, it has been three years since the aerospace subsidiary of Hanhe Science and Technology officially operated in the market, and it has been three years since it contracted the launch project of the Southern Cross navigation satellite.

The successful launch of more than 20 navigation satellites has accumulated countless prestige and government trust for this company, and it has also recycled part of the investment in research and development.

Orders for remote sensing, satellite maps, and communication satellites have been received by the company one after another, and each launch has been able to provide a net profit of millions of dollars, and the so-called net profit is the profit after the amortization of R&D expenditures, so this figure is already very good.

At this point, Gu Wan's aerospace industry has finally entered the next stage.

On December 21, 2012, the Mayans thought it was the end of the world, and the first engine recoverable rocket of Hanhe Technology was successfully test-fired.

The recovery of the engine relied on being wrapped in the landing capsule and recovered by parachute after disengagement, rather than directly flying the entire rocket back to land vertically as later generations said.

Therefore, the degree of replaceability is still relatively low.

But in any case, the technical content of this recycling is already a little higher than the recovery of space shuttle boosters in the early 80s. Whether it is the number of uses, life, and wear, it is better than the space shuttle booster in the 80s.

(There are a total of three cylinders on the belly of the space shuttle, and the thin white on the left and right sides is the rocket booster, which provides enough thrust when taking off, and this is to be recovered.) The orange-red thick one in the middle of the stomach is just a fuel tank, and that one is not recycled, and it burns up when it goes directly into the atmosphere. ）

With the recovery of the rocket engine, the cost of space launch has plummeted by more than half again, and more huge plans have also entered the stage where they can be actually implemented.

"The biggest problem at the moment is the size and tonnage of recyclable rocket engines, which cannot be stacked on a large scale indefinitely to ensure recyclability, and progress in this area is expected to be slow in the next few years. ”

Gu Yu was fully aware of the core of the difficulty, so after the test shot, he communicated with his wife.

Of course, we will also communicate with other R&D technical backbones.

On Earth, Elon Musk's "3 Thruster Falcon" program was actually quite a failure. It's just that people will hype, have gimmicks, and use the test launch of that satellite to send an electric car into space, so it can quite attract Xiaobai's attention, at least earn some money back in popularity and traffic.

And the truth is: the three-engine Falcon has been engaged in for many years, until the thrust and low-earth orbit load of the single-engine scheme have been developed, and it can reach eight percent of the three-engine scheme, and the competitor's Blue Origin single-engine scheme has almost caught up to this extent, Musk panicked.

If the three-engine scheme is continuously amplified by a single engine in terms of load, then what is the significance of the existence of the three-engine? Therefore, before the critical point of exceedance arrives, regardless of whether it is perfect or not, we must launch one as soon as possible, and we must also carry a little bit of news reporting value to play tricks and get back a little bit of this book.

(Of course, this is just saying that the technical solution is wrong in the route, not that the feelings are wrong, nor that the scientific exploration is wrong.) There will always be times when the technical direction and the scheme are wrong. It is just to say here that the Falcon's three-engine parallel scheme, there is no need to boast excessively, the time when the Tesla was launched into space, it was actually a bit of a distorted residual value waste utilization of the technology tree scheme. ）

Ma Yiyi doesn't know about the on the earth, she only knows that her husband's foresight is probably not wrong.

Since it is not possible to quickly "stack and parallel" in a short period of time to make the single load of the recoverable rocket larger, it is better to avoid this problem in the application.

"How are you going to avoid this question?" asked Ma Yiyi sincerely.

Gu Wan: "I think it is necessary to make a planning suggestion with several projects in the verification stage of the Ministry of Science and Technology, and we should temporarily control the maximum size limit of a single launch load. Consider future splicing operations in space. ”

Ma Yiyi thought for a while: "You mean, with those small space stations, one idea?"

On Earth, the former Lucia launched the Salyut space station around 1970. Now in the Blue Hole Star, at the beginning of the 21st century, that is, a few years ago, some countries finally built the first generation of space stations.

Of course, it can't be as awesome as the International Joint Space Station on Earth, and the level is equivalent to a salute.

There are people investing in the space station, but no one is willing to invest in the moon, which is also quite in line with the principle of capital, because the exploration of the moon has no economic value after all, and there is some commercial value in building a space station.

Many materials science experiments need to be carried out in a gravity-free and high-radiation environment, so with the space station, many new materials can be developed. New materials can be paid for in business, which can be earned.

In addition, in the field of life sciences, all kinds of seeds, animal embryos, and microorganisms are often put into a safe petri dish and randomly launched into the space station to see if there will be some genetic mutations due to weightlessness and radiation, and then if there are benign mutations, these selected seeds will be selected and reproduced.

This is equivalent to another wave of species exchange dividends, and the devil knows what can be bred.

With such a high dividend, it is natural that Oceanic people will also build a space station because of the consideration of commercial and financial capital.

If the Eastern country also builds a space station, it is not very difficult at present, it is nothing more than a matter of money, and whether there are so many needs for materials science and biological breeding to share.

Therefore, Gu Play's plan after sorting out his thoughts is like this:

"My idea is to talk about it upstream and downstream, and advance the Ministry of Science and Technology's own space station plan, which is currently not too high. In the future, it will take one to two years to design, test, and launch the space station, and strive to have our space station in orbit within four years.

In the next step, we can disassemble other future large-scale space launch projects into smaller projects and assemble them on a space station in low earth orbit. In this way, we no longer have to pursue the maximum payload and maximum launch diameter for a single launch.

The size and load are not enough, and it is a big deal to launch the small rocket a few more times, assemble it in orbit, and then do other big things. For example, a large orbital space telescope, or even a lunar landing program, can be reassembled from ground orbit. That way, there will be no need to smash the massive ground-launched rockets. ”

Breaking down a big goal into several smaller goals is the most straightforward solution. In the field of astronautics, it is certainly much simpler to launch something of 20 tons into space in 10 times than to launch something of 200 tons into the sky at a time.

Even if you take into account the structural redundancy caused by assembly, it is still much more cost-effective.

On Earth, when Elon Musk landed on Mars, even if it was far from being realized, some guiding ideas were established from the beginning, such as the departure base should not be chosen on the ground of the earth, but in orbit.

After all, the total ground launch weight of the Saturn V rocket on which the Yankees landed on the moon was as high as 3,000 tons, the payload in low-earth orbit was only about 140 tons, and the payload in lunar orbit was 47 tons.

In other words, only 4% of the super-large rockets launched from the ground, as large as Saturn V, are launched into Earth orbit, and the rest are for the loss of sending this 4% up. And the weight launched to the moon is only 1.5%.

But from this set of data, a problem can also be seen from the side: from the Earth's orbit to the lunar orbit, there is an efficiency of up to 40% (1.5% divided by 4%, about 40%), and as many as 2 tons of things that fly out of the Earth's orbit weigh 5 tons to reach the Moon.

The percentage of people reaching the moon has increased from 1.5% to 40%, which is a 25-fold increase.

In the history of the earth, the Yankees could not use this trick when they landed on the moon, because they landed on the moon in 69, and the space station did not appear until a year later.

In fact, it was a fig leaf that Lucia temporarily found after losing the space race with the United States on the moon, which seemed to be "although the Yankees landed on the moon and we didn't have them, we built a space station, and the Yankees didn't have it, so it was a draw."

And now, now that the world has a preliminary space station technology, Gu Play certainly hopes to reduce various launch costs in the mode of orbital assembly.

In the same way, when the Hubble Space Telescope was built on the earth, it was actually very wasteful, because Hubble was done around 1994, when the former Lucia had just disintegrated for two or three years, and it was a mess, and it was impossible for the Americans to seek international cooperation in the field of aerospace with Lucia in 94, so the Yankees could not use space station technology to develop orbital assembly.

When the Hubble telescope was launched, even if the non-detachable parts of the main mirror were not considered, even if the other components were not fully disassembled and packaged, so it took a total of $2 billion to build.

Now, if Gu Play is allowed to follow the guiding ideology of "trying to disassemble and package and reduce the difficulty and cost of ground launch", and then assemble it in orbit in the future, it can definitely reduce the cost by half.

The only pity is that an astronomical observation project like the Hubble Telescope has no economic value at all.

Or find some title sponsors, purely rely on love to generate electricity, and there is no commercial return channel.

But it's too early to think about that.

The first step is to first finalize the technical route and project determination and priorities of the people from the relevant departments of science and technology.

After several months of hard work, by 2013, he and Ma Yiyi were able to persuade the relevant departments of science and technology and all aspects of the national space strategy according to the ideas discussed above.

The relevant departments officially approved the project in 2013 to start the research and development of the independent space station (the work of the national team, the specific research and development has nothing to do with Gu Play), and it is expected to start testing in 2015 and launch in 2017.

Then, the split component of the lunar landing program and the split component of the orbiting space telescope could be established in 2014, and then the development of the space station program will be completed in the years when the space station program is implemented. If the space station is successfully completed in 2017, it will be necessary to carry out orbital assembly experiments from 18 years ago to see if it can make the moon landing and orbiting telescopes cheaper by moving ants.

It was at this time that Gu Play thought of going to the big sponsor Jack House.

He had a showdown with Jackhouse, who was not interested in money: "You can contribute a budget of 800 million US dollars, and I will contribute another 300 million, and we will launch the orbiting telescope." The only benefit I can give is to give you the naming rights of the first orbiting telescope in all mankind. I was going to call it the Hubble Telescope, and as long as you donate, call it the House Telescope. ”

Jackhouse is still quite emotional, and actually paid $800 million in exchange for the naming rights of the orbital telescope.