Tang Yue sat down breathlessly, leaning back against the hatch of the airlock chamber, looking up at the Eagle lander a hundred meters away, the eagle head paint on the white fairing was majestic.

The Eagle lander is really a big guy, almost four stories tall, supported by four thick hydraulic long legs, there are a total of four embedded convergence diffusion nozzles at the bottom of the descending stage rocket, these four nozzles will spray high-temperature and high-pressure gas thousands of meters per second when landing, and provide a huge thrust of up to 120 tons, in addition to the four main nozzles, there are also four small swimming engines, responsible for maintaining the attitude stability of the lander.

How to land the Eagle spacecraft safely is also a difficult problem, the human space program has never allowed such a large thing to re-enter the atmosphere - except for the space shuttle, but the space shuttle does not need to land vertically, and the return capsule of the general spacecraft is a small thing two or three meters high, which can hold a few people at most, is very lightweight, has a strong structure, and can effectively slow down with a parachute.

But the Eagle spacecraft can't do this, because it's too big and heavy, and the Martian atmosphere is too thin, and the density of the Martian atmosphere at an altitude of 10 kilometers is only 0.0065 kilograms per cubic meter, compared to the Earth's atmospheric density at this altitude is 0.413 kilograms per cubic meter, a difference of 63 times.

In this case, the parachute could not provide effective deceleration, it could not pull such a behemoth at all, and the Eagle spacecraft would re-enter the atmosphere at a speed of more than a dozen times the speed of sound, it would whizz through the sky, and then fall into a bag of slag on the surface of Mars.

This problem has not been well solved, and all options have been rejected for various reasons.

In the end, the legendary Caltech JPL stood up and waved his hand, I'm coming!

A group of technologists in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory locked themselves in their rooms and ate instant noodles for half a year with chicken coops and slippers, and the top bald men on the planet consumed half a ton of scratch paper before finally coming up with a solution, they decided to use a parachute with rocket thrust reverser to slow down, and designed a lot of insurance for the lander.

The group designed the lander as a lifting body, completely different from the traditional blunt-cone spacecraft, which no longer uses ballistic re-entry, but glides through the atmosphere, gradually slowing down through long distances.

The lander enters the Martian atmosphere at an altitude of about 120 kilometers, at this time its speed is as high as 21,000 kilometers per hour, and after three minutes, it opens the inflatable reducer in the abdomen, the so-called inflatable reducer, is a huge air cushion, and the Eagle spacecraft is sitting on this atmospheric cushion and gets down, I don't know what it looks like to imagine the Arabian flying carpet.

The inflatable reducer is the first deceleration, which can reduce the speed to about 2,000 kilometers per hour, and the second deceleration begins, abandoning the deceleration air cushion, and at the same time a huge ring parasail with a diameter of 30 meters is opened.

The parachute reduced the speed of the Eagle spacecraft to 300 kilometers per hour, by which time the altitude had dropped to several hundred meters, the thrust reverser rocket was activated, and the lander slowly landed in a vertical attitude.

Finally, the landing gear is lowered hydraulically.

Stand firm.

Mission accomplished!

This is the final design of the Eagle spacecraft in front of Tang Yue, it looks like a space shuttle standing on the ground, but it does not have the wings of the space shuttle, like a steamed bun with rounded lines.

The white part that Tang Yue saw was the back of the Eagle spacecraft, and the belly on the other side was actually black, covered with heat insulation tiles.

Tang Yue glanced at the display screen on his wrist, "The temperature is minus twenty-nine degrees, it's really hot." ”

"You take off the Mingguang armor and try to say this again." The old cat's voice rang through the headphones.

"If I were a Martian, I would definitely think it was hot." Tang Yue even fanned the wind with his hand, although he couldn't feel anything through the mask, "It's a scorching summer noon, I really want to eat popsicles...... Martian sandstone and perchlorate frozen ice cream, filled with carbon dioxide, ah, a bite full of the taste of childhood. ”

Old Cat: ...... What are you talking nonsense?

"I'm reminiscing about my childhood growing up on Mars." Tang Yue said and hummed softly, humming the tune of Luo Dayou's "Childhood", "On the stones by the crater, cockroaches are screaming in summer, and in the valley by the desert, only the spaceship is parked on it......"

"Why are there cockroaches on Mars?" The old cat was stunned.

"Mutant cockroaches." Tang Yue replied, "Have you seen the Martian xenomorphs?" There are mutated cockroaches inside. ”

Old Cat: ......

"Got all the solar panels in place?"

"Put it away."

It took Tang Yue two hours to move the solar panels out piece by piece, and then spread them out on the sand in front of Kunlun Station, a job he had to do once a day in the morning and once in the evening.

Tang Yue struggled to get up, pushing the cart with a clatter, like a Martian migrant worker.

The old cat sorted out the materials in the Kunlun station, it slowly circled in the hall, the distribution of materials is really a very troublesome thing, since Tang Yue has indicated that it should be evenly distributed, then the old cat can not favor one over the other, an adult needs to consume 80 grams of protein every day, 3500 mg of sodium, 3000 mg of potassium, 1000 mg of calcium, and a variety of vitamins, in order to maintain a balanced nutrition, the old cat has to study carefully.

Tang Yue pushed the cart and slowly stopped under the Eagle spaceship.

The landing gear of the lander is thicker than Tang Yue's arm, and there is a half-meter diameter foot pad under each leg, which is used to reduce the pressure, and the weight of hundreds of tons is pressed on these four pillars, standing majestically and very stable.

Tang Yue used a long-handled rake to pull away the gravel around the lander, and the landing of the Eagle spacecraft was on hard ground, and at the bottom was a large piece of hard rock, which was covered with a thin layer of soil, which was very flat, almost a natural landing and launch site.

Tang Yue walked slowly around the Eagle spaceship, looking up at the lander, and a strange idea suddenly popped into his mind.

"Old cat, what do you think will happen if we go up in this thing?"

"You'll die faster that way." The old cat said lightly, "With the self-sustaining ability of the space station, it is enough to maintain the survival of Miss Mai Dong alone, if you add one more, then the space station will crash in less than two years." ”

"But isn't Orion Two still there?"

"Orion Two is still there." The old cat asked, "So what?" ”

"Can we go back on Orion II?" Tang Yue asked, "I want to see with my own eyes if the earth has really disappeared." ”

"No problem, of course you can go back." The old cat was very simple, "But if you go, you can't come back, no one will guide you to correct the orbit, you can't even reach the earth's orbit, even if you can enter the earth's orbit, without the earth's gravitational capture, you will only become a giant piece of garbage in the vast space...... Do you still want to go back? ”

"When I didn't say anything."