Moscow.

Federal Security Service.

A man in a gray leather jacket sat behind a desk, lighting the desk with a pen in his hand while looking at the report on the desk.

At this time, there was a knock on the door outside the office.

Stopping what he was doing, the man sitting behind his desk looked towards the door.

"Please come in."

The door opened, and a thin-faced man walked in.

"The latest report from the Foreign Intelligence Agency, and the news from the Federal Space Agency," the thin-faced man continued, placing the information on the table, "It seems that the Chinese have indeed succeeded." ”

The index finger tapped lightly on the table, and the man sitting behind the desk picked up the document and flipped through the pages.

About five minutes passed.

He put down the information in his hand and looked at the agent standing at his desk.

"Is that all there is?"

The agent nodded solemnly and continued.

"The local army patrols too closely, and there are reconnaissance planes patrolling the airspace nearby. Dew, we can only observe from a distance. ”

The man in the gray leather jacket nodded, not too embarrassed by his subordinates.

After a moment's pause, he slowly stood up from his office chair and tucked the document into his arms, along with the previous report.

"I'll report this to Mr. Vladimir, the latest news on the Xiangrui, so that the Foreign Intelligence Service will keep an eye on it. Tell me as soon as you make any new discoveries. ”

"Especially the propulsion system they employ......"

"I need to know what that is!"

……

There was one thing that Lu Zhou didn't guess accurately.

Although the ground command did have a chaotic situation for a while after discovering that he was missing, when they learned from Nie Yun that Lu Zhou was staying safely on the Xiangrui, those who were in a panic gradually calmed down.

After all, people have already gone to heaven, even if they are in a hurry, it is useless.

It's impossible to make a half-launched space shuttle turn around and come back, right?

Therefore, after confirming Lu Zhou's safety, Hou Guang quickly regained his composure and shouldered the task of ground command.

The cruise time is 5 hours and 27 minutes.

As it passed over Huaguozheng, the Xiangrui Aerospace Plane made contact with CTV through the relay of the ground command as originally planned, and sent a 25-second New Year's Day congratulatory video.

Originally, this video was planned to be shot by two astronauts, but now there are not only two people on the Xiangrui, Nie Yun and Nie Han are embarrassed to think that Lu Zhou does not exist, and Lu Zhou is naturally reluctant to refuse such an interesting thing, so the video that was originally scheduled to appear by the two of them was changed to three people in the same frame.

At the end, Lu Zhou, who was standing in the C position, arched his hand to the camera, and on behalf of the astronauts and all the personnel of the ground command center, he congratulated the people of the whole country on Happy New Year's Day, which drew an end to the whole video.

Just when Lu Zhou sent the video back to the ground command with a smile, North America, which was 13 hours behind Beijing, finally ushered in the early morning of New Year's Day.

However, last night, I don't know how many people lost sleep because of the news that Columbia TV suddenly reported.

According to Twitter's official statistics, in the first half of the night on December 31, the football game is entering the final high. Yet almost a third of people in North America are talking about the space plane that was launched from across the Earth.

This is extremely rare......

For a long time, the pride of being a space power has been written in the bones of Americans, and has even become part of the culture. Not only because only Hollywood can make a real sci-fi blockbuster, but also because since the Cold War, no country has surpassed the United States in the field of space.

It was not possible in the past, and it will not be possible in the future.

However, now that the strangely named aerospace plane was successfully launched, it made this pride fall to the ground.

Especially when people heard that the rumored Xiangrui used the launch method turned out to be electric propulsion!

This kind of shock and disbelief born from the bottom of my heart is even more difficult to express in words......

Especially those who work in the aerospace field, especially the engineers who work in aerospace giants such as Space-X and Blue Origin, can hardly believe their eyes after seeing the news on TV.

NASA's state-of-the-art electric propulsion technology can't even throw an egg into the sky, and the Star Technology, which does "technical services" for lithium batteries, actually uses electric propulsion technology to the sky???

Is there anything more sci-fi than that?

Rather than believe this fact, they would rather believe that it was an April Fool's joke four months in advance......

In addition to the engineers who work at Space-X and Blue Origin, the biggest headache is probably NASA employees.

Originally, they should have taken their annual leave comfortably at home and took their wives and children to Hawaii to enjoy the warm sunshine, but at this moment they were all pulled out of the vacation because of the damn space plane across the Pacific Ocean.

Forget that, since last night, the outside of the NASA headquarters building has been surrounded by the broadcast trucks of major media, and it has not dispersed until the early morning of the next day, so that many people who come to work are blocked at the door, and it took a lot of effort to ask the reporter who handed the microphone to the stitches and squeezed into the building.

In order to get rid of these annoying reporters, NASA had no choice but to hold a press conference, invite all the reporters into the building's reception room, and dump the daunting task on the interns who had just completed their orientation.

In the midst of an unprepared riot, the press conference barely began.

Because there were so many reporters at the scene, the order at the scene was extremely chaotic.

There was no time left for the spokesman to speak, and the reporters in the lecture hall rushed up and handed over the recorders and microphones in their hands like crazy.

"This is a reporter from Columbia TV, and I would like to ask you if the news that the space shuttle Xiangrui launched by China is true with the latest electric propulsion system?"

“…… Does the successful launch of Xiangrui mean that China has caught up with us in the aerospace field? ”

“…… I want to know where the 40 billion dollars a year are spent! ”

"We did receive a briefing about the launch of the new space shuttle from China, but they didn't elaborate on what launch technology they were using," a NASA spokesman said briskly, turning the ballpoint pen in his hand, "and we'll be watching things more closely, there's nothing to say right now." ”

"But I would say that a successful launch does not mean that it was a successful launch, from the launch of the spacecraft, to the orbital operation, to the final re-entry into the atmosphere...... Only when this series of operations is completed can it be regarded as a successful manned space activity. ”

As soon as this sentence came out, it immediately caused a small commotion at the scene.

The New York Times reporter keenly heard what the spokesman was saying, and immediately handed out the microphone and asked sharply, "You mean that Xiangrui, with its latest electric propulsion technology, may fail in the re-entry phase?" Is this NASA's point of view? ”

"I didn't say that," the spokesman opened his mouth, but he didn't say anything negative, but in a kind of ambiguous way. "Whether Xiangrui uses an electric propulsion power system remains to be confirmed, and similarly, whether Huaguo's launch can be called a successful launch depends on whether they can let the astronauts come back safely." ”

When he heard this, the eyes of the New York Times reporter suddenly lit up.

It's not just reporters from the New York Times, it's reporters from other media outlets as well.

A noisy sound spread at the scene, and the atmosphere was suddenly pushed to a higher level. Peak.

Big news!

NASA predicts that the design of Xiangrui is flawed, or it will crash into the atmosphere?!

The quiet speaker, who stood on the stage and emphasized it, was sweating profusely and began to feel a little overwhelmed.

Sure enough, this intern is still too young.

Although the words have been said without leakage, it still gives reporters the opportunity to interpret from other ideas.

However, even if the press conference site has become a mess, NASA has no room for the time being, and they are obviously more concerned about the situation of the Xiangrui in the sky than how the outside media interprets this matter......

Aishang mobile phone reading address: