On August 28, ESA suddenly announced the "Selene" manned lunar landing program.

This is not a preview before the official implementation, but a very usual PPT display, that is, occasionally everyone opens their brains and then makes some imaginary drawings to make everyone happy.

The Selene plan is to use the power of ESA, with the development of a manned spacecraft led by Banda and Italy, and the development of a lander by Germany and China, and then a manned lunar landing program jointly implemented around 2020.

The main interesting thing is the rocket, Selene plans to use a new rocket with a new liquid oxygen kerosene core engine core stage tied to a solid rocket booster, to hit the spacecraft and lander into lunar orbit in two parts, and then dock to the moon.

The solid rocket booster is the EAP used by the Ariane 5 now, but the core stage rocket is interesting, the engine is ...... Buy from Demola? And the rocket is still recyclable?

Perhaps in order to prove that he was serious about drawing the PPT this time, ESA has put forward the goal of approving the first batch of $10 billion in funding and a five-year development plan for the Selene plan.

Of course, it is estimated that it will be next year after the ESA's style of doing things, but it still caused a shock in the European and American worlds.

Europe is: can we, the old European flagmen, finally send people to the moon ourselves without the big and coarse rockets of Aramco?

NACA: You are going to rebel? If you want to go to the moon, you tell me, it's a big deal, isn't it over that the Artemis project will give you two more places?

As for Badis, he is still working hard to do work in ESA, Italy is still very ambitious over the years, and his industrial strength is not bad, but ESA is really too many members, and it is very troublesome to do something.

Anyway, the Aviation Development Commission said that it must wait for the Veneto 1 rocket to be approved before the engine passes through the customs, and to promote the Veneto 1 rocket, it is still not possible to do it alone......

……

Class B base, laser laboratory.

As a classified laboratory on the same level as the nuclear base, there are not many people in the laser laboratory, but they are all elusive, and the outside world basically does not know that there is such a financial monster in the base.

As the general leader of the laser project, Zhao Xiaowen is not always at the base, and occasionally goes back to the school.

On this day, he was browsing the journals on the school's intranet, and then he saw a very interesting paper:

"A Hypothesis of a Detached Water-Based Rocket Booster"

At the heart of this paper is an alternative rocket engine: the water rocket engine.

There should be more people who know the name of water rocket, for example, buy a bottle of Coke, stuff a few Mentos into it, and then drill a hole in the bottle cap and turn it upside down, and then the expanded gas will be sprayed out with a high-speed stream of water, sending the Coke bottle to a height of several meters to more than ten meters.

This is a water rocket, but a water rocket engine is different.

ARCA, an aerospace company that has always focused a little strangely, has developed water rocket engines.

Their water engine ground test goes like this: water is heated to a boiling state inside a boiler at 250 degrees Celsius and then ejected through the engine vent, it's as simple as that.

With water as the ejector, the thrust of the water engine is extremely amazing, and the thrust of a single engine reaches 7,000 tons!

The thrust of the F1 hydrogen-oxygen engine of the Saturn V is only 680 tons, and the thrust of the water engine of the ARCA is ten times that of the F1 with a smaller combustion chamber, isn't it very powerful?

Although the thrust-to-weight ratio is the highest among rocket engines, the problem is that the specific impulse of the water engine is too low, only 67 seconds.

It's so bad that it's almost impossible to fly out of the atmosphere with it.

Another problem is that ARCA's vision is that the rocket will not only carry thousands of tons of dead water, but also carry enough high-energy batteries and resistance wires, which is a big chunk of dead weight.

So the water engine...... Just take a look.

But this dissertation, written by a senior, is different, and it does something innovative: the water is not heated on a rocket.

Instead, an external heating surface is reserved at the bottom of the rocket equipped with a water engine, and the ground is continuously irradiated with several high-energy lasers to produce continuous high temperatures.

If the diameter of the water rocket is 14 meters and the height is about 50 meters, it can just meet the requirements of loading 7,500 tons of water, and a water rocket engine with a thrust of 10,000 tons is installed at the bottom.

The goal of such a water rocket is not to send the spacecraft into space, but to load a normal rocket of about 1,000 tons on the upper stage, send it from the ground to an altitude of 8,000 meters to 10,000 meters, and then start the engine of the normal rocket of the upper stage and continue to fly into space.

Theoretically, this approach can significantly reduce the weight and volume of the upper stage rocket, so as to save the cost of the high thrust required for the low-altitude ascent stage.

Because the water rocket below is very cheap, how simple is it to only withstand the combustion chamber of 250 degrees? Ordinary stainless steel is OK, the shell is also to meet the strength, the cost is pitiful, the water does not cost money, the expensive heating part is a ground laser, almost no money.

Of course, Zhao Xiaowen, who is already an expert in the aerospace industry, will only find it interesting when he sees it, because in fact, there is no need to do this, the cost of ground laser construction is extremely high, and the upper stage still has rockets, and the cost is not so low.

However, the paper itself is not low, the author's thinking logic is very forward, and it gives a lot of designs with practical potential, which must be a good seedling.

Such talents can be pulled into the laboratory early, and they will become great tools in the future.

Zhao Xiaowen immediately began to contact the school to find someone, but learned that this student was facing expulsion?

It shouldn't be!

He immediately called his counselor directly and asked what was going on, only to find out that the student named Gao Qitao had really stabbed the big basket.

Gao Qitao's own grades are relatively good, but he turned around in his junior year when the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics was established, and he also maintained his excellence.

As an excellent student, he was not left behind, graduating with a fourth-place grade in his flight school and obtaining his independent jet flight license in July this year.

Gao Qitao, who has excellent flying skills, has won quite a lot of bonus flight hours because of his extremely excellent performance, and even the flight time of the "Meteor" higher education plane has a lot of time.

You must know that the flight duration of the beginner aircraft and the conversion of the higher education aircraft are 24:1, and the flight cost of the latter is very high.

Then in the first half of the month, when Gao Qitao violated the rules and flew in the valley at a low altitude - this is a behavior that has been repeatedly banned in flight schools, but because it is usually done by instructors or top students, the punishment is not painful, and Gao Qitao generally has never had an accident.

As a result, that day he somehow saw the wrong way, flew the wrong tributary into the area of a city, and then got through the hole of the bridge across the river......

It is said that the tail was less than 3 meters away from the bridge deck at that time, and it was an extremely thrilling but highly skilled aerobatic flight, but then the high-altitude aircraft was warned by air traffic control to fly out of the Xinyuan permissible airspace, and was troubled by the air force and local city leaders.

There are already a large number of residents in the city who have been complaining about the noise problem all day long, and many people have made a fuss about this matter, and it is not easy for the city to suppress it, and the pressure is put on the school to withdraw from the school in order to quell the protests of the city residents.

Air force...... The Air Force also severely criticized Gao Qitao, but told the latter that as long as he joined the Air Force, he could be sent to a military academy in the future, and claimed that if he did not become a pilot, he would leave a record and not find a job.

After hearing this, Zhao Xiaowen directly dropped a sentence: "I knew that these vultures were staring at our students all day long, Xiao Gao, I will protect it!" See who dares to let him go! ”

(End of chapter)