"What's the separation speed?"

"At 2.5 kilometers per second, the separation speed will be much higher when the task is not recovered, and the minimum may be pressed to about 1.8 kilometers per second in the case of recovery."

Robert is now at the Starship Manufacturing Base, carefully reviewing the entire process of the Starship's third launch.

SpecaX is actually quite a unique company, and unlike XAP, which focuses on the use of high technology, Musk is trying to pull astronautics off the throne.

The entire Starship manufacturing base is actually very rudimentary (for a space company), with the largest factories and assembly centers made of steel frames and plates, which from the outside look like an oversized tent.

Starships and super-heavy boosters were shipped from here, but more than half of them were scrapped in ground tests, and only a handful of them passed pre-launch standard inspections.

The B10 booster launched this time is very different from the original design, mainly because NACA has eliminated the rocking function of most of the engines in the first stage in order to obtain a stage that can be used once.

The previous design was that a total of 13 engines could control the nozzles vector in the two inner laps, and only the three in the center of the B10 could swing.

If the steering force is insufficient, the steering is completed by adjusting the throttling of the engine on one side to create a thrust difference, which is equivalent to combining the steering method of the N1.

There are also a lot of other scattered improvements, although the few SpecaX launches in the early days did not think about recycling, but there are still many designs ready for recycling, and the B10 has all been cut down, simplifying a lot of structure and reducing the pressure on the computer.

Since the second launch of Starship has basically solved the reliability problem of 33 engines working together, this B10 has perfectly achieved its goal after greatly reducing design expectations, and only the second-stage Starship spacecraft has been blown up.

Robert led people to carefully check the entire record of the B10's launch process, including the mission log sent by the computer in real time, and found nothing suspicious.

"Tom, immediately set the parameters of B10, and all the B11 to B13 in your warehouse will be improved to the same state as B10, how long will it take?"

Tom Mueller frowned and thought about it:

"In fact, this launch proves that many of the B10's designs can still be optimized, maybe we ......"

Robert interrupted him:

"No, just the B10, freeze its technical state without any changes, we don't have time to pursue better now, NACA only needs a rocket that can be successfully launched."

“…… All right. Tom can understand Director Robert's anxiety, although the B10 has seen a lot of improvements after launch, but after all, changes are risky.

Modify the original design with caution.

"But in reality we only have the B11 basically built, the B12 and B13 are still semi-finished, and the SpecaX can deliver the B11 at the end of October, and then deliver the remaining two pieces in November and December."

"Very well, then we will use B11 and ICPS to carry out the Artemis 3 mission in November, and the second manned mission of Artemis IV to the moon by January 1."

Director Robert replied quickly.

At the time of the third Starship launch, he had already planned to transplant the ICPS used by the original SLS rocket to the super-heavy booster, which is equivalent to replacing the core stage and booster of the SLS with the first stage of the Starship, and the lunar orbit capacity of the new rocket can reach 46 tons, which is equivalent to a Saturn V.

The name of the new rocket will continue to be SLS, called the SLS-X rocket, which can also be referred to simply as SL-X.

The goal of SLS-X is to send a deeply modified Blue Moon lander over for an unmanned mission to the moon, and if feasible, to launch a second SLS-X.

The SLS-X structure remains the same, this time with an Orion spacecraft and a refueling for the Blue Moon, followed by the Artemis III lander for a second manned landing on the moon.

As long as the first level is reliable, the mature ICPS upper level will definitely meet the task requirements.

In fact, the Starship's super-heavy booster potential is very large, if the Centaur VI upper stage with three RL-10 engines is used, the capacity of low-earth orbit will reach 180 tons, and the capacity of lunar orbit will reach 55 tons;

If it were an EUS upper stage of five RL-10s, the LEO capacity would reach a staggering 70 tons.

The ICPS upper stage is SL-X block 1, the Centaur VI upper stage is SL-X block 2, and the EUS upper stage SL-X block 3.

Although all of them cannot be reused, they are cheap and have strong capacity, and they are destined to become the main force in the next two years.

The new SL-X is a "assembled" rocket, but the Raptor engine used by the first stage booster is easy to control the flow, and the overall test of the rocket will not be too difficult in Robert's opinion.

After Artemis II in July, Robert also embarked on a major internal overhaul of NACA, and now he has set his goal for this year to "return to the moon", and it is no problem to launch at least one SL-X in two months, and it is not impossible to launch a second one at the tail of the Gregorian New Year.

……

October 8, the first day after Golden Week.

The base also had a seven-day holiday during Golden Week, but there were still many people who stayed on duty to maintain and inspect the aerospace aircraft together with other people involved in the design bureau of Tengyun Engineering.

After four days of inspection, the design team found that Tengyun was in unexpectedly good condition, and there were no problems with a quick inspection of the entire aircraft inside and out, which perfectly achieved the required "normalized launch" goal.

Theoretically, by doing nothing and refueling it, Tengyun would be able to take astronauts into space for the second time, a huge improvement over the space shuttle and recyclable rockets.

The first test flight of the "Tengyun" was different from the aircraft process, although it was named a prototype, all the configurations were fully in place, and subsystems were tested during a few days in space, and no problems were found.

Therefore, the second flight mission was cut off by Lin Ju for "public and private use", and he was directly prepared to arrange for newcomers to take him to fly.

All 22 passengers of the mission assembled on the runway, 18 of whom were "payload specialists" and six were from the space agency.

Yun Hongjun touched the ultra-light cabin spacesuit on his body, and he always felt that it was not real.

The day before yesterday, Lin Ju told him that Seryov wanted to exchange the design of the high-strength booster separator and hoped that he could go over as soon as possible, so the next day he flew over in a C810.

As a result, as soon as he landed, he was set up by several technical experts from the space agency at the base and rushed to the medical center, only to know that he was going to go to space by space plane the next day......

Seryov's explanation was that Tengyun's previous test flights were for testing the aircraft, and there were no important tasks, so everyone was guinea pigs on this flight.

During the entire flight of the last flight, the maximum acceleration experienced by the astronauts was 2.55G, the duration was 3.3 seconds, and the average G-value was 1.59G.

What is this concept, the maximum take-off acceleration G value of civil airliners is 1.5, the maximum acceleration of roller coasters can reach 4.8G and last for 6 to 7 seconds......

Moreover, the second flight was only an independent flight mission that lasted 24 hours, and Lin Ju boldly and directly let all passengers except the main and co-pilot go to ordinary people - Seryov himself was among them.

Before gathering at the airport, he even secretly drank half a glass of whiskey, and the smell of wine was a little hot when he stood next to Yun Hongjun.

(End of chapter)