"F**K, this is definitely the most expensive thing ever."

John looked at the "good news" that NACA had just submitted, and couldn't stop whining at Sullivan next to him.

It has been a month since the A105 nuclear engine was shipped to Boeing's Seattle plant, and the good news has finally arrived.

After a team of more than 200 people worked day and night, the A105 engine has been successfully combined with the renovated space shuttle.

Just three hours ago, nuclear engines provided the space shuttle with a steady stream of power for the first time, and it is expected that all necessary commissioning and safety tests will be completed by April, and a manned launch mission will be carried out in May and June.

It is worth mentioning the installation process of the A105 engine, which first needs to be fully tested at the test site before being shipped to the factory for final assembly, and it will not stop burning from the first operation until the estimated 10-year scrapping period.

In order to save volume and valuable weight, the A105 reactor is not only equipped with higher concentrations of nuclear fuel, but it is also a non-replaceable design, but NACA is confident that it will completely drain the value of an expensive engine within 10 years.

The safety of the A105 when the engine is not working has also been confirmed, and the A105 has a lower than normal radiation value, and there have been no safety incidents.

It seems that the FATS program is going very well, but the fly in the ointment is the current price of $9.97 billion.

Counting the manpower required for the repair and transformation of Endeavour, as well as the cost of re-developing spare parts, plus the cost of the A105 engine, the cost of the space shuttle's nuclear power transformation alone is infinitely close to $10 billion, much higher than the original $3 billion.

Even more irritating is the launch issue, where the SLS rocket will not be able to launch the shuttle and will need to be rebuilt with new tanks, which is expected to cost as much as $11.5 billion for the first launch of Endeavour.

Although the vast majority of these costs are R&D expenses, and continued production can be greatly reduced by flattening, the rocket that launched the space shuttle cannot be reused for the time being, and NACA is not willing to accept the original expensive offer, and Boeing is looking for a way to launch the space shuttle in other ways.

John had a headache when he saw the dazzling quotation lists, and even if the space budget would be unhindered because of the M incident, it didn't mean that he could really spend money completely regardless of the finances.

If he doesn't do a good job of causing public resentment, he is likely to be pushed out as a scapegoat, which is by no means a paranoia episode of victimization.

He hoped that Sullivan would come up with something, but he didn't expect the latter to say this:

"Sir, Endeavour is not the most expensive, and when the Discovery and Atlantis are completed, its cost will be reduced to $5 billion, and there is one thing that will cost more than $10 billion in materials alone."

"Ha, does the Navy want to add nuclear submarines or nuclear aircraft carriers? Damn, haven't you already mentioned it! ”

"No, it's not this."

John pointed to the stack of papers he had brought with him:

"DARPA, Defense Advanced Planning and Research Agency, because of the success of the A105, they have officially decided to invest in the research and development of a nuclear-powered version of the Starship spacecraft, the program name is NSS (Nuclear StarShip), waiting for Congress and you to pass it."

John had long known that DARPA was going to engage in a nuclear-powered starship, but because of several failed launches of the starship and JFT progress problems, it was once thought that it was far away.

After the last failure of the Starship SN25, Musk assured them that the fifth launch would be in orbit, and at the same time JFT delivered usable nuclear engines to the Endeavour, DARPA finally made up its mind to carry out the NSS program.

Of course, this is also indispensable to the cause of the M incident, and deep space navigation must have a large nuclear-powered spacecraft of the size of the NSS, sooner or later.

Instead of the A105 engine, the NSS was equipped with the "Helios 5" nuclear engine, which was redesigned based on the "Helios 2A", with thrust increased from 97 tons to 110 tons and specific impulse increased to 910 seconds.

The NSS is expected to use 9 Helios 5 engines with a total thrust of 1,000 tons and a take-off mass on par with Starship.

Leaving aside the still unknown horror research and development costs, just nine high-thrust nuclear engines are enough to know how high their cost is, and $10 billion is optimistic.

The entire NSS program will require a budget of $30 billion, and will eventually require the construction of 10 to 20 NSS spacecraft, all of which must be completed before deep space construction begins.

John almost suffered a cardiopulmonary arrest when he saw this rough plan, and when the "Constellation" plan was first established, he thought it would be a big deal to be an enhanced version of "Ares", but only now did he know how big the gap was.

To outsiders, the fantastical "Constellation" project is precisely the limit of what NACA can do based on realistic imagination, but the premise is definitely the continuous investment of madness, and now it is beginning to show its hideousness.

Such a large amount of money will certainly not be able to be allocated from normal financial expenditures, and only borrowing (printing) debts (banknotes) can provide the required funds.

When it comes to borrowing, Sullivan also brought the first news from the Federal Reserve:

“…… According to the needs of the 13th Office, the Fed believes that the Treasury bond ceiling will be raised by another 50%, and will continue to expand the scale of additional issuance and maintain the interest rate increase. ”

How does the federal government get money by printing money? Of course, instead of printing them and spending them directly, the federal government first issues treasury bonds, and then prints money to buy treasury bonds, and indirectly obtains the additional treasury bonds.

The federal Treasury was $20 trillion in March last year, about a year ago, and has expanded to $23.5 trillion after several rate hikes and adjustments, and the Fed intends to increase its issuance to $30 trillion in the coming year and $40 trillion in 2020.

In this way, the federal financial dilemma will be greatly eased, and it will barely be able to keep up with the snowballing space program.

The continuous issuance will reach its peak in the 30s, when only two results await them:

Either an alien crisis will be detonated to get rid of the mess and re-establish order, or the market's refusal to pay will trigger the collapse of the global financial order, which will eventually lead to war.

Either way it can be accepted, and the expected situation will not be much better anyway.

Thinking of this, John is glad that he will step down before the snowball explodes, otherwise his historical evaluation would have been extremely bad.

Fortunately, at the same time, he suddenly thought of something, and asked Sullivan:

"Jack, how is the financial situation of the Chinese people, and their situation should not be too good?"

Sullivan: "Wait, they're going to publish their annual report soon, but based on the observations of some of my economics friends, they found something very interesting. ”

"What is it?"

"Their military spending as a percentage of GDP has been around 1.5% before, and has never exceeded 2%, but according to the think tank, in 2017 they have added a lot of huge spending, and this figure may reach 2.2%.

Also, XAP still seems to be receiving huge investment from their military, with experts predicting it could rise to 2.5 percent or more this year. ”

"So many, do they want to turn the world upside down?"

"It's hard to define, but if you look at the technology they're showcasing at the festival, it's really close to that."

"I know, it's wireless transmission, damn it, when will my artificial moon shine on Ami's night sky!"

(End of chapter)