A big country of aerospace with black technology

Mars.

In the future space age, it is an important planet for human beings to live on.

As a planet in the solar system, it is very similar to the earth.

Human beings have had great interest in exploring it since the last century.

And many studies at this time believe that liquid water once existed on Mars now or in the past.

Generally speaking, liquid water is considered an important condition for the origin of life.

Because most of the lives currently known to humans require liquid water as a chemical reaction medium to maintain their own lives.

"Mars exploration is an important direction for our future cooperation!"

In the conference room, although everyone did not agree on the subsequent exploration plan, there was still a lot of common ground on the topic of exploring Mars.

"Zhang, we should first launch the Mars orbiter, and then launch the Mars lander and rover."

The person in charge of the Gallic Mars Exploration Plan, Paul Sartre, carefully introduced their arrangements for the Mars Exploration Plan on the stage.

In their plan, they will first spend five years developing and launching a Mars orbiter, and then land on the surface of Mars three years later.

Such a plan can only be said to be quite satisfactory.

In fact, this is almost the same as ESA’s Mars exploration plan.

Gaul obviously wanted to use this plan to test the Dragon Kingdom and see if they could extort a sum of money from the Dragon Kingdom to maintain their own exploration plan.

Zhang Xingyang supported the table with both hands and held his chin, watching with some boredom as the other party vigorously promoted their exploration plan on the stage.

Even compared to the Tianwen-1 Mars exploration plan carried out independently by Long Guo more than ten years later, this plan looks very petty.

"Our orbiting spacecraft will conduct high-precision measurements of the topography of the Martian surface and help us establish a more accurate model of the Martian atmosphere in the past."

Paul Sutter introduced the goals of their planned orbiter mission.

After listening for a short while, Zhang Xingyang confirmed his thoughts.

They are indeed deceiving and want to find an enemy to take over their Mars Express project.

This plan mainly uses a Mars orbiter to study the Martian atmosphere and climate to explain the geological structure, mineralogy and traces of surface water on Mars.

Although it also carries a miniature Mars rover to conduct exploration activities on the surface of Mars.

But the luck of this miniature Mars rover was not very good. During the process of landing on Mars, it unfortunately disappeared.

In its original history, the "Mars Express" project did make a lot of achievements, and also found traces of the existence of surface water on Mars.

And a large number of landforms in areas that have not been observed before have been drawn.

However, for Zhang Xingyang, or for Long Guo, such a plan seems a bit inappropriate.

The reason why Gaul's plan is more conservative is actually easy to understand.

Because they do not have high-thrust rockets, they cannot send heavier payloads into Mars orbit.

In fact, when they launched the "Mars Express", they still used Maozi's "Soyuz-FG" launch vehicle.

The load mass that can be carried must be strictly controlled under 2 tons.

The total payload of "Mars Express" is about 1.3 tons.

The total weight of the "Tianwen-1" carried by Longguo's first Mars exploration plan is 5 tons.

This is also the difference caused by the difference between the Rockets.

The Long March 5 heavy-lift carrier rocket used to launch "Tianwen-1" has a mass of 14 tons in the earth-moon transfer orbit and 5 tons in the earth-fire transfer orbit. It is affectionately called "Fat Five" by everyone!

After Paul Sartre explained their plan, Zhang Xingyang stood up politely:

"Mr. Paul, with all due respect!"

"Your plan is too conservative!"

After hearing Zhang Xingyang's denial, the bearded Paul on the stage was obviously a little disdainful.

After all, in his opinion, the Dragon Kingdom, which had just completed manned spaceflight, still had some advantages over them in terms of launch vehicles.

In terms of satellite detectors, Longguo does not have many advantages.

In fact, both sides are pretty much the same in this regard.

Even from a certain perspective, ESA, which has advantages in many detector components, can even be said to be at a disadvantage.

After all, many of their components are produced in multiple countries.

For example, more than five countries are involved in manufacturing the Mars orbiter alone. The antennas, radars, solar panels, and structural components come from four different countries. The assembly is in another country, and Gaul's software.

The consequence of this is that the manufacturing and communication costs of the detector are huge and the time cycle is very long!

This is also one of the drawbacks of multinational cooperation, not just the Mars exploration plan.

In fact, this situation also existed during the construction process of the International Space Station.

Although in many cases, Yingjiang has the right to speak on the International Space Station, making people mistakenly think that this is a space station built independently by their family.

But in fact, the International Space Station is indeed the largest space cooperation project with the most participants on Earth!

This is also an important reason why it took nearly twenty years from the proposal of the plan to the initial completion, and even the construction time was almost as long as the use time. After more than ten years of completion, it had to face the situation of decommissioning.

"Our rocket system is fully capable of meeting the five-ton Mars orbit payload."

"So, we think we can be bold and launch the orbiter, lander and rover all into Mars orbit at once!"

After Zhang Xingyang finished speaking, none of the Longguo Yifang staff showed any surprised expressions.

After all, before this meeting, they had already made strict calculations. Taking the Hongyan rocket they are currently using as an example, the low orbit carrying capacity is 26 tons, the earth-moon transfer orbit is 15 tons, and the earth-fire transfer orbit is 5.2 tons.

It is fully capable of meeting the task of launching such multiple payloads at one time.

The participants from Gaul in the audience had just learned about Dragon Kingdom's launch vehicle capabilities, and they started discussing among themselves in whispers.

In fact, Hongyan rocket has completed research and development work and has been oriented to the commercial market for several years. However, the main users of Hongyan rocket are the Southeast Asian market and the Eagle Sauce market.

In the Western Continent market where Gaul is located, it is not very good.

So they may have heard of Hongyan rockets before, but they don’t know much about the rocket’s performance.

But for Gaul, this was a complete surprise.

They also want to make the detector larger in scale, but they have been limited by the inability of the launch vehicle before, so they can only build a dojo inside the snail shell, and everything is calculated carefully.

I didn’t expect that I would be able to gain something like this in the Dragon Kingdom.

After Paul Sartre confirmed this, he abandoned his original plan almost instantly.

Instead, it supported Zhang Xingyang’s plan to launch a Mars orbiter, lander and rover at once.

The plan for Mars exploration has thus turned to another path that has never appeared in history.

——

If we talk about exploring Mars, it is for mankind’s second home in the space age.

Then the asteroid exploration plan is for the safety of all life on earth!

Of all the disasters that could lead to the mass extinction of life on earth, an asteroid impact is the most threatening.

After all, there is precedent for this in the long history.

Taking the history of the earth as a reference, 65 million years ago is not a particularly distant time.

An asteroid with a diameter of about 10 kilometers hit near what is now the Gulf of Mexico, with an explosion yield of about 100 trillion tons of TNT.

The most powerful thing created by mankind so far is the Tsar Bomba in the early 1960s, which had a power of about 50 million tons of TNT.

The asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs was two million times more powerful than the Tsar Bomba!

This is without counting the accompanying damage energy such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes caused by the asteroid.

If such an asteroid impact event occurred today, it would be a devastating blow to the entire human civilization.

"So, we need an asteroid defense plan!"

Zhou Xuan, director of the Institute of Deep Space Exploration, spoke eloquently at the 2001 annual planning meeting of the aerospace system.

This plan, even for people working in the aerospace system, is still a bit science fiction.

Therefore, Zhou Xuan does not have extravagant expectations that this plan will receive strong financial support now.

I just hope to get more funds through this plan.

After all, except for some self-sufficient units, most scientific research units survive through grants.

Without financial allocation, their lives would not be easy.

Not surprisingly, such a project that was too advanced was not passed in the annual planning meeting.

Zhang Xingyang doesn’t think there is anything wrong with this. After all, the funds for the space system are not very large these days, and the focus is still on more important and higher-priority projects such as manned spaceflight, satellites, and lunar exploration programs. superior.

This meeting only reviewed part of the planned project reports submitted by various aerospace research institutes.

After the meeting, Zhang Xingyang found Zhou Xuan, the director of the Institute of Deep Space Exploration, who was a little dissatisfied after the project was rejected.

"Director Zhou, please stay!"

Zhang Xingyang's words were not very loud. Zhou Xuan, who was walking in front, didn't hear him at first. It was only after someone around him pulled him that he realized someone was calling him.

"Dean Zhang, what's the matter?" Zhou Xuan asked a little puzzled.

Zhang Xingyang is currently very famous within the aerospace system.

After all, the Rocket Research Institute he is responsible for has developed rapidly in the past few years, and is responsible for almost a large number of projects every year.

"There's something I want to talk to you about. Isn't it convenient?"

Zhang Xingyang looked at the people around him, smiled and extended the invitation.

"Are they also from the Institute of Deep Space Exploration?"

"How about we come together?"

Zhou Xuan and her colleagues next to her looked at each other and nodded.

Several people came to a small conference room in the venue.

Zhang Xingyang didn't chat too much and said straight to the point:

"I don't know, Dean Zhou, have you ever planned an asteroid exploration project before?"

If Zhou Xuan didn't know what Zhang Xingyang was going to do when he first found her.

But after hearing his words, I instantly understood that he might have some interest in asteroid exploration.

Then he became energetic instantly, looked at Zhang Xingyang with bright eyes and said:

"Although we have not done actual development work before, our theoretical exploration has not fallen behind."

"Our asteroid defense plan is also proposed on this basis."

"In fact, in our plan, the first step is just to sample the comet and return it."

"Establishing an asteroid defense system is our ultimate goal."

"Dean Zhang, are you interested in participating in this project?"

There is no difference between the development route of the asteroid defense plan proposed by Zhou Xuan and others and Zhang Xingyang's memory.

In the early days of the asteroid defense plan, there were actually some big differences from the later completely completed planetary absolute defense circle.

This is also due to various reasons. For example, it is not possible to fully understand the composition, orbital inclination, eccentricity, etc. of asteroids.

Therefore, the method of asteroid defense is mainly to push away threatening asteroids through impact deviation.

It is not the same as later generations using automated weapon stations to completely smash asteroids.

"There is a bit of interest, but currently we have no exploration plans for asteroids."

Zhang Xingyang's first words made Zhou Xuan a little happy, but his second words made his heart plummet.

However, Zhou Xuan still took a breath and asked:

"Then Dean Zhang, why are you looking for me today?"

Zhang Xingyang could naturally see that Zhou Xuan was slightly angry, so he smiled and said:

"I wonder, is Dean Zhou interested in Mars exploration?"

What Zhang Xingyang said was somewhat beyond Zhou Xuan's expectations.

This is also normal, after all, the cooperative exploration plan with Gaul has just been finalized at this time.

There has been no official announcement of the cooperation between the two parties in Mars exploration.

"We will cooperate with Gaul in Mars exploration in the future."

"What is currently determined is that we are responsible for the development of launch vehicles and Mars orbiters."

"They are responsible for the development of landers and rovers, which are Mars rovers."

"However, in the process of cooperation, we still have a lot of exchanges with each other."

"I wonder, are you interested in working in Gaul for a while and participating in the development of the Mars rover?"

After Zhang Xingyang finished speaking, the eyes of several people across from him widened.

This news is really shocking. After all, for so many years, almost all aerospace work in China has been carried out independently.

Suddenly, you have such in-depth cooperation with other countries in aerospace.

It was still somewhat beyond their expectations.

"This is a good thing for us." Zhou Xuan said immediately.

“We have a lot of interest!”

Although there are certain differences between Mars landing detection and asteroid detection, a lot of things can be learned from asteroid landing sampling.

This is also an important reason why Zhou Xuan agreed directly.

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