Riding the wind of rebirth

“Hahahaha…Are you scared now?” Li Weigang said happily, “It’s not over yet. In terms of specific design ideas, it will also be the benchmark platform for our domestically produced satellites in the future. In other words, many of our country’s satellites in the future will rely on this satellite as a basis for upgrades and functional transformation.”

"When you called me that day, we were conducting the last round of thermal engine commissioning in the base laboratory." Deputy Chief Engineer Zhang Weifeng couldn't help but feel angry and amused: "Now you know why I said you made a big mess?"

Li Laosan didn't understand yet, but Zhou Zhi already understood. Dongfanghong-3 had undergone two years of transformation after the last launch failure, and its functions had been greatly improved. At least before the success, it was definitely a big national secret.

Then, after the last test run was successful, I called Li Weigang and said I wanted to launch a satellite. What did you think Li Weigang would think?

Especially since this happened right after Clover helped the base develop a process quality control system and gave the base a computing matrix as the system host...

Zhou Zhi now believes that the reason why Li Weigang did not immediately send Captain Zhou to arrest him and isolate him for investigation was because he had made considerable contributions to the country and donated a lot of money and equipment. He was a good comrade who had been tested, and he did not behave like an enemy spy.

"This matter has caused so much trouble..." Zhou Zhi held his forehead with his hand: "I really don't know anything about this matter. I just came up with this idea while chatting with my third brother. I wanted to ask you if it is feasible..."

You can imagine how tense the base has been in the past few days. They must have been frantically checking all the external interfaces of the system, rechecking whether the system has installed this backdoor, loopholes, and whether there are illegal users and illegal user permissions...

Anyway, just like how Clover was nervous when Mai Xiaomiao was the black cat, I guess the base will be nervous this time too.

"Your phone call delayed our work progress by three days!" Li Weigang stretched out his hand in grief and anger, making an OK gesture: "Three whole days!"

"Boss Li, you just don't trust your colleagues." Zhou Zhi said with a shy smile, "Even if you don't trust us, you should at least trust the comrades in the project transformation team and the project acceptance team. When we delivered the system, we put it through the most rigorous inspection and review."

"Besides, as far as I know, the base's network is independently operated and has no extra connections to the outside world. It is equivalent to an independent local area network. Even if there is a backdoor in the system, there is no possibility of connecting from the outside, right?"

“Hahaha…” Li Weigang laughed disapprovingly: “Of course there is no conventional physical link, but don’t forget where we are here, there is also an unconventional link…”

"Satellite hacker?!" Zhou Zhi was shocked: "Mr. Li, please don't scare me! Has there been any successful case in the world so far?"

"Why does it need to be so complicated?" Zhang Weichao shook his head. "If someone uses the satellite communication interface to connect to the external network for the sake of convenience, wouldn't that give others an opportunity to attack?"

"Ah, this..." Zhou Zhi felt so scared: "Could it be that someone in the base did this and let Clover take the blame? This is a management loophole, not a system loophole!"

“Hahahaha…” Li Weigang laughed, “Through the past three days of checking and filling in the gaps, although I have proven your innocence, I did find a lot of problems. Thinking about it now, I’m sweating all over.”

"Supporting firewall! Supporting interface polling! Plus abnormal access monitoring! Abnormal traffic monitoring!" Zhou Zhi's forehead was also slightly sweaty. Not to mention how terrible it is to leak confidential information, he would cry blindly if he couldn't wash it off by jumping into the Yellow River: "We won't ask about the satellite, we won't ask..." "Don't! I've already said so much." Li Weigang saw that Zhou Zhi misunderstood his meaning, and hurried to stop him, blurting out his thoughts: "Can you still run away?"

Zhang Weichao also quickly said: "No. 3B is a new generation of communication satellite developed by us. It is aimed at the most advanced international level in the world today. The requirements of our superiors at that time were to ease the shortage of satellite communication resources in our country, promote the development of our satellite communication industry, enhance our prestige in the international aerospace field, and consolidate our position in the international aerospace launch market."

"There is an extreme shortage of transponders in the domestic communications satellite market. Most of them need to be forwarded through the International Satellite Communications Organization. The annual cost of public communications alone is tens of millions of dollars." Li Weigang said, "A lot of the oil here is your contribution. You must feel bad for spending this money, right?"

"Yes!" Zhou Zhi nodded. "For example, the communication between the Four Leaf Grass Headquarters and the computer room of our grain station, and between the two bases of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the capital, all use channels rented from foreign satellites. Not only is the cost high, but there is also the risk of leaks."

"In order to learn from the previous failure, we conducted a strict second inspection and acceptance of the satellite." Zhang Weichao said: "This time we used new standards and found many hidden problems. Now we have full confidence that our satellite, in terms of performance and safety, far exceeds the level of satellites of the same level in Europe and the United States."

"In addition to the rocket assembly process that has been reorganized according to the new standards, our quality control has taken a big step forward. Whether it is rocket launch, satellite apogee launch, geostationary orbit insertion, or orbit determination, we have great confidence. Something like what happened in 1992 will never happen again."

The launch in March 1992 suffered an unexpected failure.

It was broadcast live around the world at the time, but after the rocket was ignited, only brown and silver smoke rose, but the rocket did not take off.

To ensure the safety of the rocket and satellite, the base shut down the rocket about ten seconds later. After nearly 40 hours of emergency rescue, power outages, and firefighting, the rocket and satellite were finally saved.

After a thorough investigation, it was finally found that there was a little aluminum shavings the size of a grain of rice on a program distributor on the Arrow.

This was a standard quality control incident.

Because it was broadcast live, people all over the country knew about the accident at the first time. Many people felt that it was a "failure that brought shame to the Chinese people" and it also brought enormous pressure to the aerospace personnel.

But in fact, this launch almost blinded their foreign counterparts. Only they paid attention to a secret that had never happened in the history of world space launches and was exposed because of China's launch failure - the engine of the Long March series of rockets could actually be "emergency shut down" again after ignition!

They think this is a miracle in the world's aerospace industry!

"The most important thing is the price advantage," Li Weigang said. "According to estimates, for every additional satellite produced, the unit cost of the satellite will drop by 20%."

"So many?" Li Laosan and Zhou Zhi were shocked again. (End of this chapter)