Riding the wind of rebirth

Watching several elderly people working hard to promote "Dong San Yi", Zhou Zhi felt amused and touched, but also a little sad.

Today's military workers are still somewhat humble, lacking the boldness and courage of the later "asking for a high price". They are not as confident as they were later. Instead, they are worried that others will not buy their products.

The current mainstream is to enlarge satellites, such as Hughes' Austar, which has to be launched using the Long March 2 bundle with a payload capacity of more than four tons.

Dong-3B uses a large number of lightweight structures and is only a medium-sized satellite in terms of weight. Therefore, it does not require a high-thrust and high-payload rocket to launch, and is much easier than launching Austar.

Of course, it is also possible to use large rockets, which is the way of the future - launching multiple satellites with one rocket.

Zhou Zhi believes that this is the right path. Replacing a single large satellite with multiple medium-sized satellites will systematically improve the system's fault tolerance, overall efficiency, and emergency response capabilities.

There is an important premise, which is the networking capability of the satellite platform.

"Mr. Yu, may I ask if our East 3B has the networking function code now?"

"Networking?" The old man who led the Science and Technology Commission was stunned. "Of course we have interfaces for international organizations to communicate. Is this what you are asking about?"

"No." Zhou Zhi shook his head: "What I want to say is whether Dongsanyi, as a satellite platform, has the ability to form a network in space, just like a wireless communication base station on the ground."

Fearing that people might not understand, Zhou Zhi simply came to the blackboard in the conference room and started drawing a picture with chalk: "It's like this. In this way, the satellite can carry more channel access and provide longitude and latitude positioning and other services to ground receivers. Also, when one or several satellites fail, the load balancing system can evenly distribute the requests to the remaining normal satellites without affecting the service."

"Our applications have very high requirements for system reliability. If the Dongsanyi has such a function, it will undoubtedly provide better protection for our applications."

Several old men looked at each other and discussed in a low voice: "From a design point of view, there is no big problem. These are mature technologies on the ground and have now been miniaturized. But this is not a matter of five satellites..."

"To complete this network in Asia, we need to add two more satellites. If we want to do it worldwide, we need to add six more satellites." Elder Yu said, "Adding the original five satellites, there will be eleven in total."

"Eleven is the minimum requirement, right?" Zhou Zhi then asked, "What if we require a large redundancy guarantee?"

"If we want to meet the maximum guarantee, we need 1.5 satellites," another old man added, "the cost will go up significantly, but the benefit is that the performance can be expanded. The capacity of synchronous uplink and downlink information can be increased by about times."

From five stars to fifteen stars, the number of satellites has doubled, but the performance has only increased by 1.5 times. But don’t think that this is not cost-effective. This is the scientific researchers making things difficult for themselves. In fact, an increase of only % is acceptable. After all, this is an extra "gift" for the purpose of ensuring maximum safety.

Li Laoer rubbed his temple painfully. Although everyone was working together and the three parties were trying to make this happen with the utmost sincerity, it would still take a lot of effort to negotiate such a big deal.

Now that Party A has arrived, he starts making random demands, and all the previous letters of intent have to be revised again.

But there is no doubt that this matter is also good for himself. Satellite networking, what a grand concept. When Yangtze Telecom follows up in the future, the gimmick of space network highway will be enough to double the stock price!

Several senior members of the Science and Technology Commission were secretly surprised. If Zhou Zhi and Li Laosan were not too perfect in the background investigation report, they would have suspected that these two were liars who only boasted about their achievements.

Five stars become fifteen stars, plus the five in their own plan and the five in the future of China Yangtze Power, the research and development mission of twenty-five satellites is enough to catalyze the maturity of the Dongsanyi platform and even directly lead the world's advanced level by ten years!

This is often the case in the development of the military and aerospace industries. For example, the F16 of the United States is actually an air combat platform. It was put into service in 1978 and has been in service for years. It is still the main fighter of many countries. A mature platform can often maintain its leading position for decades. Because the cost of research and development and production of these things is quite high, they can only stay on the drawing board and are difficult to be transformed into real objects.

However, without conversion and application, it will be difficult to have the opportunity to upgrade and improve. If such an opportunity is lost, it will be difficult to maintain the advantage and be overtaken by newly emerging technologies.

There are many similar examples, such as the development history of destroyers in the two major countries in the East and the West, and the development history of stealth fifth-generation aircraft, which can illustrate the importance of "production".

In the era when everyone was still pursuing large satellites, generally having a production mission of four or five satellites was enough to develop the satellite into a very perfect one.

For example, the Dongsanyi platform is still serving as a pioneer in the lunar landing mission decades later, which means it has "evolved" to the point where it can be used for decades.

This is also the most cost-effective way of research and development, to fight to support the war, provided that there are enough application scenarios to make money, and then use the money earned to support its development.

After building 25 stars, it is really exciting to see what the East 3B platform will evolve into.

No, we don’t even have to start research and development. Just by discussing the scale, we can naturally see many development directions.

Three stars are enough to cover the entire world. More than three stars will cause problems with coordination. More than nine stars will inevitably require networking to improve efficiency.

The concept of aerial networking base stations naturally emerged.

Three base stations can locate the receiver very accurately, and the concept of high-precision satellite navigation naturally emerges.

Then we gave the Elbows a rough version, and the military got a high-precision version, hehe...

Next, we can build an independently operated global communication network...

Nuclear submarines only need to release a small communication buoy to receive instructions from the central government anywhere in the four oceans. The long-wave radio stations that previously controlled the fleet will become secondary communication guarantees in the near sea in the future...

There are also various remote sensing, reconnaissance, and even guidance...

We already have the Star Network, so how can we not have these? How can we not develop them?

"If that's the case, we'll have to renegotiate the price." Old Yu coughed to hide his excitement. "Although we have the technology to build a network of satellites, they are all on the ground, so the research and development task is not easy. Moreover, the sudden increase in the number of satellites is also a test for production. If we want to save costs, we can only develop multiple satellites per rocket. The current rocket for launching the Dong-3B is no longer practical, and the interface of the Chang-2F is not compatible with it..."

"In short, the task is heavy and there are many difficulties, but as long as there is funding to start research and development, we old guys guarantee that no matter how many difficulties or how heavy the task is, we will overcome them!"

To put it bluntly, we are still short of money! (End of this chapter)