Riding the wind of rebirth

This was entirely thanks to Zhou Zhi's "golden touch," which was his foresight regarding future successful technological paths, a skill he inherited from later generations.

While optical communication has many advantages, it also has many disadvantages.

The drawback of the Zuda is that its performance is easily affected by atmospheric turbulence, clouds, fog, rain, snow and other weather conditions, and the ground receiving end needs to be equipped with high-precision tracking and aiming equipment, resulting in high deployment costs.

Microwave communication is different. Although the bandwidth is relatively small, it has good cloud penetration ability and environmental adaptability. Ground terminal technology is mature, low cost, and easy to deploy, with higher coverage stability and availability.

Therefore, for terrestrial use, microwave communication actually has better application scenarios and is the direction of development for the vast majority of countries.

Optical communication is mainly used for connections between fixed devices.

Of course, space, free from atmospheric interference, is another area with enormous potential; however, the vast majority of countries in the world do not possess the technological capability to launch space equipment.

Twenty years later, an American tech genius, the world's richest man, finally realized this dream by dropping a bunch of "base stations" into low Earth orbit. This is Musk's "Starlink".

However, Starlink's technical approach is clearly not as scientific as AXA's current "Sky-Star-Earth Network" system. With its pyramid-shaped three-dimensional network structure, Starlink's data exchange efficiency is far higher than Starlink's planar network structure.

Therefore, in terms of technical approach, Starlink technology is far more advanced than Starlink twenty years later. It achieves the same effect as Starlink with fewer satellites through a three-dimensional network, and is also more efficient.

Although the network setup is much more difficult, the advantage is that although the initial investment is large, the overall investment is much smaller, and the lifespan is very long. With the addition of ion propulsion technology, the lifespan can basically be maintained for more than ten years.

Musk's low-Earth orbit satellites require a lot of energy to maintain their orbits. Once the energy is depleted, they will be sucked into the Earth's atmosphere by gravity and burn up. Therefore, their lifespan is basically only about three years, and new satellites need to be launched continuously to replenish them, resulting in very high maintenance costs.

Of course, the current performance of Star Engine satellites is far from reaching the high speed of future networks, but with this correct technological approach, the remaining task is to iterate and continuously improve efficiency.

At least for now, the Star Engine space network has outperformed terrestrial networks.

"This is the world's first high-end dedicated optical communication solution for a specific scenario," Zhou Zhi said. "Optical communication solutions and space communication solutions are not nonexistent, but China was relatively late to participate in both. However, we are the first in the world to combine the two and are in a leading position."

"However, for various reasons, this plan cannot be publicized. It is enough for everyone to know. After we go out, we should keep it as secret as possible and not tell everyone."

"Then what can we say?" Yan Xiao asked anxiously, "We still need to talk at the handball team's annual dinner!"

"Hahahaha..." Zhou Zhi laughed: "There are so many things you can brag about, like the performance of the Long March 3B rocket and the orbit-changing capabilities of the Dongfeng-3B satellite platform. Aren't those enough for you to brag about?" "Give me some more, give me some more." Yan Xiao even wanted to take out his notebook to write it down.

"Furthermore, the Dongsanyi platform has adopted a large amount of carbon fiber composite materials and light metal materials, and has also replaced a large number of optoelectronic components. The previous satellite platform had a total of 24 C-band transponders, 6 16-watt medium-power transponders, and 18 8-W low-power transponders. These microwave band transponders have all been eliminated, and a single optical band dynamic frequency modulation transponder can complete the relay mission."

"In addition, the use of ion propulsion instead of the previous gas thrusters has greatly reduced the launch weight from 2.2 tons to 1.4 tons."

“That’s not right,” Yan Xiao said. “You just said that reducing the satellite’s weight would allow for the addition of more modules to improve its performance. Now that it’s been reduced in weight so much, it means you haven’t improved the platform’s performance much, right?”

"You idiot, didn't you even listen to what Shiqing said just now?"

"Multiple satellites launched in one launch!" Liang Hong exclaimed. "The Long March 4B has a payload capacity of 5.5 tons and a satellite payload of 1.4 tons, which means we can launch four satellites at once!"

"No way, four 1.4-ton rockets would be 5.6 tons. If we follow the rocket performance that Elbow mentioned, the Long March 3B would be overloaded. And it's impossible to leave no redundancy at all, right? Is that safe?" Yang Honghui did the calculation and immediately realized something was wrong.

"Right, does that mean it's only carrying three satellites? But that seems like a waste of a lot of transport capacity." Yang He was also thinking.

Zhou Zhi explained the problem with a smile: "Although Sister Hong's calculation method was incorrect, the result was correct, which is four satellites launched in one rocket."

"Huh? Isn't it overloaded?" Liang Hong doubted her math skills again, but after recalculating, she found that Yang Honghui hadn't made a mistake.

“We just mentioned that the Long March 3B's carrying capacity is indeed 5.5 tons, but that 5.5 tons is the carrying capacity when sending the satellite into geostationary orbit.” Zhou Zhi laughed. “We also mentioned earlier that only five of the Star Engine system's satellites are geostationary orbit satellites, while the remaining ten are medium orbit satellites.”

“The altitude of a geostationary orbit satellite is 36,000 kilometers, while that of a medium orbit satellite is around 20,000 kilometers. The difference between the two is more than 15,000 kilometers. The energy required to send a satellite to a medium orbit is much less than that required to send a satellite to a geostationary orbit.”

"As long as we properly match the satellites, the carrying capacity of the Long March 3B is sufficient to meet our requirement of launching four satellites in one rocket."

"That doesn't make sense either..." Everyone had studied junior high school physics, and He Shiqing, who was good at thinking, discovered a new problem: "When the satellite separates from the rocket, it loses its power, right? Were all four satellites released into the medium orbit? And then one of them continued to move to the geostationary orbit using ion electric propulsion technology?"

“This method is not impossible, but it will reduce the lifespan of the high-orbit geostationary satellite.” Zhou Zhi shook his head: “So the academicians designed a more ingenious method. After the satellite separates from the rocket, the four satellites are still fixed on the release bracket and fly towards the high orbit using their huge inertia. Then, during the flight, the release bracket will explode. The force of the explosion will push the three medium-orbit satellites back into their orbits, while the remaining high-orbit satellite will gain new energy and fly to the geostationary orbit before stopping.”

These principles are easy to understand when explained, but to actually implement them in the vastness of space would require countless calculations and designs that would consume countless brain cells—a fact everyone is well aware of. This evokes a sense of pride for our country's scientists, coupled with a profound sense of shame for our own limitations. (End of Chapter)