Reborn Before the Apocalypse: My Backing is the Nation

Chapter 57: Seriously Injured
Every engineer involved in the engine's manufacturing and testing knows that even if it has passed the tests and received the qualification label, there are still countless hidden dangers inside.

A single engine contains hundreds of thousands of internal parts. If any one of these parts malfunctions, the entire engine may fail to operate properly, potentially leading to the failure of the entire rocket launch.

It seems to be working fine now, but who knows if it will malfunction the next time it's started? What if a change in temperature or humidity causes a problem that wasn't there before to suddenly appear?
These are all very possible scenarios.

But now... I can't worry about that anymore.

There's no time to investigate each one individually.

The completed liquid hydrogen-liquid oxygen engine was hoisted into a transport container, and the helicopter immediately roared into the air and flew towards the first-stage assembly plant. Behind it, the second engine was already under intensive manufacturing.

Hundreds of kilometers away, in the Southeast Aerospace Industrial Park, a massive project is nearing completion.

The factory, which was already huge enough to handle the overall assembly of the Sirius-4 rocket, with a height of over ten meters, a width of several tens of meters, and a length of over one hundred meters, was expanded again.

Its height increased to over 20 meters, its width increased to 100 meters, and its length skyrocketed to 200 meters.

Its total internal area reached more than 20,000 square meters.

There was no other way. The Giant Spirit II heavy-lift launch vehicle was 62 meters long and 5.8 meters in diameter. With the four boosters, the diameter reached 12.2 meters, which was much, much larger than the Sirius-4 rocket, which was only designed for low Earth orbit launches. The original assembly plant was simply not big enough to accommodate it, and it had to be modified and expanded.

Such a massive factory, including the installation and debugging of various equipment, would normally have taken at least a year to build. But now, through modifications and expansions within the existing framework, the addition of numerous auxiliary facilities, and the tireless efforts of thousands of workers day and night, its construction period has been shortened to just three days.

The engineer in charge of the primary assembly plant looked at the workers who were methodically finishing up the work, and felt a mix of emotions.

He knew that once this emergency mission was completed, all the temporary auxiliary facilities would be dismantled. At that time... the factory would be completely abandoned.

It's not even worth repairing or restoring.

This is entirely at the cost of overdrawing the future life of this complex factory, forcing it to unleash all its life force in just two or three days so that it can undertake these current tasks.

"I heard that not only us, but also upstream industries, rocket shell processing plants, engine manufacturing, large test benches, and so on, all factories have undergone this kind of overdraft transformation."

After this mission, the country's aerospace industry will not be able to recover for at least twenty years.

We might not even have the capability to launch a small commercial near-Earth satellite anymore…

The engineer sighed deeply, his heart filled with uncertainty about the future.

"Reporting to Engineer Liu, the training has been completed."

A subordinate rushed over and gave him a report.

"it is good."

Upon arriving at the conference room, he saw over 2000 senior technical workers and engineers, drawn from hundreds of factories, research institutes, laboratories, and universities across the country, sitting upright.

"Although you have only worked on small and medium-sized Sirius series rockets such as welding, installation and material laying in the past, and have never been in contact with a giant launch vehicle like the Giant Spirit II, you should have a better understanding of it after these few days of emergency training."

The technology and processes are the same; the only difference is that the requirements for the Giant Spirit II rocket are more stringent. There's no need to be too nervous. As long as you follow the training guidelines seriously and diligently, you will definitely be able to complete this mission successfully.

The first batch of parts will arrive at the factory in three hours. Okay, everyone, now take a break.

……

Helicopters and trucks roared into the factory area one after another.

Engines, bundles of wiring harnesses, pipes, chips and sensors, huge rocket shells and other components are piled up in the warehouse according to their type, like a small mountain.

Trained technicians and engineers, dressed in dust-proof suits, began assembling the first Giant Spirit II rocket in a strictly dust-free, huge factory, aided by numerous robotic arms.

It's just a rocket, and each of its four boosters requires two engines. The first and second stages of the rocket also each require one engine, making a total of ten engines.

This does not even include the rocket's third stage, the small attitude control engine and retro-rocket engine in the payload bay.

Besides the engine, the heart of the rocket, there is also its brain.

The task is undertaken by tens of thousands of chips of varying sizes distributed throughout the rocket.

A sensor, a control circuit, a shunt – almost every basic component requires a chip for control, not to mention the core components such as navigation, communication, and electronic control, which use an enormous number of chips.

At the same time, the working environment of these chips is extremely harsh when the rocket is in operation.

Violent vibrations, extreme high temperatures, extremely high overloads, and so on. And most importantly, high-altitude radiation.

The farther away from the Earth's surface, the greater the radiation from deep space and the sun.

Commercial-grade chips typically don't need to consider the effects of such radiation. However, rockets, especially the precision equipment in the payload bay, must take this into account.

Because high-energy cosmic rays can cause bit flipping in chips.

The underlying operating logic of a chip involves the manipulation of a large number of 0s and 1s based on binary, which are represented by the on and off states of the chip circuitry.

High-energy cosmic rays could potentially "bump open" a closed circuit and "bump off" an open circuit, causing a bit flip.

In a consumer-grade chip, this would almost certainly cause the program to crash and the computer to freeze. For a rocket chip, a single chip malfunction could potentially cause the entire rocket to fail.

These chips need to have sufficiently high reliability under extremely harsh operating conditions to prevent the effects of cosmic radiation on them.

For this reason, these chips are also specially made, and their cost is hundreds or even thousands of times that of consumer-grade chips.

Like the other components, these chips did not undergo the rigorous testing that was used before. Instead, they were simply selected from the best and then given a brief test before being supplied here.

Inside the massive factory, construction has officially begun amidst the busy work of thousands of top-notch technical talents drawn from all over the country.

(End of this chapter)