I ask you to build tractors, but you build rockets?

"Old Sun, go on!"

Semyon grabbed a piece of sugar cane and threw it through the feeding window. Gorilla No. 7 liked this sugar-rich food very much.

The researcher who is usually responsible for raising and caring for the experimental subjects is standing nearby, preparing today's dinner.

After the injection of 304 injections, due to the substantial increase in physical fitness, the demand for external nutrient intake will also increase significantly.

In the week before the injection, the experimental subjects had to be given two bottles of glucose and saline every day. Gorillas are not humans who can understand human speech, and their biggest worry is ripping off the needle.

For this reason, the researchers had to use sedatives carefully, fearing that the orangutans would not cooperate and fearing that the sedatives would affect the performance of 304 injections, so the dosage was controlled very strictly.

When he saw laboratory director Xie Miao feeding No. 7, he paid more attention. Excessive food intake may cause diarrhea. There is still a gap between the physical fitness of these experimental subjects and wild gorillas, and it will affect the injection. Effect.

If these gorillas did not die during the experiment, the most humane final destination would be to retire and send them to a zoo to die of old age. Needless to say, it is inhumane, but Semyon is obviously not the kind of person who treats experimental subjects purely as objects.

"Xiao Zhang, how do you think Lao Sun's physical fitness compares with humans?"

"Director Xie, before No. 7 took the medicine, he was a 140-kilogram male gorilla. His physical fitness was at least two to three times that of humans. It is amazing that the 304 injection can achieve the desired effect.

Its mechanism of action is more advanced than current drugs. It would be great if we could also master this method that can control the effects based on the genes of organisms. "

Xie Miao nodded and looked thoughtfully into "Old Sun's" eyes.

…

On April 22, a number of domestic private aerospace companies, space agencies, and some technology companies received varying numbers of invitations.

The signature of the invitation letter sent was Xinyuan Aerospace Power Company, and the content was about the first flight mission of the "Storm" space shuttle in Qiongzhou on April 30, the day before Labor Day.

The Storm will carry seven people on its first flight and will also carry out missions.

Because according to the launch plan, the second living module of the Qianjin space station was launched on April 26, it was naturally necessary to launch an H2 to carry out the truss installation work.

This was a repeat of the first flight of the Storm. After a simple evaluation, the base gave up the original Pioneer launch mission and handed the mission to the first flight of the nuclear-powered space shuttle H2N Storm.

According to traditional thinking, it is a bit risky, but after all, the H2 airframe has flown several times and is theoretically reliable.

However, there are still some changes in the body of the Storm. Compared with the H2M, the three A100 engines of the Storm can provide an unprecedented 30MW of power, which is unimaginable for any spacecraft.

Such high power cannot be used up by the Storm alone. It can provide power to other spacecrafts and support extremely energy-consuming equipment.

Sufficient energy support also makes its body a little longer. The materials in the nose living compartment alone can accommodate 7 astronauts to live comfortably for 15 days. 12 tons of liquid hydrogen fuel can enable it to start without restraint. Nuclear engine flight.

Regardless of whether it is empty or fully loaded, Storm can complete the required incremental acceleration from low-Earth orbit to lunar orbit within four hours, consuming no more than 1.3 tons of liquid hydrogen, and can reach the moon in about 20 hours. .

Just maneuvering to the Advance space station after being launched into low-Earth orbit does not consume much fuel. The most worrying thing during the entire working period of the Storm was the escape of liquid hydrogen.

Serev's zero-evaporation liquid hydrogen storage technology is still in PPT status for the time being. In order to prevent damage to the storage tank, the Storm is releasing vaporized hydrogen every minute and every second. This consumption is even more than what the engine uses...

But no matter what you say, you can't change the fact that the Storm is epoch-making. As long as the Storm's astronauts want to, they can drive her to the moon and back.

Of course, these plans are not in the Aerospace Development Committee's memorandum for the time being. Even before Xinyuan sent the invitation letter, very few people were sure that the Storm was a nuclear-powered space shuttle.

…

Southern Nevada, Lincoln County.

Jackass (jack ass?) Flats proving ground, where the JFT team resides.

Freeman pays close attention to all information about the opponent of the FATS project, the H2N space shuttle, but now he knows the name of the Storm.

"A storm, it was a storm."

The launch plan of the Storm has been disclosed by the Aerospace Development Commission and registered internationally. Nuclear-powered spacecraft must abide by this rule, and the same will be true when Endeavor returns to flight in the future.

At present, many people have taken photos of the An-1250 transport Storm. The three nuclear engines at the tail of the Storm are tightly wrapped in the transport. It is unclear, but Freeman can still roughly speculate on the reasons for the changes in its body. and general layout.

There is no doubt that the A100 has passed the XAP acceptance and has been mass-produced and installed on the space shuttle, and they must think that the A100 is quite reliable to put 7 astronauts on it during the first flight.

In contrast, Endeavor's nuclear engines are only now being manufactured...

It took a short time for the Endeavor's power to be determined to be an improved version of the NERVA A6, which became the NERVA A105 (Endeavor's code name is OV-105), the abbreviation of which is the A105 engine.

The A105 engine is a modern improvement based on the NERVA A6. After all, material science and computer design technology are advancing rapidly, and there is a lot of room for optimization.

The maximum thrust of the A105 will reach 35 tons, which is larger than the three A100s, and the maximum power will exceed 700MW. The thrust will be increased while reducing the power, indicating that the efficiency has been greatly improved.

The rocket's specific impulse also exceeded a thousand seconds, reaching 1145 seconds. The combustion chamber flow rate is 24 kilograms per second, and the maximum power will last for 90 minutes.

The total weight of the A105 will be controlled within 10 tons, but additional calculation of the mass of the heat dissipation part is required, but Freeman is confident that it can be controlled.

However, because the project has been stalled for half a century, it is difficult to restore the engine manufacturing capacity. Fortunately, Endeavor only needs one engine.

The bad news is that it is now close to May. The engine will be manufactured and installed in July...there is also the test run process. This is a nuclear engine. Freeman estimates that it will be completed around October, but he will never do it in the Hexagon. satisfy.

There is nothing you can do if you are not satisfied. It is not okay to let astronauts sit on a reactor that may explode at any time. If a few astronauts die because of this, the investigation will probably take a year.

What Freeman cares about now is the technical parameters of the A100. The published content has almost no actual value, and it was drawn on a PPT before manufacturing. Freeman estimates that the real parameters are close to the level of the NERVA A6 at most.

According to the flight mission description, the Storm also needs to carry trusses to perform installation tasks on the space station. If the fuel is expected to be up to 10 tons, it will actually only fly in low-Earth orbit and cannot go to the moon, unless there is a slight possibility of never returning.