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

Director Robert had just relaxed a little for a few days when he felt huge pressure on his shoulders again.

He has the right to know the details of the bidding for the blasting project at Yushu Base No. 1, but the specific price is still under negotiation.

With Rohde in front of him, other parties also knew how to quote prices and gave their prices one after another:

The country proposed to be equal to the leader, with 5 quotas and a nuclear bomb payment of US$5 million; Lucia only needed the quota for free, with 7 bombs for 7 people; our own request was for 10 quotas, and the total price of the hydrogen bomb was 10 million US dollars.

The conversation was not very pleasant. Only the people from the Republic of China seemed to have reached some kind of tacit understanding, while Rumei was still slowly grinding. However, as a country that has the ability to train astronauts on its own, they are already selecting personnel for emergency training.

No matter how many were negotiated in the end, Robert believed that even if there were only 5 people, they would still be able to make a profit. These quotas would run through the entire early, middle and late stages of the blasting mission, and at least two landing operations would be required. The large amount of experience gained cannot be bought. Great stuff, will save you a lot of money in the future.

There is actually only one core requirement that the Presidential Palace insists on: Ami must receive the best treatment. We have launched 9 nuclear bombs and cooperated with you one extra time, which is not enough.

John was determined to earn back all the face he had lost through this cooperation, and NACA was actively planning how to benefit from the project.

For example, is it reasonable to build a separate facility on the lunar surface to store hydrogen bombs in order to keep it secret? The astronauts who guard them must have a temporary base, right? You must have a set of equipment for measuring data... Anyway, there are many ways to bring in private goods, and they may be needed in the future.

While planning this, Robert was also thinking: Where does the Aerospace Development Committee get the confidence to take so many people to the moon repeatedly?

Now that the mystery was basically solved, he was in a bad mood.

Because on September 25, the Aerospace Development Commission announced that a 2,800-ton segmented solid propeller ground ignition test was conducted at the Xinyuan launch site.

A single solid propeller with a thrust of 2,800 tons!

The SRB used by SLS has a thrust of just over 1,500 tons, which is almost double.

Looking at the published test footage, the S2800 booster with a diameter 35% wider than the SRB is long and thick. The body of more than 70 meters is itself a heavy rocket. When igniting, the entire camera screen is constantly shaking, and the movement is "ground". "Shaking mountains" is not an exaggeration at all. The ground thrust of Saturn 5 is only 3,400 tons!

For a booster of this level, what kind of core stage will it be equipped with, and how big of a rocket will it make up?

Sure enough, the Aerospace Development Commission subsequently announced the specific data of the next-generation super giant rocket-Long March 18:

It has a diameter of 18 meters and a height of more than 210 meters. The four solid boosters have a thrust of 11,200 tons. The core stage uses 39 YF-96 (H280) liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen engines. The sea level thrust is 280 tons. The total take-off thrust is 22,000 tons. The take-off mass More than 15,000 tons, using a sea launch solution.

Careful people have discovered that the Long March 18 is very similar to the data of the previous Xinyuan 4. In fact, the Aerospace Development Commission "converted" this model and included the rockets of private rocket companies in the "Long March" series for the first time. Will become the official serial active rocket.

As a super rocket second only to the "Hailong", a hypothetical work in the 1960s, the Long March 18 is divided into three configurations: basic, A, and B. The basic low-Earth orbit transport capacity of 550 tons is on the same level as the Hailong. , Type A is the first two-stage semi-configuration low-Earth orbit transport aimed at the moon, with a transport capacity of 800 tons, and can directly send a 360-ton payload to the moon.

After seeing the news at the time, Robert even wondered if he had been pranked. However, at the same time as the Long March 18, the Long March 9 rocket under development by the space agency was also announced. It has also been completely finalized and uses a 12-meter-diameter rocket body. The maximum take-off thrust also exceeds 10,000 tons, and can launch a 400-ton payload into low orbit.

Just when he wanted to fly to the other side in person to ask what these colleagues were crazy about creating these monsters, the Aviation Development Commission also gave the reason for building the super rocket: the "Nine Chapters" landing spacecraft, the specific data is unknown, but The maximum take-off mass can reach 350 tons, and it can transport more than 200 tons of payload to the moon at one time.

According to the description, the "Jiuzhang" spacecraft can carry a large number of payloads freely back and forth between low-Earth orbit, the moon, and the lunar surface for a long time. It will be the absolute main force in future lunar missions, but no appearance and specific size parameters have been disclosed.

However, considering the carrying capacity of more than 200 tons and the need for an 18-meter-diameter rocket to launch, it is probably quite large.

This also means that the Chinese lander has evolved directly from the split type at the level of the Apollo program to a large spacecraft that can only be matched by the Starship Moon Landing Edition, and it will definitely not be in service later than the Starship Moon Landing Edition.

Starship is indeed a good project. Although the overall high-orbit transportation capacity is poor, its versatility and cost-effectiveness are quite excellent. However, it has not yet conducted a successful test launch...

Two months have passed since the second flight of the Starship. Musk has also prepared the B10 booster and SN20 spacecraft for the third launch. The skipped sequences were all consumed during ground testing, which is enough to show that SpecaX Still maintaining their iteration speed on Falcon 8.

However, the thought of the Long March 9 and Long March 18 rockets gave Robert a headache. Although he was not sure whether the other side would produce these two monsters, at least he could not fall behind in terms of publicity.

So what should we use to benchmark a super rocket with a take-off mass of 15,000 tons?

…

Beijing.

More than half a month has passed since public opinion about the construction of a new giant accelerator arose, and the scope of discussion has spread from high-energy institutes to the entire world.

At the beginning, there were only a few vague sentences, but as time passed, the new accelerator concept became more and more complete. "TEPA" has begun to appear in official media, and the relevant data and construction locations have gradually become clearer.

There are also three important figures who are also popular: Frank Yang, Wu Yunfeng and Lin Ju.

Last year, the first two people were on the hot search:

On September 4, 2016, in response to the CEPC plan proposed by the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Academy of Sciences in 2012, Frank Yang published an article "It is not appropriate for China to build a super large collider today" and insisted on opposing views; on September 5, Wu Yunfeng immediately He wrote "China should build a large collider today" to fight back.

Although the total budget proposed by CEPC at that time was "only" 30 billion yuan, the Institute of High Energy also proposed the SQCC (Proton-Proton Collider), which would first build an electron-positron collider and then build a 70-kilometer circumference For the proton collider, the budget of the latter is 70 billion yuan, which is actually only 10 billion yuan less than TEPA in total.

Moreover, CEPC is expected to start in 21 years and be put into use in 35 years. SQCC will be started in 30 years and put into operation in 50 years. By extending the time span to reduce investment, the cost of TEPA, which is targeted to be completed within ten years, will definitely increase significantly.

Therefore, TEPA's 110 billion budget was quickly overturned. Superiors ordered the Academy of Sciences to recalculate, and the new budget table came to around 140 billion to 170 billion yuan.

The 200 billion investment previously exaggerated by the media was actually more than just talk!