Super technology leader

While the two spaceships were flying towards Mars, the aerospace engineering on Earth wasn't idle either.

At the end of October, the Tianting Space Station officially began its manned construction phase.

Previously, they had been using unmanned docking modes, directly allowing the orbiter's computer to control the docking process.

Tianxia has accumulated a lot of experience in this area and has strong capabilities, not only playing smoothly in Earth's orbit, but also playing a trick with the Chang'e-5 mission on the moon, winning the title of "human's first unmanned lunar orbit docking".

However, the large simulated rotating gravity cabin of the Tianting Space Station is too large to be transported as a whole, and can only be assembled in sections. Moreover, due to structural problems, traditional docking modes cannot be used, so astronauts are needed to guide, push, and assemble in space.

Twenty space engineers boarded two orbital shuttles into space. After docking with the industrial zone manufacturing center, the industrial zone, which already had 30 staff members, reached full capacity.

Fifty people is the most reasonable number that a medium-sized rotating simulated gravity cabin can accommodate.

Of course, it is possible to squeeze in more people, but there is no need for that at the moment.

The Tianting Space Station is one of the Navigator's important space projects, and the two large gravity simulation cabins are the most important part of the Tianting Space Station, so the twenty space construction engineers are considered the Navigator's entire elite in space construction.

Other countries' space agencies have only trained professional astronauts, who are "all-rounders" in space work, and have not really trained engineers with such specific skills in space construction.

After all, except for the Navigator, no one knew that the era of large-scale space construction would come so quickly.

The Navigator has always regarded the Tianting Space Station as a technology verification device, used to verify various space technologies, rather than a formal "space city".

300 meters to be considered a space city is too small. That's just a name shouted out by some people who don't understand the industry.

Even the construction of this large simulated gravity ring cabin is an experiment to train the company's space construction engineers.

When this project is completed, there will be more space facilities to be built, and by then, these engineers who have participated in space construction missions can become the backbone, leading other new space construction engineers to carry out more space construction missions.

Of course, the Navigator's "emphasis" is not the same as the emphasis of other institutions and companies, because in addition to this project, it also has the task of improving the lunar base.

With the Spore spacecraft assembled, the Yishan rocket became free. Although it will not perform high-intensity transportation missions in the short term, some regular time-span transportation missions still need it.

And it is irreplaceable.

After the Spore set off, it transported a new module to the moon. The diameter and height of this module far exceeded the previous module, reaching 15 meters in diameter and 30 meters in height, which can be called a behemoth in the original lunar base.

The Navigator announced to the public that the role of this module is for experiments, but in reality, it is a refining factory, not the previous refining of metal materials to prepare for the future manufacturing of spacecraft and the construction of lunar bases, but a helium-3 refining factory.

Not to mention that Tianxia's nuclear fusion technology has made breakthrough progress, from the previous pure energy consumption just to light a fire, to starting to discharge electricity, and now the discharge is increasing, and it seems that the discharge is about to officially exceed the power consumption.

Once a technology breaks through a certain value, its progress will be rapid.

Maybe nuclear fusion technology can be officially used someday.

Since Tianxia has made breakthroughs, the Navigator naturally has to "keep up".

The reason for putting "keep up" in quotation marks is because the Navigator does not intend to start with deuterium-tritium nuclear fusion, but directly with helium-3 nuclear fusion.

To use helium-3 for nuclear fusion, you must first have helium-3.

This new refining factory is for this purpose.

As for the technology of helium-3 nuclear fusion, there is no need to worry about it. The Navigator really does not lack technology.

It's just that the core of these technologies is in the Navigator's "Navigator", which is in Tang Ye's hands.

The lunar base initially had four people, and later six astronauts from the Navigator Company moved in, so there are now ten permanent astronauts, the same number as the people landing on Mars this time.

Speaking of Mars, the Navigator's other important project is naturally the Mars landing.

When it was about halfway through the journey, the Spore made a head-to-tail reversal.

It had been accelerating by spraying all the time, but halfway through the journey, the Spore should decelerate.

Although it is equipped with a lot of maneuvering nozzles, those small nozzles are obviously insufficient in thrust and cannot allow the spacecraft to decelerate into Mars orbit when approaching Mars, but will allow the spacecraft to fly directly over Mars and fly to more distant stars.

So its deceleration method is to first turn off the main engine, and then stop the rotation of the rotating cabin. At this time, the maneuvering nozzle exerts force to turn it around.

That is, turn the bow cockpit to face the Earth and the direction of the main thruster to face Mars.

After completing this action, the main engine is ignited again, and the rotating cabin rotates again to restore simulated gravity.

Because the thrust of the ion thruster is relatively small, and the speed of the spacecraft is already quite fast, even if it can stop suddenly, it cannot stop suddenly. If it does, the astronauts in the spacecraft will die. So from here, the thruster must spray like it did when it came, using the reaction force in the direction of flight to decelerate the spacecraft.

Until the speed of the spacecraft slowly slows down, it can enter Mars orbit.

At this point, it can be said that the Spore's flight distance has passed halfway, and the Enterprise, which set off earlier, is still flying towards Mars by inertia... uh, drifting.

Although the Americans added a lot of fuel to the Enterprise and took a "shortcut", this "shortcut" is only a shortcut for chemical fuel rockets.

So after the Enterprise's engine sprayed for enough time to increase the flight speed to a relatively high speed, it still turned off the engine and flew by inertia, which can only be used in space where there is no resistance.

There is no way, chemical fuel engines, especially rocket engines, consume too much fuel.

To play like the Spore, spraying all the way from Earth to Mars, would bankrupt the American Space Agency, or directly bankrupt America.

After the Spore set off, the Enterprise could receive information sent to them by the command center almost every day. At first, it was all about the Spore, but later they gradually stopped sending it, for fear of affecting the mood of the astronauts on the Enterprise.

But knowing some information, the astronauts can also calculate. As the Spore gets closer and closer to Mars, their emotions become more and more anxious.

Their mission is to contact the four aliens before any other forces.

Friendly cooperation is impossible. That option isn't in America's dictionary, so it's capture.

It's best to capture them alive. If they can't be captured alive, they must bring back the aliens' bodies, and also try to bring back important fragments of the aliens' crashed spacecraft.

But now the Navigator's spacecraft is obviously faster than them, so the people of Tianxia will be one step ahead of them... no, two months ahead of them to reach Mars!

By the time they get to Mars, they won't even get the leftovers!!

At that time, the possible situation is that when they arrive at Mars, the Spore has already taken the aliens and the important fragments of the aliens' spacecraft back to Earth.

Then what's the point of doing the mission!!!

Especially the two astronauts from the Space Force, they are even considering whether to change course and not go to Mars, but calculate the return route of the Spore and then intercept the Spore!

As members of the Space Force, their minds are full of military struggle ideas.

If the enemy's vanguard reaches the target first, then the vanguard must be wiped out before they can send the message back to headquarters, which is also a victory.

Their spacecraft is not only equipped with individual weapons, but also heavy weapons.

If they really have a plan, they might really be able to take down the Spore.

That way... they might even be able to take back the aliens and the wreckage of the aliens' spacecraft that were snatched away by the people of Tianxia.