Chapter 143 - Sol Two Hundred and Seventy-Five, Battle to Save Mai Dong (1/2)

Chapter 143: Sol Two Hundred and Seventy-Five, Battle to Save Mai Dong

At that instant, Tang Yue felt as though he had returned to a century ago in the era of Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard. The engineers had given their all to construct a launch pad weighing hundreds of tonnes and used the R-7 and Redstone rockets that weighed nearly thirty tonnes to send a payload of 70 kilograms.

That was extremely disproportionate in terms of mathematics and physics, with them spending massive amounts of resources to ultimately concentrate on such an individual.

A long period of time had passed, and during this time, humans gained the ability to build space stations, to land on the moon, and to head for Mars. However, they had forgotten that all of that once started from careful micro-steps. In the early days, liquid oxygen and ethanol engines that were sent to near-Earth orbit had a carrying capacity of fewer than three tonnes and the manned spacecraft was only two meters long.

However, those were the nascent steps of human aeronautical history.

When Tomcat firmly said “all we care about is that rounding error,” time seemed to rewind, returning back to the instant when the Voskhod 1’s Chief Designer, Korolev, decided on not wearing spacesuits. It had rewound to the moment when the Kennedy Space Center’s Wernher von Braun gave the order for the countdown. Back then, engineers used tons of scrap paper to calculate every single gram, just for that rounding error.

Human aeronautical success was obtained one step at a time through these tiny rounding errors.

“During the atmospheric entry, it’s not only the Eagle but also Orion. Is that right?” Tang Yue asked.

“Yes.” Tomcat nodded. “Orion is the lifeboat, the Aquarius lunar module on the Apollo 13.”

Orion II was a spacecraft that shuttled between Earth and Mars.

It was one of the biggest spacecraft created in human history. The reason it wasn’t the biggest was that Orion I was the same size. Compared to calling them spacecraft, they were more like mobile space stations. To provide sufficient living space for the six-member crew and provide them with enough survival resources, Orion’s structure was completely different from ordinary spacecraft.

Its main body was made of three trusses, making it reach a length of 88 meters.

At one end of the truss were the solar panels spanning sixty meters long. It was a module with eight panels that supplied electricity.

The middle truss was the central module which was the control center and living quarters. There were a total of eight cabins that were connected to one another in a circle.

The other end of the truss was the service module with the massive propellant reservoir tanks and the nine Raptor 10D liquid oxygen-methane high-pressure engine. The reservoir tanks could be refilled and the engine could be repeatedly used.

Design-wise, Orion was a rather weak structure. It was only a thin rod that seemed skewered together. It was unable to enter the gravisphere of both Earth and Mars. Once gravity acted upon it, the truss would undoubtedly fail to withstand the weight of the central module and engines, warping and snapping immediately.

The day it entered the atmosphere, was the day it was decommissioned.

Orion was born in space, but it would return to Earth.

“You want to let Orion enter the atmosphere with the Eagle?” Tang Yue asked. “Is… Is it possible?”

As someone who knew a bit about aerospace engineering, Tang Yue found the idea crazy. There were too many unresolved problems.

Without much thought, it was easily conceivable that the Orion spacecraft would disintegrate at high speeds, burning up and exploding as a result.

“At times…” Tomcat waved its paw. “The technique involved is the craziest.”

…

“Orion II is 88 meters long. This is the length of the truss.” Tomcat held the pen in its paw as it began explaining the plan to the duo. “If we…”

“Throw it down.” Mai Dong and Tang Yue knew what the cat was about to say.

“… Yes, if we throw it down, right into the atmosphere, it will definitely disintegrate and crash.” Tomcat held the pen and placed it horizontally across the table. “It cannot descend in this manner, but if we were to change the orientation…”

Tomcat held the pen in its paw vertically.

“By letting it descend this way, we can guarantee the structural integrity. This is determined by the truss’s materials and structure. When it’s vertical, it can withstand a force five to six times that of when it’s horizontal. When descending, it will be decelerating. The forces acting on the truss are compressive stress not tensile stress… As long as we ensure that it maintains a vertical orientation during the descent, it can go all the way down!”

“But how do we maintain its vertical orientation?” Tang Yue asked. He couldn’t imagine how an eighty-meter-long pole could maintain its vertical orientation at such high altitudes.