Chapter 309 - Desert Survival Training (1/2)

Breakfast was bacon pieces and cinnamon bun paired with a drink of Tang. There was also pea soup and tuna salad, standard Apollo-era space meals.

These were mainly dehydrated and semi-moist foods, some of which required heating and some in their natural state (mostly nuts). There was no problem with them nutritionally, but tasted barely passable.

The space food of later generations was greatly improved, having benefited from the advancement of food preservation technology. In Zhang Heng’s era, NASA would provide astronauts with an option of more than 180 types of food and beverages. You could even have chocolate ice cream on the International Space Station (of course, a very extravagant thing even for now), which helped a lot in keeping the astronauts’ morale high throughout their months-long stay and lonely tours above our planet.

For now, however, Zhang Heng and the other two candidates wouldn’t get to enjoy this privilege. The storage hold in the service module contained enough food for three astronauts for eleven days. If all went well with the mission, excluding the moon landing and returning to earth, the remaining food should last them six to seven days, just enough for the astronauts as they awaited the arrival of the NASA rescue team.

However, considering possible communications equipment damage and other unforeseen emergencies, Zhang Heng and crew weren’t allowed to stay where they ‘landed’ as they waited for help to come.

So, after breakfast, the three performed simple some navigation, divided the food and water among themselves, and continued the training session. They packed the supplies into backpacks and moved to the next target location – also the toughest part of the survival course.

The target location was 80 kilometers away. Even if they walked without taking a break, it would take them at least 20 hours. What more, summer was coming, and the desert temperatures far exceeded 40 degrees Celsius in the day.

Under the scorching sun, the body would lose water very quickly, and if not replenished in time, it could easily become dehydrated. Fortunately, even though forced to traverse the hellish landscape, Jia Lai, the more overweight one of the group, didn’t lag behind. For Zhang Heng, a man who had experienced worse situations than this, it was all another day’s worth of work. He was the most physically fit among the three, and with Level 2 wilderness survival skills, the current situation was not much of a challenge for him.

The truth was, the NASA provided emergency backpacks and supplies in the service module had saved the trainees a lot of trouble. After all, NASA wasn’t training them to be survival experts. Under normal circumstances, astronauts were only trained to follow the manual’s emergency procedures, make good use of the resources at hand, conserve strength as much as possible, and finally, complete the task within the specified time.

The most the astronauts had to go through was a more than a strenuous stretch of workouts, pretty much like basic military service.

However, after walking in the desert for an extended period, moods began to fluctuate.

Not only did the dry and arid environment test the body to its very limits, but also inflated everyone’s emotions in the worst way possible, especially when the three of them were hiding something. On the surface, they were all facing the same situation – all aiming for the final spot. But the fact was, even if Zhang Heng did nothing, he could have simply survived on his own, relying on his outstanding performance to become the final candidate for Apollo 11.

In contrast, Bruno and Jia Lai were more passive, especially so for Jia Lai. Thanks to the strategy he adopted at the beginning of the game, he ranked at the bottom of the three. He would really have to use this final training session to get rid of his two opponents.