Chapter 716 Plan

After the dinner, Lin Ju and Zhong Chengcai, who had been separated for a night, met again.

"Has the news leaked out?"

"Almost. Building a spaceport is too troublesome. If you want to control investment, you must expand the supply chain as much as possible. If time is relaxed, the spaceport should be delayed until after 2030 instead of before 2030."

Lin Ju frowned while speaking. The spaceport - or space city, space dock is really not Xinyuan's idea, but the military took the lead in requesting it.

Again, a space dock is necessary to manufacture large spaceships. The risk of doing it all at once is too great, so it is necessary to build a transitional experimental spaceport.

The time span from this experimental spaceport to the formal giant spaceport is about 10 years, which is both time to find problems and accumulate experience.

If the most stable and cost-effective plan is to build a small space elevator first, and then start building an experimental spaceport after stable operation, and then build a giant spaceport.

The time nodes for doing this should be around 2030, 2035, and 2045, which means that the ability to manufacture combat spaceships will be available from about the middle of the 21st century.

But the higher-ups can't wait that long. They have set a safety deadline of only 10 years, and hope to start building spacecraft in 2030, which is 12 years from now at most.

The space elevator requires a lot of basic research. It can't be accelerated by 2030, so it can only be accelerated in other places, and the spaceport can be built without relying on the space elevator.

This time is very tight. The experimental spaceport is required to be completed in 2025, leaving at least 5 years for familiarization, and the official giant spaceport will be started in 2030.

The spaceport will first build the dock part, and when the dock function is initially available, it will build ships while building, so that the time node can be advanced to 2035, saving more than 10 years.

If this progress is to be achieved, the spaceport must be started before 2021 at the latest, leaving the aerospace port two years to complete the overall design.

Even if it is an experimental spaceport, it needs to integrate scientific research, production, planting, life, electricity and other comprehensive functions. Its complexity is that of a small city. If you have to compare it, it is very similar to an aircraft carrier. The design project is extremely difficult, involving hundreds of industries, and it is not something that a genius designer can handle.

The design team must reasonably divide the functional areas, maximize the efficiency of each part, accommodate as many people as possible, and reduce the overall mass as much as possible. What is needed is time to run in.

The Space Administration and Xinyuan have each made calculations and found that if the design is designed to accommodate 1,000 people according to the standard, the overall weight needs to be no less than 40,000 tons.

As for the giant port for building spacecraft in the future, its total mass needs to be between 150,000 and 400,000 tons depending on the specialization direction in order to build spacecraft of more than 10,000 tons.

The giant port can undoubtedly only rely on the space elevator, while the experimental "small" spaceport is just stuck at the upper limit of traditional aerospace technology.

According to the single-time capacity of Xinyuan 4/Long March 18 of 500 tons, that is a full 80 times. It takes four years to launch 20 times a year, so it will not choose to launch all from the earth.

At least a quarter of the mass of the spaceport is the support frame, which will be manufactured by the steel consortium on the moon in the future, and it will be much easier to transport it from the moon.

But these are all rough ideas. In order to build this spaceport, the Aerospace Development Commission first established a design preparation committee, and this temporary committee first organized a large design team, and then began to design and assign tasks.

However, the design team still cannot be comprehensive, and will be divided into countless sub-projects for classification and packaging. The responsible designer will select the contractor/enterprise and then carry out detailed design.

Zhong Cheng has been overwhelmed for a long time. In his words, he is "busy all the time."

As an institution that coordinates all aerospace forces in the country, the Aerospace Development Commission has gained huge power and also ushered in unprecedented heavy pressure.

"That's good... It's said to be two years, but it will take at least three months to prepare, leaving us only about 18 months. 18 months to design a space city is the same as the time to design a destroyer in the past.

If there is any mistake, it will cause heavy losses to the country!"

"But this is unavoidable."

Lin Ju could only sigh. Such a hasty start will definitely encounter a lot of problems, but the key is that there is not much time left for humans, so they can only run first.

After sighing for a few words, he finally couldn't suppress the doubts in his heart and asked Zhong Cheng:

"Is there any hope for Amei? After all, it is an experiment, and the starship has been successful. If they are also pulled in..."

"It's hard to say, but it's not completely hopeless. The key depends on how much sincerity Amei can show."

When the spaceport plan was first proposed, someone suggested that it be used as an international project to share the pressure, and the only "international partner" that the country can look up to is NACA.

But everyone is skeptical about NACA's ability, and Lin Ju is not sure now. After all, the current NACA is also very different from the original world line. Not only has it developed a nuclear engine, but it has also achieved a giant rocket every two months.

Now the SL-X has been called the "monthly rocket" by the Aramco media. In fact, if SpecaX and other military-industrial complexes work hard, it is not impossible to launch it once a month.

This force can at least undertake one-third of the spaceport's engineering workload, which can greatly relieve domestic pressure.

Zhong Cheng hesitated for a moment, then continued:

"If you really have this plan, I may need to lead a group to Amei for an inspection to see what their current quality is like and to deeply evaluate their rocket and spacecraft factories."

Lin Ju nodded. Although "Shanhai" can also do this, it is more reliable for people to go for specific evaluations. Sometimes it is not only the technology and equipment that are important, but also the people's hearts.

"Then Xinyuan can also send a few people to exchange cooperation on the Sky Curtain Plan. There will be many more actions later."

It has been eight or nine hours since the second nuclear explosion. If nothing unexpected happens, Li Wei and Liu Ming have arrived at the explosion area and are collecting data for packaging and uploading.

This explosion caused a full hour of radio chaos. The entire moon was surrounded by a frenzy of electromagnetic pulses. Until now, some satellites have been out of contact, and the communication system of the "Wutu" space station has also been damaged.

But the result is also remarkable. According to the rough calculation of the space station, the diameter of the explosion crater caused by this explosion exceeds 4,400 meters, and the depth is initially estimated to be about 500 meters!

This depth has completely touched the iron ore-dominated ore vein layer above the rare earth ore layer. The space station can already see the exposed ore deposits through reflection maps!