Chapter 57: Greatly Depleted
Every engineer involved in engine manufacturing and testing knew clearly in their hearts that even though it had passed the testing and received the qualified label at this moment, in reality, it must still harbor countless unknown hidden dangers internally.
Just a single engine alone has a total number of parts internally reaching as high as hundreds of thousands. If any one of these parts fails, it could cause the entire engine to fail to work normally, which in turn could lead to the failure of the entire rocket launch.
It appears to have no faults now, but who knows if it will malfunction the next time it starts? Will faults that weren’t there suddenly appear if the temperature or humidity changes?
These are all very possible things.
But now… no time to worry about it.
Where is there so much time to investigate each one individually.
This completed liquid hydrogen liquid oxygen engine was hoisted into the transportation box, the helicopter immediately roared to life and took off, flying toward the first-stage general assembly factory building, and behind it, the manufacturing of the second engine had already begun in full swing.
Hundreds of kilometers away, in the Southeast Aerospace Industry Park, a massive project was nearing completion.
The factory building, originally already massive enough to handle the overall assembly work of the Sirius-4 rocket, over ten meters high, dozens of meters wide, and more than a hundred meters long, was now being expanded further.
Its height had increased to over 20 meters, its width elevated to 100 meters, and its length directly surging to 200 meters.
Its internal total area had thus reached over 20,000 square meters at a stroke.
There was no way around it; the Giant Spirit God II Heavy Launch Vehicle was 62 meters long, with a body diameter of 5.8 meters, and including four boosters, the diameter reached 12.2 meters—far larger than the Sirius-4 rocket, which only handled low Earth orbit launch missions. The original general assembly factory building simply couldn’t accommodate it, so it had to be modified and expanded.
For such a massive factory building, including the installation and debugging of all sorts of equipment, the original construction cycle would have taken at least a year. But at this moment, through modification and expansion on the existing framework, adding a large number of auxiliary facilities, and with thousands of workers battling day and night, its construction period had been shortened to just three days.
The engineer in charge of this first-stage general assembly factory building looked at the workers in front of him methodically wrapping up, his heart filled with mixed emotions.
He knew that once this emergency mission was completed, all the temporary auxiliary facilities would be demolished. At that time… this factory building would also be completely scrapped.
Not even worth the value of repairing and restoring.
This was completely overdrawing all the future life of this comprehensive factory building at the cost of its life, making it burst out all its life in this short two or three days to undertake these current missions.
“I heard that not only us, but even the upstream industries—the rocket casing processing factory, engine manufacturing, large test bench, and so on—all factories have undergone this kind of overdraft modification.
After this mission ends, the nation’s aerospace industry won’t recover its vitality for at least twenty years.
We might not even have the capability to launch a single small low Earth orbit commercial satellite…”
This engineer let out a deep sigh, his heart filled with bewilderment about the future.
“Report to Engineer Liu, the training work has been completed.”
A subordinate rushed over hurriedly and made the report to him.
“Good.”
Arriving at the meeting room, he saw over 2,000 senior technicians and engineers, drawn from hundreds of factories, research institutes, laboratories, and universities nationwide, sitting upright and still.
“Everyone has previously only done small and medium-sized work like welding, installation, and material laying for the Sirius series rockets, and has never touched a giant launch vehicle like Giant Spirit God II, but through these few days of emergency training, everyone should have a clear idea by now.
The technology and processes are all the same; it’s just that the Giant Spirit God II Rocket has stricter requirements.
Everyone doesn’t need to be too tense; as long as you follow the training key points, do it seriously and earnestly, we will certainly complete this mission smoothly.
The first batch of parts will arrive at the factory in three hours. Alright, now everyone hurry and get some rest.”
……
One helicopter after another, one large truck after another roared into the factory area.
One engine after another, bundles of wire harnesses and pipes, chips and sensors one by one, huge rocket casings, and other parts were stacked in the warehouse by type, like a small mountain.
The trained technicians and engineers, wearing dust-proof suits, began the assembly work on the first Giant Spirit God II Rocket inside the strictly dust-free massive factory building, with the assistance of numerous robotic arms.
Just a single rocket alone: each of its four boosters requires two engines, the first and second stages of the rocket body each require one engine, adding up to ten.
This doesn’t even account for the rocket’s third stage, the small attitude engines and retrograde engines in the payload bay, and so on.
Besides the engine, the heart of the rocket, there is also the rocket’s brain.
The task is undertaken by a total of over ten thousand large and small chips distributed throughout the rocket.
One sensor, one control circuit, one distributor—almost every basic part requires a chip for control, not to mention core components like navigation, communication, and electronic control, which use an astronomical number of chips.
At the same time, when the rocket is operating, the working environment for these chips is extremely harsh.
Fierce vibrations, extreme high temperatures, extremely high overloads, and so on. And most importantly, high-altitude radiation.
The farther from the Earth’s surface, the greater the radiation from deep space and the sun.
Commercial-grade chips usually don’t need to consider the influence of such radiation. But rockets, especially precision equipment in the payload bay, must consider it.
Because high-energy cosmic rays can cause bit flips in chips.
The underlying operating logic of chips is the manipulation of large numbers of 0s and 1s based on binary, and 0s and 1s are represented by the on and off states of chip circuits.
High-energy cosmic rays can potentially “knock open” closed circuits or “knock closed” open circuits, causing bit flips.
On consumer chips, this would almost inevitably cause program crashes and computer freezes. For rocket chips, an error in one chip could lead to the failure of the entire rocket.
These chips need to have sufficiently high reliability under extremely harsh working conditions to eliminate the influence of cosmic radiation on themselves.
Precisely because of this, these chips are also specially made, with costs hundreds or even thousands of times higher than consumer-grade chips.
Like the other parts, these chips have not undergone rigorous testing as usual, but were merely “selected from the best,” given a simple test, and then supplied here.
In the massive factory building, under the busy work of thousands of top technical talents drawn from across the nation, the construction work had officially begun.
