Chapter 82: In Good Condition
One rocket after another roared into the sky, either exploding into a burst of fireworks in the sky or drilling into the clouds, disappearing completely.
On the orbit hundreds of kilometers from Earth, dozens of artificial flying objects have already appeared.
These artificial flying objects have various shapes; some look like a car, some like a flying bird with wings, and others are square, like a big box.
The orbits of these flying objects are extremely similar and relatively close, rotating around Earth together at a speed of 10 kilometers per second, one lap every more than an hour, like a ring belt floating in the sky above Earth.
At the beginning of the ring belt, flying objects continuously ignite their propulsion, slowly increasing their speed, and finally fly toward the Moon along the Earth-Moon transfer orbit.
At the end of the ring belt, flying objects continuously take off from the ground and merge into the ring belt, orbiting Earth together.
Leaving on one side, supplementing on the other.
Until the last rocket finally lifted off from the launch site, adding the 47th flying object to the ring belt, this operation was declared temporarily concluded.
The artificial objects floating on the Earth orbit are becoming fewer and fewer, until only the last one remains.
It finally ignited acceleration, slowly increasing speed under the propulsion of the hot gas at the tail, and smoothly entered the Earth-Moon transfer orbit when facing the Moon.
These 47 flying objects in the vast space roughly form a straight line arrangement, with distances between them ranging from thousands to tens of thousands of kilometers, like a long sword pointing from Earth to the Moon, or like a bridge connecting the two massive planets.
When the last flying object from the Earth ring belt merged into this bridge, at the end of the bridge, the first-launched lunar detection satellite had arrived at the orbit change position.
In the intense jetting, its orbit changed again, from passing by the Moon to orbiting the Moon.
Before it could complete self-inspection and formally enter the working state, the second satellite arrived, then the third, the fourth…
Zhao Jianguo, who had slept for 4 hours in the zero-gravity environment, was now awake.
Apart from a slight hunger in his stomach that might affect his reaction speed and power, he felt his condition was almost the same as on Earth.
There was no problem at all in handling the subsequent work.
He floated in the zero-gravity cabin, carefully checking the readings and working state of each piece of equipment, and finally sent a report to the Earth command center.
“Earth Earth, this is Moon 7 spaceship. I have completed manual inspection, status good, ready for landing.”
“Earth received. Orbit change in three minutes.”
In the vast space, this small conical spaceship, like the satellites before, also initiated maneuver.
Its orbit became increasingly elliptical, and after reaching a limit, it began to slowly eliminate radial speed, with its flight relative to the Moon turning vertical.
It descended straight toward the desolate and dead land of the Moon like a meteor.
Due to the lack of domestic experience in manned moon landing, the automatic execution program of this landing spaceship was quite immature.
Coupled with the round-trip communication delay of about 2.5 seconds between the Moon and Earth, the experts at the Earth base could only play a supporting role at this moment.
The most important parts all required the astronaut to judge and execute himself.
In this unprecedented massive project of moon landing, countless execution steps—if even one was wrong—could lead to overall failure.
At this moment, the cabin was still in zero-gravity state. In this state, Zhao Jianguo quickly pressed buttons, opening or closing switches one by one.
Although the movements were fast, there was no panic at all; everything was orderly and smooth.
With the assistance of ground experts, Moon 7 spaceship plummeted fiercely, and the desolate and dead land of the Moon below expanded rapidly like it had been zoomed in.
When the altitude was still 3000 meters, several blazing flames instantly jetted out from the bottom of the conical spaceship, abruptly slowing its descent speed.
Although he had long lain at the bottom of the spaceship in an anti-impact posture, the instant switch from zero gravity to more than 1.6 times Earth’s gravity still hit Zhao Jianguo like a heavy hammer, causing him to grunt uncontrollably.
Fortunately, this gravity environment did not last long, less than two seconds.
The next moment, gravity rapidly weakened. Ignoring his body’s discomfort, Zhao Jianguo quickly got up to check the equipment readings.
Fortunately, everything was normal.
Under the intense flame jetting, the speed of the conical spaceship slowly decreased. Combining radar scanning equipment and lunar detection satellite assistance, Zhao Jianguo began executing another particularly important task.
Finding a suitable landing location.
The landing location must be flat and solid. Otherwise, if it landed on a big stone and the spaceship tipped over, he would probably be stuck inside the spaceship waiting to die.
His gaze was like a hawk’s, quickly scanning between radar signals and satellite signals, using this data to slightly adjust the jet direction of the spaceship’s tail flame.
Thus, the spaceship’s landing trajectory shifted slightly, avoiding areas littered with rubble.
Finally, the spaceship stopped jetting at two meters above the lunar surface. Under the lunar gravitational field, the spaceship body with a total mass close to one ton, along with Zhao Jianguo inside, “smashed” onto the lunar surface at 2.5 meters per second.
Thick moon dust rose suddenly like water splashes under this impact force, then slowly fell, scattering everywhere.
Feeling the gravity identical to that in the gravity simulation airplane, Zhao Jianguo lay at the bottom of the spaceship, caught his breath, and got up again.
After an inspection confirming that all equipment in the narrow cabin was operating normally, he sent Earth’s first greeting from the Moon.
“Report to Earth, Moon 7 has successfully landed, spaceship status good, I feel good personally.”
“Earth received. Execute subsequent tasks as planned.”
Ignoring the faint applause and cheering from Earth’s signal, Zhao Jianguo put on the pure mechanical spacesuit composed of countless gears, springs, steel poles, connectors, and more, piece by piece.
Even though ground experts had considered weight as much as possible, adopting lightweight materials and design plans, the total mass of this entire set of pure mechanical spacesuit, including the necessary onboard oxygen, water, and food reserves, still reached 100 kilograms.
It could be said that a large part of the spaceship’s payload was taken up by this spacesuit.
Fortunately, the Moon’s gravity was lower than Earth’s. On the Moon, the astronaut would feel its weight at less than 20 kilograms.
Otherwise, he might have been crushed by the spacesuit before even starting the mission.
After putting on the spacesuit and pressing the air extraction button, the air in the narrow cabin was completely pumped out, turning it into a vacuum state.
The cabin door opened, and the desolate and dead lunar surface appeared truly before him for the first time.
