Chapter 3: The Ghost Of History
“Qian Xuesen has been back to China for five years now, and McCarthy should have been gone for a year or two as well.
If I had a choice, I really don’t want to get involved in NASA’s vortex at this current time point.
When I return to 2020, I’ll carefully collect detailed information from 1960, fully leverage my advantages using the information gap, and even if I want to join NASA to participate in an interesting project like manned moon landing, I still need to handle my identity, background, appearance, and any other aspects that could raise suspicion before seeking to join NASA.
But now, he could only take it one step at a time.” Lin Ran thought as he walked.
The “gate” has a cooldown time; it cannot be opened anytime, anywhere.
Until the next opening, that is, returning to Earth’s 2020, it will take seventy-six hours, more than three days.
According to the information from the gate, the initial cooldown time is 72 hours, and the more things you bring, the longer the cooldown time. Here, things only relate to mass. Even if his weight increases in the future, the cooldown time will increase accordingly.
Including clothes, shoes, mobile phone, and such, the extra time is not much, just four hours, which is within an acceptable range.
However, if he wants to bring a car from 2020 through the garage door to the 1960s, the cooldown time would be at least a year.
If it’s just surviving three days in New York, Lin Ran feels that with his current ability, there is no problem at all.
But his current crisis is not just simple survival, but a more serious identity exposure crisis.
He is carrying an iPhone XS released by Apple in 2018.
Now is the peak period of confrontation between America and the Soviet Union. Once the iPhone XS is exposed, this thing that stands out at first glance, whether suspected to be an alien product or a product from the future, once exposed, he would have no peace in 1960.
Don’t say it’s impossible; the legends of Area 51 have long existed. Currently, America and the Soviet Union are at the peak of imagination, with all sorts of wild ideas emerging endlessly. To win, they even started superpowers research and heavily invested in it.
Once the iPhone is exposed and suspected to be a product from the future, that would be perfectly normal.
The North Face down jacket he is wearing stands out unusually in Times Square, New York in 1960; from fabric, design to details, it clashes with the fashion of this era.
Just following behind Haines, Lin Ran could see curiosity and scrutiny in the eyes of every passerby who saw him.
The waterproof and windproof fabric of the North Face down jacket has a smooth and shiny surface, a material that completely did not exist in the 1960s. The jackets worn by passersby now mostly use wool, cotton cloth, or coarse tweed, with a heavy and rough texture. His clothing fabric might reflect strange sheen under sunlight, easily causing unnecessary trouble.
Lin Ran sighed inwardly; fortunately, he didn’t like flashy bright yellow or red, nor did he choose blue snow mountain, but deep blue camouflage, a color that isn’t so strange among the common black, gray, and brown jacket colors in the current winter.
So survival crisis is secondary; finding a place to stay for three days without letting the iPhone in his pocket get exposed is the top priority.
Better safe than sorry.
Appropriate contact with Haines, this risk is controllable, sticking to one principle, with plenty of room to make up for it in the future.
But once a major incident like iPhone leak happens, no matter how much he tries to make up for it, it will cause an irreversible difficult situation.
Not to mention joining NASA; if he can avoid being locked up forever, he should thank his lucky stars.
So a place that can fully recognize the value of his brain is the best landing spot.
Compared to the abnormality shown by his brain performance, the down jacket is obviously much less eye-catching.
The dialogue with Haines also verified Lin Ran’s conjecture; the other party’s attention was entirely on the gravitational perturbation correction formula, not at all on the abnormality in his attire.
It’s just wearing a conceptual outfit that somewhat resembles a spacesuit; what’s the big deal.
And as an outstanding graduate of the aerospace major, forced by survival pressure to change careers, what could be more exciting than personally participating in the space race of the 1960s?
This is also a good entry point; rather sooner than later.
After various considerations, Lin Ran chose to complete the gravitational perturbation correction formula on the glass of the telephone booth, giving this era a little shock from the future.
In the restaurant private room carefully selected by Haines, Lin Ran took the initiative and said, “Randolph Lin.”
Lin Ran said no more; the situation was not yet clear, and he hadn’t figured out exactly what identity to fabricate for himself.
The Haines sitting opposite did not care about the background of this Chinese person in front of him; he only cared about how the other party calculated the gravitational perturbation correction formula.
“Randolph, you know what I wrote on the glass just now, right?”
Lin Ran leaned back on the brown leather sofa, with a matter-of-fact expression: “When a satellite passes over the equator, the extra mass of Earth produces greater gravity than at the poles. This extra gravity causes the satellite’s orbit to wobble. If this problem is not solved, the satellite’s lifespan will be very limited.”
As expected, the other party not only recognized at a glance that what he wrote was the gravitational perturbation correction formula, but even knew what the formula was for.
This is not something an ordinary person can do.
As for casually completing the fourth and fifth terms of the formula so effortlessly, in his cognition, no one could do it at all.
So when he saw the formula, after thinking carefully, he had that ghostly expression.
Feeling ghostly is not wrong; in a sense, Lin Ran is indeed a ghost of history.
“Of course, now whether it’s you or the Soviet Union side, everyone is still pursuing just functional realization, not precise control.
So although it affects lifespan, the equatorial bulge, that is, the second term, causes the perigee to deviate from the predetermined orbit by 3 degrees per revolution. Even with limited lifespan, it can still stay in the sky for ten years or so. This is not fatal at all.”
When Haines heard “orbit 3 degrees,” he had the illusion of lightning striking his brain; his carotid artery throbbed, and the Chinese descent in front of him precisely reproduced the angle deviation that the Houston laboratory took 237 hours to calculate.
Now McCarthy’s influence has gradually dissipated, and indeed a very few Chinese descent engineers have returned to work positions at NASA.
But as far as he knows, there is no Chinese people working in any astronomical observatory across America.
Secondly, America’s first satellite Explorer 1 was launched two years ago, and only last year did they precisely calculate the impact of Earth’s non-spherical perturbation on it.
Only with data did they calculate the impact, then retroactively derived the J2 term in the gravitational perturbation correction formula based on the data.
That is, the second term.
This guy in front of him casually stated their achievement accumulated over the past two years.
“Who exactly are you?” Haines couldn’t hold back anymore.
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