Chapter 231 I'll Protect Xiao Gao

On August 28, the European Space Agency suddenly announced the "Selene" manned lunar landing plan.

This is not a preview before the official implementation, but a very common PPT presentation. It is just that everyone occasionally opens their minds and makes some imaginative pictures to make everyone happy.

The Selene plan is to use the power of the European Space Agency, with Italy and Italy taking the lead in developing manned spacecraft, Germany and the United States taking the lead in developing landers, and then jointly implement a manned lunar landing plan around 2020.

The main interesting thing is the rocket. The Selene plan will use a new rocket with a liquid oxygen-kerosene core engine core stage bundled with a solid rocket booster, and send the spacecraft and lander to the lunar orbit in two times, and then dock to land on the moon.

The solid rocket booster is the EAP used by Ariane 5 now, but the core stage rocket is interesting. The engine... where to buy it from? And the rocket is still recyclable?

Perhaps to prove that it is serious about drawing the PPT this time, the European Space Agency has proposed to approve the first batch of US$10 billion in funds and a five-year development plan for the Selene plan.

Of course, with the ESA's work style, it is estimated that it will be confirmed next year, but it still caused a shock in Europe and the United States.

Europe is: We old European flag people can finally send people to the moon without Amei's rough rockets?

NACA: You poor people want to rebel? If you want to go to the moon, tell me. At most, you can get two more places in the Artemis plan.

As for Badis, he is still working hard in the ESA. Italy has been very ambitious in recent years, and its industrial strength is not bad. It's just that the ESA has too many members and it drags its feet and is very troublesome.

Anyway, the Aeronautical Development Commission said that it must wait until the Veneto 1 rocket is approved before approving the engine to pass the customs. To promote the Veneto 1 rocket, Italy alone is not enough...

...

Class B base, laser laboratory.

As a confidential laboratory with the same status as the nuclear base, there are not many people in the laser laboratory, but they are all elusive. The outside world basically doesn't know that there is such a funding behemoth in the base.

As the general manager of the laser project, Zhao Xiaowen did not stay at the base all the time. He would occasionally go back to school.

On this day, he was browsing the journals on the school intranet and saw a very interesting paper:

"A concept of a separated water-based rocket booster"

The core of this paper is an alternative rocket engine: a water rocket engine.

Many people should know the name of water rocket. For example, if you buy a bottle of Coke, put a few Mentos in it, drill a hole in the bottle cap and turn it upside down, then the expanding gas will spray out with high-speed water, sending the Coke bottle to a height of several meters to more than ten meters.

This is a water rocket, but the water rocket engine is different.

ARCA, an aerospace company with a focus that is always a bit strange, has developed a water rocket engine.

Their ground test of the water engine is as follows: heat the water in a boiler at 250 degrees Celsius to a boiling state, and then spray it out through the engine nozzle. It's that simple.

With water as the ejecta, the thrust of the water engine is extremely amazing, and the thrust of a single engine reaches 7,000 tons!

The thrust of Saturn V's F1 hydrogen-oxygen engine is only 680 tons. ARCA's water engine has achieved ten times the thrust of F1 with a smaller combustion chamber. Isn't it amazing?

Although the thrust-to-weight ratio is the best among rocket engines, the problem is that the specific impulse of the water engine is too low, only 67 seconds.

This specific impulse is so bad that it is almost impossible to use it to fly out of the atmosphere.

There is another problem. ARCA's idea is that the rocket will not only carry thousands of tons of dead water, but also carry enough high-energy batteries and resistors, which is another huge dead weight.

So the water engine... just take a look.

But this graduation thesis written by a senior student is different. It has an innovative point: the water is not heated on the rocket.

Instead, an external heating surface is reserved at the bottom of the rocket equipped with the water engine. Several high-energy lasers are used on the ground to continuously irradiate to generate continuous high temperature. The rocket only needs to pump water down, and the high temperature irradiated by the laser will be stimulated to a boiling state to generate thrust.

If the water rocket has a diameter of 14 meters and a height of about 50 meters, it can just meet the requirement of holding 7,500 tons of water, and a water rocket engine with a thrust of 10,000 tons is installed at the bottom.

The goal of such a water rocket is not to send a spacecraft into space, but to install a normal rocket of about 1,000 tons on the upper stage, send it from the ground to an altitude of 8,000 to 10,000 meters, and then start the engine of the normal rocket on the upper stage to continue flying into space.

In theory, this method can greatly reduce the weight and volume of the upper stage rocket to save the cost of the high thrust required for the low-altitude ascent stage.

Because the water rocket below is very cheap, how simple is it to only need a combustion chamber that can withstand a high temperature of 250 degrees? Ordinary stainless steel is enough, and the shell also meets the strength requirements. The cost is pitifully low, and water is free. The expensive heating part is a ground laser, which costs almost nothing.

Of course, Zhao Xiaowen, who is already an expert in the aerospace industry, would only find it interesting, because there is actually no need to do so. The cost of building a ground-based laser is extremely high, and the upper stage still requires a rocket, so the cost is not much lower. Instead of going through all that trouble, it would be better to make a few more reusable rockets or an entire aerospace plane.

But this paper itself is of great value. The author's thinking logic is very forward-looking, and he has given many designs with practical potential. He must be a good seedling.

Such talents can be brought into the laboratory early and will become great in the future.

Zhao Xiaowen immediately contacted the school to find someone, but learned that this student was facing expulsion?

This shouldn't be the case!

He immediately called his counselor to ask what happened, and then he knew that this student named Gao Qitao had really made a big mess.

Gao Qitao's grades were relatively good. He transferred to the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics when it was established in his junior year, and he still maintained his excellence.

As an excellent student, he did not fall behind in other aspects. When he was studying in the flight school, he graduated with priority with the fourth place, and in July this year, he obtained an independent jet advanced training aircraft flight license.

Gao Qitao, who has excellent flying skills, has received a lot of bonus flight time because of his extremely excellent performance, and even has a lot of flight time on the "Meteor" advanced training aircraft.

You know, the flight time of the primary training aircraft is converted to the advanced training aircraft at a ratio of 24:1, and the flight cost of the latter is very high.

Then in the first half of the month, Gao Qitao was flying in a valley at a low altitude in violation of the rules. This was a behavior that the flight school had repeatedly banned, but because it was usually only done by instructors or top students, the punishment was not severe, and Gao Qitao generally did not get into trouble.

As a result, he somehow misread the road that day, flew into the wrong tributary and entered a city area, and then went through the hole of someone's cross-river bridge...

It is said that the tail was less than 3 meters away from the bridge deck at that time. It was an extremely thrilling but highly skilled aerobatic flight, but then the high-altitude training aircraft was warned by the air traffic control to fly out of the permitted airspace of Xinyuan, and was troubled by the Air Force and local city leaders.

There were already a large number of residents in the city who complained about noise problems all day long. Many people made a fuss about this matter. It was not easy for the city to suppress it. The pressure was put on the school to let him drop out of school to quell the protests of the city residents.

The Air Force... The Air Force also severely criticized Gao Qitao, but told him that as long as he joined the Air Force, he could be recommended to a military academy in the future, and claimed that if he did not become a pilot, he would have a record and could not find a job.

After hearing this, Zhao Xiaowen said, "I knew that these vultures were always watching our students. I'll protect Xiao Gao! Let's see who dares to let him go!"