Chapter 238 Overtaking on a Curve
"Mark, Mark, take a look at this plan and analyze its feasibility."
"Oh shit! Although it looks a bit strange, it seems to be really good, much simpler than the centrifugal space station."
When Claire submitted the specaX plan to others for evaluation, people's comments were that it was a weird thing at first, but it was quite reliable after careful consideration.
In Musk's plan, this gravity system based on ropes is called "Flexible gravity device", that is, FGD system, and the ring-type gravity device of Xinyuan is called "Hard gravity device", HGD.
Compared with HGD, the biggest advantage of flexible gravity device is that it does not need frequent launches, and only two spacecraft are needed to form gravity.
This is a major good news for the Aramco aerospace industry, which lacks giant reusable rockets such as Xinyuan II A and Xinyuan III, and it is also very flexible to use and can be separated at any time.
If two starships are really used for landing on Mars, then the biggest problem in this plan is to send the starship into space first, and the centrifugal part is easy to solve.
Although intuition may make people worry about the problem of cable breakage, this is actually the easiest. Now NACA engineers can come up with dozens of ways to ensure its reliability.
For HGD, the centrifugal compartment must be connected to the central axis with a channel, or the centrifugal compartments must be connected. No matter which one, there will be a problem: to obtain greater gravity, the difficulty brought by the increase in radius is exponentially increased. The Fram space station with a radius of 120 meters only needs 1,500 tons of mass, and the space station with a diameter of 200 meters must be at least 4,000 tons.
FGD is different. For the normal life of personnel, the number of revolutions per minute set by the artificial gravity device is not more than 2, resulting in the iron law of at least 60 meters of radius for 0.3G low gravity. The problem of space station mass has been solved.
Even two 10-ton compartments can easily obtain 1G gravity.
However, FGD is not Musk's original creation. In fact, the Mars Society proposed it when imagining the Mars Direct plan a few years ago, but no one really wants to use it in reality for the time being.
Now it seems to be a good way to overtake others.
NACA first shared this idea with Lockheed Martin, which is responsible for the return capsule of the "Orion" spacecraft, and the latter responded a day later.
Lockheed Martin said that this technology is very simple. A cable device can be added between the docking parts of the return capsule and the service module of the Orion spacecraft, which can be released to 120 meters long and rotate around the center to generate 0.25G gravity.
If the progress is fast enough, it may be used in the Artemis program to land on the moon.
As for Lao Ma's starship landing plan, Lockheed is a little ambiguous, thinking that the starship is too heavy and unreliable. If it is really thrown away, it will be a real trouble. It is better to use a traditional spacecraft with 200 tons on one side, separate the manned part and the power part, and the mass of 400 tons is just right.
Claire hummed and ahed for a while, why didn't he know Lockheed's idea? Didn't he just not want the specaX starship to succeed?
NACA refuses to do that. These old contractors are asking for exorbitant prices. How can they be as easy to use as the emerging companies such as Blue Origin and specaX?
You should know that specaX and Blue Origin were both supported by NACA.
Bush's "Constellation" plan was huge in scale, including the "Ares" series of rockets, the Orion spacecraft and other projects, which were even more ambitious than the Artemis plan.
Later, when the Constellation plan ended, these projects were not left untouched.
The Orion spacecraft was completed at that time, with Lockheed Martin developing the return capsule and Europe (mainly Airbus) developing the service module.
The Orion spacecraft originally used the liquid oxygen-methane engine developed by OPI in Huntsville, Alabama, which took into account the production of fuel on Mars and the moon.
After the Constellation plan ended, NACA could not bear the high prices of these old contractors and gave the technology of liquid oxygen-methane engines to two companies: Blue Origin and specaX.
So why are the main engines of these two companies, the BE series and the Raptor, both methane engines? There are traces and origins.
Among the "Ares" series of rockets, the Ares I rocket, which uses a five-stage SRB solid rocket, has made its first flight. Its rocket body and solid rocket recovery technology were given to specaX, which is the source of the rocket body technology and part of the recovery technology of the Falcon 9 rocket.
And as for the vertical recovery of rockets, this was done by the Alliance at the end of the war. It is conceivable where the relevant personnel at that time went after the war.
In addition to the original Falcon 1, specaX's most important Falcon 9 rocket body and recovery technology have the strong support of NACA, and they are also very effective. The money spent on the entire Falcon 9 plan is not as much as the Ares I plan in a month...
The Ares I, which uses a space shuttle booster as a first-stage rocket, has a launch cost as expensive as the SLS rocket. It is conceivable how ruthless those contractors are.
NACA engineer Mike Hockachak also went to provide on-site guidance after the explosion of the specaX launch pad.
SpecaX has never encountered related problems since then.
But the starship is different. This is the plan that specaX wants to promote. For 9-meter rockets and spaceships, it is obviously not that easy. Musk may want to attract NACA's interest through the Mars plan to obtain something like the Falcon. 9 Such support.
Although the Artemis project has decided to use Blue Origin's "Blue Moon" lander, Lao Ma has been promoting his own starship, but NACA has been hesitant.
The first is the high-thrust methane machine. Blue Origin’s BE4 has not been going well. It’s hard to say how reliable the Raptor is.
To launch a starship into space, the super-heavy booster needs to be installed with 29 Raptor-generation engines, using a three-circle 1+8+20 layout. With so many engines, NACA feels the same way about it as the Alliance people look at N1. Afraid.
The tragedy of N1 was still vivid in her mind, and Claire was hesitant to let NACA step into this pit.
Technically, he believes that half a century of human technological progress should have been able to solve the problems of control computers and excessive vibration, especially the Xinyuan-3 with 19 engines and the Long March 10 with 10 engines and 20 combustion chambers. After all successful launches.
But Starship... This is different from Falcon 9, which can appropriate some mature technologies. This requires considerable new development investment.
However, someone soon made the decision for him.
When the 220-ton Axis part of the Advance floated in low-Earth orbit, the first people to go crazy were the Congressmen. They were extremely frightened by the huge progress of the Advance and felt great pressure.
However, spacecrafts that are not for military purposes cannot be sanctioned for various reasons. Therefore, after a difficult struggle, although the expenditure in the aerospace field this year has exceeded 100 billion US dollars, Congress gritted its teeth and approved a new plan:
NACA needs to conduct artificial gravity spacecraft research.