nyslfriends Chapter 263 Flying to Mars
Chapter 263 Flying to Mars
In the early hours of the morning when the launch window opened, the temperature at the Hainan launch site was only seven degrees Celsius.
The Sky-3 rocket stood tall on the launch pad, its 62-meter height resembling an illuminated iron tower under the searchlights. White vapors of liquid hydrogen fuel slowly drifted from the pressure relief valve in the middle of the rocket, condensing into a thin mist in the beam of the searchlights. All the screens in the control center switched to the launch countdown interface, with every status indicator in green.
As the countdown entered its final minute, Zuo Cheng stood in the last row of the control hall. He didn't sit down. The people around him also fell silent. The only sounds in the hall were the countdown and the low hum of the cooling fans on the instrument panels.
"ten."
"Nine."
Chen Hao sat in the third row, his hands gripping the armrests. His knuckles had turned white.
"Three. Two. One."
"ignition."
Zuo Cheng's gaze fell on the large screen in the center of the control hall. The moment the ignition command was given, he felt his heart skip a beat. It wasn't nervousness. It was an indescribable weight. He had been carrying this weight ever since he returned from the Sahara. Two months, sixty-one days, the entire company urgently switched from commercial spaceflight to deep space mode, forcibly pushing a rocket that was still on the drawing board six months ago onto the launch pad.
The liquid hydrogen preheating indicator lights on all three upper-stage nuclear thermal propulsion engines of the Cangqiong-3 rocket turned green. The first-stage rocket's thrust exceeded 3,000 kilonewtons, and the entire rocket slowly lifted off the launch pad amidst vibrations. The vibrations traveled from the launch site to the control center, causing the water in the cups on the table to ripple slightly. Dozens of cameras simultaneously broadcast live from different angles, with every frame watched in real-time by over 300 million online viewers. In the large conference room at the 402 headquarters in Hangzhou, the hundreds of employees remaining also watched the same screen. Han Lu stood in the front row, her hands clasped in front of her chest, her nails digging into her thumbs.
The maximum dynamic pressure zone has been reached.
The rocket body endured pressure exceeding six times the force of gravity. The aluminum-lithium alloy casing emitted a series of fine metallic groans under the pressure of the air. The stress curve on the control screen surged towards the critical value at a rate too fast to bear. Chen Hao's fingers left indentations on the armrest. The curve had crossed the critical value, exceeding it by less than 0.5%.
But the arrow body held up.
First-stage separation. Second-stage ignition. Fifteen minutes later, the rocket entered its near-Earth parking orbit. Signals from the Hainan tracking and control station indicated successful separation of the satellite and rocket, and the probe deployed its solar panels in its predetermined orbit.
The next step is the most crucial. The nuclear thermal propulsion upper stage ignites in orbit, propelling the probe into a Mars transfer orbit. This is the first nuclear thermal engine to be started in a space environment. The reactor's temperature rise curve, the liquid hydrogen injection rate, and the nozzle thrust calibration are all being tested for the first time in a vacuum and zero gravity environment.
The nuclear thermal engine reached 93% of its rated thrust within 0.5 seconds of ignition. Two seconds later, the thrust stabilized at 100%, which was 4% higher than during ground testing.
"Thrust is stable," the telemetry and control operator's voice came through the loudspeaker.
Seven hundred and twenty seconds later, the upper stage shut down according to the pre-programmed procedure.
The probe entered the Earth-Mars transfer orbit. The velocity increment precisely matched the design value, with an error of less than one-thousandth. All screens lit up green.
No one spoke in the control room for twenty seconds after the shutdown signal was confirmed.
Then Chen Hao stood up and shouted. Not any words, just a short, completely liberating shout. Then everyone shouted along. Some jumped up, some hugged their colleagues, some took off their headsets, slammed them on the table, and laughed.
The globally broadcast footage stopped at the last frame of the probe's tail camera. Against the backdrop of deep space, the blue star slowly shrank, from a blue-white planet that filled the entire frame to a marble, and finally to a pale blue dot of light, blending into hundreds of thousands of stars.
The delay is six seconds. Once in Mars orbit, it will become sixteen minutes. Every second of delay is a hard constraint on the speed of light on a solar system scale. No technology can overcome this. All humanity can do now is wait.
A retired NASA deep-space navigation expert calculated some figures on live television. He gestured with his finger across the screen, his tone filled with undisguised respect. He said they built a rocket capable of sending an eight-ton payload to Mars in two months. The last time NASA did the same thing, it took eight years from project initiation to launch. He attributed the difference between two months and eight years to one thing: this company wasn't afraid to fail. When you're not afraid to fail, two months is enough.
Musk posted a two-word message on social media: "Well played."
The probe was officially named "Questioning Mars." Yu Ying had come up with the name when she drew the arrowhead on the rocket. She had told Zuo Cheng at the launch site, "We're not going to conquer Mars; we're going to say hello to a predecessor from four billion years ago." Zuo Cheng listened in silence for a few seconds, then nodded. He liked the name. It was right. Humanity didn't need to plant a flag on Mars. Humanity needed to knock on doors.
The launch was a success, but Mars is still seven months away. The probe's journey exceeded 400 million kilometers. The control center, having calmed down from the launch day's excitement, entered a long period of daily shifts. Zuo Cheng demanded that every frame of telemetry data be analyzed and every anomaly reported to him, regardless of the time.
Yu Ying took a calendar and started counting down from the day of the successful launch. She placed the calendar on Zuo Cheng's desk. The first page of the calendar read: "Seven months from now, humanity will, for the first time, decipher an ancient message from a planet."
Zuo Cheng didn't add any annotations. He simply placed the calendar on the right side of his desk and turned one page each day.
The solar system node status monitoring on the system panel was quietly updating. The Mariner Canyon node's energy index was 0.12, and the Hellenic Plains node's was 0.08; both were in near-complete dormancy. But the closer the probe got to Mars, the slower the values began to climb. It took three million kilometers to go from 0.12 to 0.13. It took one million kilometers to go from 0.13 to 0.14. The closer they got, the faster the increase, like two people sensing each other's presence across a room and a corridor. Sometimes Zuo Cheng would wake up in the middle of the night and check the panel. The two numbers looked like heartbeats. Not the heartbeat of Mars, but the pulse of a civilization from four billion years ago that hadn't yet been extinguished.
He wrote a question on the last page of Yu Ying's calendar, in the blank space on the landing date page.
"What did you leave on Mars?"
Then he closed the calendar and turned to today's page. There were 123 days left in the countdown.
The lights in Building 402 were still on in the early hours of the morning. From the Aerospace Division to the Quantum Computing Division to the Satellite Control Center, behind every lit window were people pushing humanity's boundaries further. The probe was quietly flying towards Mars in space, its antenna pointed towards the red planet. Seven months later, it would knock on a door that had been closed for four billion years for all of humanity. Zuo Cheng stood by his office window, looking at the night sky. Mars was not visible in that direction. But he knew it was there. It and the two nodes on it were waiting.