"What's the plan?" Tang Yue came up to him.
"Go away, don't disturb my work. Go write your story about Da Vinci's egg." Old Cat shooed Tang Yue away. "I'm calculating the flow field."
"I've already finished writing the story about Da Vinci's egg."
"Then draw duck eggs. After you finish drawing duck eggs, you can draw goose eggs. After you finish drawing goose eggs, you can draw your own balls."
"Can't you reveal a little?
Don't keep me in suspense at this critical moment! "Tang Yue grabbed Old Cat." Mai Dong is also very concerned about this problem … right?
Mai Dong? "
"Hmm?
Canned food?
What canned food? "
The girl appeared in the communication system.
Mai Dong and Tang Yue had discussed this problem before. Although the Orion spacecraft had safely decelerated, there was no landing site on Mars, and Orion II did not have landing gear. This 80-meter-long candied hawthorn would inevitably smash onto the hard ground and shatter into pieces.
If Mai Dong fell with it, it would be too dangerous.
It was the height of thirty floors.
There were no parachutes on the Joint Space Station, so there was no such thing as leaving the spacecraft in the air to perform a parachute jump. Only James Bond could do a stunt like leaving the spacecraft during a high-speed fall. Mai Dong, a little girl, would be courting death if she tried to do that.
For the vast majority of people, parachuting was an extremely dangerous matter. In the early days, the Soviets tried to eject astronauts out of the cabin and parachute down. However, Yuri Gagarin almost had an accident during the parachute descent.
It turned out that it was unwise to resist the harsh environment at high altitudes with one's body. The safest place was always inside the command module, where the astronauts were wrapped in a thick metal shell to keep out the turbulence and low temperature.
"Mr. Cat, do you have any ideas?"
Mai Dong also wanted to know how Old Cat would solve this problem. After all, it was directly related to her life and death.
Old Cat stared at the colorful patterns on the monitor. The workstation under the table was humming, and the cooling fan was running at full power. The calculation of fluid dynamics was very important.
It curled its lips.
"Who told you that it has to be over eighty meters high?"
Tang Yue and Mai Dong were both stunned.
"Isn't the length of Orion more than 80 meters?
If it landed vertically, it would be more than 80 meters. "
"Are you stupid?"
Old Cat turned around, leaned back in the chair, and crossed his legs. "Who told you that we are going to bring the entire Orion into the atmosphere?"
"You … You mean …" Tang Yue frowned. He seemed to have grasped something and had a clue.
"Do you know why the main truss of Orion is a three-section structure?
Because of its modular design, the entire spaceship is made up of a power module, a central module, and a power module. Every module can be replaced. This was considered when the Orion spaceship was designed. "Old Cat raised a finger.
"What does this mean?
This means that the spaceship itself can be dismantled. The engineers have already reserved the dismantling interface … We can't dismantle the engine, but we can cut the entire spaceship short. "
"Orion has a total length of 88 meters, and the power module at the front is 25 meters long. We don't need to bring this section down at all. We can just cut it in half."
Tomcat raised its paw and pulled as a ferocious glint flashed in its eyes. "Therefore, I won't foolishly erect an eighty-meter-tall pole tens of thousands of meters in the sky. That's too risky."
"Sixty-three meters." Mai Dong calculated. "The final spaceship to enter the atmosphere is 63 meters long?"
"Yes."
Old Cat nodded. "We can throw away the power module truss. This shortens the length by nearly a third. It's much easier to maintain balance."
"How difficult is it?
Is it difficult to carry out? "
Tang Yue thought of the truss of Orion. It was all welded with thick steel bars and stood up like a tower crane. When it came to dismantling the truss, Tang Yue's mind jumped to the scene of a large group of workers holding acetylene up and down.
It sounded like a heavy project with a lot of work. They had to consider whether Mai Dong could do it alone when they came up with the plan. For example, dismantling the rocket engine sounded feasible, but in reality, it was impossible to carry out the plan. There was no practical value in it at all.
"It's a reserved dismantling interface. It's like the lock between the carriages of a train."
Old Cat replied. "To dismantle it, you only need a wrench. It's much easier than dismantling the engine."
"The last half of the sentence is purely superfluous."
"Of course, just dismantling the truss is not enough."
Old Cat continued. "We have to completely dismantle Orion and the Eagle lander. We have to dismantle all of them into empty shells and abandon all of the weight that can be discarded!
Solar panels, living quarters, service modules, and storage modules, we don't want any of them!
We only want the nine engines. We want the highest thrust-to-weight ratio. "
"We will dock the lander to Orion. Orion will be the ferry that will take the lander across the hundred-kilometer journey."
Old Cat described the landing process. "At the final landing, the lander will disconnect from Orion. Orion will crash, and the lander will land."
"And the lander's position is not that high. It's not hanging from the top of the truss. The docking position of the Eagle is at the central module, only thirty-five meters away from the engine."
"Thirty-five meters …" Tang Yue calculated in his mind. "But thirty-five meters is not low. It has to be more than ten stories high."
Indeed, by cutting off a portion of the truss, the total length of Orion could be shortened by twenty-five meters. This was beneficial for lowering the center of gravity and maintaining the attitude. The docking position of the Eagle lander was also not as high as Tang Yue had imagined, but the last threshold could not be crossed. From eighty-eight meters to thirty-five meters, wouldn't it still be a bag of slag if it fell?
What was the difference between jumping down from the thirtieth floor and the tenth floor?
Perhaps the former required a shovel.
"The space station doesn't have a parachute. What can we use to withstand the impact of the landing?"
Tang Yue asked. "Something will definitely happen if we fall from a height of more than thirty meters. Even the Eagle lander won't be able to withstand such a fall."
Mai Dong nodded as well.
"When I was in university, a senior with a doctorate jumped off a building. He fell from the tenth floor and died on the spot."
Old Cat held his forehead in silence.
"People of your generation might not know. After all, the both of you were born in the late twenties. It's no longer possible to see such a method in this era … But its disappearance doesn't mean that it's unreliable. Some methods are eliminated by history because a better method has appeared. However, they are ultimately the wisdom of our ancestors.
"When we can't find an answer, we can look at history. Our predecessors have often given us the best solution."
Tang Yue and Mai Dong looked at each other, unsure of what Old Cat was talking about.
Old Cat twirled his fingertips and gently sighed. He leaned back in his chair. "Do you know, at the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, about fifty years ago, the first batch of probes that came to Mars … What did those great pioneers rely on to pass the last hurdle?"