Chapter 47: Kaitian Spaceship
Typically, the time between a spaceship prototype’s debut and its finalization for mass production is never this short.
In the Human World, a slower pace could easily mean over a decade.
Throughout this process, a spaceship is tested, refined, and optimized over and over. Mass production for the market only begins once the accident rate has been brought to its absolute minimum.
But for Li Qingsong, the entire process took only about half a month.
Everything happened at an unbelievable pace.
After the first batch of 100 Skysoar-I near-surface spaceships was delivered, the second and third batches quickly followed. In just one year, the number of Skysoar-I spaceships flying in the skies of Ceres exceeded 1,000.
Though they were all designated Skysoar-I, they varied in size, tonnage, external design, engine power, and purpose.
Some were dedicated passenger vessels. Others were heavy freighters designed for high-tonnage cargo. Still others were prized for their small size, speed, and agility, serving as high-end rapid transports.
The Skysoar-I series became a diverse and capable family of vessels.
However, this success was short-lived. Before long, the first spaceship crash occurred.
A heavy freighter suddenly lost power control mid-flight. Massive amounts of liquid oxygen and methane mixed, turning it into a giant bomb that detonated with a thunderous BOOM in the dim skies of Ceres.
Not only was all the cargo on the spaceship lost, but several Clones were also killed in the explosion.
Li Qingsong, however, was not the least bit surprised.
’A spaceship exploding? What’s so unusual about that? It’s hardly worth making a fuss over.’
He simply didn’t have the time to refine a single spaceship design for years, or even a decade, until it was truly mature, the way they did in the Human World.
Since that was the case, spaceship malfunctions, and even explosions, were inevitable.
But this situation had to be viewed from two perspectives.
Hasty mass production and large-scale use would inevitably lead to the frequent emergence of various hidden dangers and design flaws.
While this would certainly result in losses, it was also the most efficient way to expose these hidden dangers and design flaws so they could be dealt with systematically.
All the various hidden dangers that would have taken over a decade of repeated refinement to find and eliminate could now be exposed in less than a year of mass production and use. The increase in efficiency was more than tenfold.
The only downsides were losing a few spaceships, destroying some cargo, and killing some Clones. As far as Li Qingsong was concerned, these were acceptable losses.
Thus, a cycle began: frequent spaceship malfunctions, some even resulting in explosions, were met by the tireless, round-the-clock work of the Clone engineers, which in turn fed into the constantly iterating and optimizing production line.
The more ships that blew up, the more Li Qingsong put into service.
In the first month, Li Qingsong lost over 50 spaceships. In the second month, the number dropped sharply to only 20. By the seventh month, not a single spaceship exploded.
At the end of the first year, at the cost of over 300 destroyed or scrapped vessels, the overall performance of the spaceships built in Li Qingsong’s factory had more than doubled. Now, they had just finished building the first spaceship in the truest sense of the word.
Powered by the newly developed high-efficiency methane-oxygen engine, its speed could reach an unprecedented 900 meters per second. This was fast enough to exceed the first cosmic velocity of Ceres and enter a stable orbit around it!
"Ignition!"
At Li Qingsong’s command, the massive spaceship—a hemispherical structure approximately 5 meters high and 16 meters in diameter—blasted an unprecedentedly fierce, scorching plume of fire from its stern.
It took off with a thunderous ROAR. After reaching a certain altitude, it adjusted its trajectory and began a powerful ascent at an angle.
The numbers on the speedometer jumped rapidly, finally reaching 900 meters per second, or about 3,240 kilometers per hour.
By this point, it was already at an altitude of 50,000 meters above the surface of Ceres.
The engines shut down, and the gravity in the cabin vanished abruptly. The Clones’ bodies began to float up as if in water.
But they were still restrained in their seats by their safety belts.
Now, the spaceship Li Qingsong had named "Genesis-I" was orbiting Ceres, completing one revolution approximately every 110 minutes.
Those that could only fly in the near-surface space of Ceres and could not enter orbit were the Skysoar-class spaceships.
Those that could enter orbit were the Genesis-class spaceships.
After a few hours, this Genesis-I spaceship, designated 01, finally caught up with the Deep Space Spaceship and docked with it.
The Clones and some supplies were then transferred to the Deep Space Spaceship, completing the first space freight mission.
Li Qingsong had performed this kind of work many times before using the landing craft. But none of those previous times had made him as excited as this one.
’Because this time, I used a spaceship I built myself!’
’From this moment on, I finally possess the true ability of space travel!’
’With a spaceship capable of entering orbit, I can build space stations, construct zero-gravity factories, and deploy numerous satellites, Detectors, and telescopes. My sphere of activity will be vastly extended. I’m no longer confined to the planet’s surface!’
At this moment, it was as if a great door was slowly opening before him, as if the heavens and earth had instantly become vast and boundless.
After a moment of excitement, Li Qingsong immediately made up his mind.
’I will build a large-scale space laboratory!’
At this stage, a large space laboratory was of great significance to Li Qingsong.
The reason was simple. Although the surface gravity on Ceres was low, it still existed. And some experiments and research could only be conducted in a zero-gravity environment.
For instance, selective breeding, high-precision mechanical processing, manufacturing highly integrated chips, and much more.
With a large space laboratory, Li Qingsong’s rate of technological development would inevitably accelerate.
At the same time, this massive construction project would require numerous Genesis-I spaceships to make multiple takeoffs, landings, and round trips to space for cargo missions.
This, in turn, would replicate the effect of the previous large-scale use of the Skysoar-I spaceships, exposing defects and hidden dangers in a short period. This way, Li Qingsong could quickly improve the stability and reliability of the spaceships and, ultimately, enhance their performance.
Thus, in addition to the spaceships crisscrossing the planet’s near-surface space, numerous high-speed spaceships quickly appeared in outer space as well.
Besides the spaceships used for transporting materials for the space lab, Li Qingsong also dispatched a large number of ships into space for high-speed, long-duration flight tests, trying every possible way to push them to their limits, and then trying every possible way to optimize and improve them.
Time flowed by quietly amidst these efforts.
During a routine space flight test, Li Qingsong suddenly discovered something that looked like a metal plate near the spaceship.
The object was about a meter across and had a slight curve to it, as if it were a fragment broken off from a much larger piece of machinery.
’This doesn’t look like anything I built.’
Puzzled, Li Qingsong maneuvered the spaceship to get a closer look.