Chapter 382 - 374: Space Power Station_1

"Billionaire Elon Musk boarded the SpaceX Dragon Spaceship and entered space."

"On May 20th, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, along with two SpaceX engineers and a billionaire, boarded the ’Dragon’ spacecraft and went into space, joined by a Tesla Roadster sports car."

In the Capital, Lin Ju refreshed Twitter and saw a post Ma had published 15 minutes ago, wearing a custom SpaceX spacesuit, leaning against a blue Tesla Roadster.

It looked like the stripped-down Dragon Spaceship didn’t have any problems.

The Falcon 9 rocket had almost no failures after the success of its recovery experiments in the original timeline, with just a few failed landings interspersed among more than 200 launches without malfunction.

The same goes for the Dragon Spaceship, the Manned Dragon Spacecraft had gone through seven or eight years of two-type iterations, so the Falcon 9+ Manned Dragon combination was extremely reliable both technically and historically.

Judging by Ma’s tweets almost every half hour, he seemed to be quite happy with this space trip, and even the promised Roadster from last year was brought along.

But the space agency thought the car was just an empty shell; otherwise, the Center of Gravity arrangement for the Dragon Spaceship would be a big problem—with no room to store supplies. No wonder Ma didn’t open the Roadster’s door.

"Sir She, there are more than five spots for the space training program this year, right? The Dawn Spaceship can fit up to 11 people at most."

Academician She felt like Lin Ju was hinting at something, immediately becoming more vigilant.

"That’s impossible. If any accident occurs with 11 aerospace experts, the trouble would be enormous. Ever since the Incident of June 3, there have been internal regulations; five people is already the limit."

Lin Ju, as a military enthusiast, knew about the June 3 Incident too. It was a disaster that occurred in 2006 when the country was flight-testing the Airborne Early Warning aircraft AWACS-200, and the plane crashed due to icing on its wings. The accident resulted in the loss of 34 top electronic experts in China—nearly halving the research strength—and if not for that, the development pace of AWACS might have been significantly faster.

Lin Ju: "But our spaceship is much stronger than the Y-8, with completely different reliability, and the June 3 Incident was largely due to the plane being overloaded and not meeting safety standards."

"How many people we send up is planned, is there something new with New Yuan?"

Academician She, not willing to beat around the bush, directly asked the real question.

"What could be wrong with us... Oh, actually there is a small matter. The third and fourth living modules have been completed. I plan to increase the launch frequency of the space shuttle. Here’s the flight plan for the four launches in the second half of the year, just to report so it can be arranged."

Lin Ju spoke in a calm tone, but Academician She didn’t fall for the usual tricks, he grabbed the flight plan, flipping through it and said:

"I knew it, Musk goes up and you also want to go. This is always... Huh? A hundred-person passenger cabin!"

Seeing the crazy passenger conversion proposal, Academician She was so shocked he couldn’t speak, and began shaking his head at a pace unbecoming his age.

"Ridiculous, ridiculous! This is too dangerous, 113 people! Do you realize how much risk that involves? It would be more sensible for you to simply work from space."

He had thought Lin Ju was beguiled into going back to space again, but it turned out he was planning to send more than a hundred people up at once. He didn’t even want to calculate the success rate; unless it was 100%, the Aerospace Development Committee wouldn’t dare to approve it!

Even a 0.001% risk meant the lives of over a hundred people. Such an accident level would require a national announcement and the establishment of a central committee for investigation, with impacts difficult to estimate.

Seeing Academician She’s resolute refusal, although Lin Ju had anticipated it, he still felt somewhat disappointed. It seemed like the resistance was indeed significant.

"So... should I go up?"

"That’s more like it... wait, you’ve roped me in, hey!" Academician She now regretted why the big shot had gone abroad without him. Other than himself, no one in the Aerospace Development Committee could keep Lin Ju in check, and as a result, there was never a small issue each time he came to the Capital.

"What about these other things in the bag? Shall we talk about them all at once?"

"Ah? That, well," Lin Ju took the remaining documents out of the open briefcase.

"Chang’an Technology University has bamboozled the Sichuan government into preparing to do a space power station, a small project."

"..."

Although Sichuan receives the largest central fiscal transfer payments each year, their enthusiasm for innovation had never waned. Along with the greatly enhanced autonomy due to the reform of the central and local fiscal relationship, they were starting to spread their wings.

A space power station wasn’t a novel concept; America had dabbled in it first in the 70s but withdrew due to costs. Entering the new century, it was picked up again, with numerous countries following suit.

In 2008, space-based solar power was included in the national key research program, and in 2014, the country released a planning and demonstration report on the development strategy and key technological system for space power stations.

In the original timeline, the "Chasing the Sun" project was initiated in 2018. By 2022, a trial space-based solar power transmission-reception device was constructed in China, and a space power station was projected to be built by 2035, with power generation capacity to rival the Three Gorges Dam.

Compared to terrestrial power generation, space-based power had many advantages.

First was the intensity of radiation. Without atmospheric and cloud interference, the average radiation intensity on the solar panels of a space station in a geosynchronous orbit at 36,000 kilometers was 10 times that of Earth;

Moreover, satellites in geostationary orbit could receive sunlight all the time, completely unaffected by Earth’s rotation and weather, allowing for continuous power supply throughout the year.

According to some preliminary reports from various countries, the efficiency of terrestrial solar panels was around 8% to 12%, while the efficiency of space stations could reach 35.5%.

There are mainly two methods for transmitting power to Earth: microwaves and lasers.

Compared to lasers, microwaves are not attenuated by the atmosphere. Microwave conversion and collection efficiency at 1 to 10 gigahertz can reach 90%, and the overall efficiency can still reach 32%, which is 2.5 to 4 times the efficiency on the ground.

The main domestic researcher in this area was Professor Ding Biyun from Chang’an Technology University, and it was their team who worked on the space station project in the original timeline.

Perhaps influenced by the changes in the timeline, they found the Sichuan government, which had been eager to find new projects after their artificial moon project was vetoed, and sold them on their space power station plan.

According to their ambitious sales proposal, if a space power station weighing 1,000 tons, generating 160 megawatts of power and covering an area of 400,000 square meters were built in space, it could provide 10% of Rong City’s installed power generation capacity. Moreover, because it generated power all the time, in reality, it could reduce the installed capacity on the ground by 15% to 20%.

Although the current cost of high-power solar panels is close to 1 million yuan per square meter, mass production of such an enormous amount of solar cells—1,000 times the existing capacity—could bring the price down to an unbelievably low level. The total construction cost for the power generation portion would be no more than 4 billion yuan, with the overall space power station costing within 10 billion yuan.

Such a space power station could generate 1.4 billion kilowatt-hours per year and transmit about 1.26 billion kilowatt-hours to Earth. Based on a supply standard of 0.55 yuan per kilowatt-hour, the direct generation revenue would approach 700 million yuan. But considering the reduction in loss due to all-time generation, in reality, it could save twice that amount in electricity costs.

Translated into coal-fired power, this would mean saving 860,000 tons of coal and reducing 2.2 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.