Chapter 392 - 383 Song_1

It’s four o’clock in the morning, but the command center is bustling with activity.

The superior had prepared some words to say, but now he decided to change his approach.

"Comrades, let’s cheer for our astronauts with a song."

The rest were stunned for a moment, then rustled into formation.

Other staff members in the command center also stood up, and Lin Ju glanced forward, already knowing which song it was.

"Fellow students, everyone rise up...

Great waves, great waves, unceasingly...

Hurry, bring out the strength..."

The song of more than a hundred people from the Capital was transmitted into space via antennas, received by a super-large communications satellite in geostationary orbit, and sent toward the direction of the Moon.

Inside the cabin of the Storm spacecraft, the voices from 370,000 kilometers away mixed with the singing of the seven astronauts, pushing them forward like the billows.

...

"Laurel-01, Laurel-02, Magpie Bridge has established stable communication!"

"Navigation route is planned, expected to enter orbit in 10 minutes."

"Chang’e 5 B3 lander is requesting communication, now connected!"

"..."

After being quiet for more than ten hours, the cabin’s interior began to buzz with activity again, as the seven astronauts focused intently on various operations.

Meng Senlin glanced inadvertently to the upper right window, and under the reflection of the sunlight, the contours of the Aitken Basin were visible to the naked eye.

After the final deceleration, the Storm had successfully entered the 40-kilometer lunar orbit and had already orbited half a circle to enter the sunlit side.

hours and 56 minutes, that was all the time taken by the Storm from detaching from the space station to entering the orbit.

There was more than 60% of the fuel left, plenty to spare, and the three engines had worked so steadily for so long under the high-temperature conditions of hydrogen ions, only adding a few traces of ablation to the root of the tail fin.

Hu Dong pressed his face against the porthole, taking a high-definition photo of the Moon’s front.

40,000 meters below, every geological feature on the Moon was visible due to the absence of atmospheric interference, like a super-gigantic, detail-rich image, profound enough to make one feel their own insignificance.

"Command center, is this camera position appropriate?"

Hu Dong secured another camera, aiming it at the porthole.

"Offset it to the right a bit more, the console can still be seen now."

There are four cameras for the live broadcast; three outside the cabin and one inside. The external ones aren’t an issue, but the internal one must consider security concerns.

The field of view of the cabin’s camera can only cover the large area of the porthole above the console, and it can also turn to capture the inside of the cabin, but it must avoid exposing the console as much as possible.

The latter has quite a number of command switches related to the nuclear engines, which can reveal quite a bit of useful information for professionals.

At 4:57, the ground command center confirmed there were no errors, and they opened up the signal interface to the television station.

In front of countless televisions, people had already waited for a bit; the studio had done more than twenty minutes of science popularization starting at 4:30, and both the host and guests tacitly waited for the voice in their earpieces.

The director backstage gestured, the host moved slightly, and with a smile looked towards the camera:

"Dear viewers, the Storm spacecraft which has arrived at the Moon is about to send back live television signals. Let us now turn our gaze to 380,000 kilometers away."

The screen went black for a moment, and then appeared the seven astronauts huddled together, with the gray-white surface of the Moon occupying the entire porthole behind them.

The director of Central Television Station glanced at the backstage data; the viewership was rising almost vertically.

Experiencing similarly rapid growth were the crazy visitations to New Yuan’s official website and social media, from both domestic and foreign sources.

Even though the backend servers had been prepared in advance, the sudden surge in traffic was still unexpectedly huge, and to prevent collapse, they had to continuously lower the bandwidth for each user. It was visibly affecting the live video feed, which started to stutter.

Musk frowned as he watched the astronauts freeze on the screen, slamming his tablet forcefully.

"Why are we experiencing lag in space; isn’t the Dragon Spaceship directly connected to satellite signals?"

Shen Bili: "But the Star Chain signal we’re getting is also relayed from the ground, so there’s no difference from being on Earth. It doesn’t directly connect to the broadcasting satellites."

Musk: "Then why can’t we directly receive China’s television satellite signals?"

Shen Bili: "That... we would need to purchase their television signal decoder, and besides, nobody has tried using a satellite TV receiver in space before."

"..."

It took a full four or five minutes for the frantically deployed redundant servers to process the unimaginable volume of access requests, and the screen finally began to move again.

At this time, only Hu Dong and Meng Senlin were left in the picture, their backs against the giant porthole almost as big as their bodies, and the highly illuminated Moon under the sunlight could be seen very clearly, displaying all of its details.

"...We are now about 40 kilometers above the surface of the Moon, which is a straight-line distance of 40,000 meters, passing through 1,700 meters every second.

Above my head is the Sea of Tranquility, where the Apollo 11 mission landed, which was the first time humans set foot on the Moon. This place is..."

The Moon filling the porthole became a vast map at the astronauts’ fingertips, Musk believed at least 95% of the Earth’s viewers could not understand their explanations, but they would listen as earnestly as he did.

Even without speaking, merely gazing at it could make one feel its breathtaking beauty.

This was entirely different from observing through a super telescope; a single glance was like being on the Moon, unconsciously bringing to mind a serene background sound.

The feed quickly switched to the outside of the space shuttle, with two cameras facing the Moon, one facing Earth, displaying the different sceneries fully.

It was only after more than ten minutes that Hu Dong received a hint to temporarily hand over the feed to the ground studio.

There are of course many programs for the continuous four-hour live broadcast; now it’s just a temporary cut, and when the feed will be restored depends on the action speeds of the other astronauts.

At this time, they were being helped into their spacesuits by two others, with another two suits lying nearby.

Aside from exiting the cabin to observe the Moon at a closer distance, several small cube satellites in the cargo bay will be released to collect more data on the Moon’s magnetic field and radiation.

The preparation for spacewalking takes about half an hour, and by then Lin Ju had also received the preliminary television and internet live broadcast viewership data.

According to initial estimates, about 400 to 600 million people in China watched the live broadcast, a result without full promotion, and direct international visits exceeded 700 million, with indirect broadcasting being hard to estimate, and likely surpassing 1.5 billion. In total, there may have been more than 2.5 billion people watching the Skylight-1 mission.

This number exceeded the Apollo 11 mission by four times, and this was just a minimally promoted lunar orbit mission.