Chapter 430 - 421 Fourteen_1

The SRB malfunction a few hours after launch dealt a harsh blow to the responsible manufacturer, Orbital ATK, and Boeing, in charge of quality inspection, received a severe scolding.

The preliminary detection report made everyone break into a cold sweat, unable to imagine how severe the consequences of an explosion in the air could be.

It could be said that if Claire hadn’t made a split-second decision to risk launch failure and force an early separation of the boosters, Artemis II would have become a tragedy in front of the whole world.

However, the problems didn’t stop there.

The "Blue Moon" lander was waiting for maintenance.

On June 28th, the "Blue Moon" and the fueling module docked in lunar orbit, taking 6 hours to successfully transfer about 18 tons of fuel to the "Blue Moon," bringing its total mass to 40 tons, enough to meet mission requirements.

During the early hours of June 30th, the "Blue Moon" successfully docked with the Gateway space station’s HALO module docking interface, which seemed very smooth.

At 23:00 on June 30th (Central Time), over an hour after the Artemis II launch, the team monitoring the Gateway’s status sent a report directly to Claire.

The problem was strange; every five hours, the Gateway would detect an attitude deviation and then activate the RCS to correct it, which had occurred many times since the evening of June 28th.

At first, the ground team didn’t pay much attention to the first two occurrences, but after the third time, they started a detailed investigation. They first checked the sensors for errors and then discovered that the attitude and orbit were indeed regularly deviating.

Subsequent real-time monitoring revealed that it was not a deviation every five hours, but a continuous one at the space station; it was only after five hours of minor continuous drifting that it would trigger the correction commands.

The Hall Thrusters of the PPE module were not working, so where was the power coming from? The team quickly focused their attention on the docked "Blue Moon."

However, after thorough checks, none of the "Blue Moon’s" attitude engines were working, but according to the direction of the drift, it was likely that the problem was indeed there.

They immediately called over the Blue Origin development team, and with blueprints and simulation software in hand, they began a detailed analysis, eventually locking the source of the drifting thrust at a position in the middle of the cylindrical lander.

Upon looking at the blueprints, there was a pipeline for the liquid oxygen tanks used for the astronauts’ breathing inside the lander.

Although the internal sensors of the lander did not send out any abnormal signals, it was almost certain that this pipeline had a leak, only it was unknown why the related pressure vessel sensors also failed to detect it.

But regardless of the cause, a liquid oxygen leak was definitely occurring. Calculations showed that an entire tank of liquid oxygen would be leaked away before the crew of Artemis II arrived — "Blue Moon" had four of these oxygen tanks, two of which were backups.

Therefore, after arriving at the Gateway, the Artemis II crew would have to carry out a repair mission on the lander; the fuel consumed by the Gateway to adjust its orbit was actually a minor issue, as there would definitely be enough for this mission.

However, if it was determined that the lander could not be repaired or the risk of repair was too great, they would have to abandon the lunar landing mission.

At present, the four astronauts aboard Artemis II were urgently reviewing the lander’s emergency repair manual and formulating possible repair plans, while the ground team was tirelessly at work.

The astronauts were still unaware that they had narrowly escaped being burned to a crisp by the rocket. After the SRB investigation, ground control chose to block this news. They only knew that the booster separated early due to a sensor anomaly and had no idea that they had just skirted death.

Up to this point, they were still diligently striving to complete their mission.

...

"How far away do you think Artemis II is from us?"

"At least 10,000 kilometers, right? And we don’t even know in which direction. Space is three-dimensional, not a flat surface like the ocean."

Unlike the tense atmosphere on Artemis II, Dawn III’s three astronauts were relaxed.

Fang Lin captured a perfectly round photo of Earth at the perfect angle and was arranging his time as scheduled.

Thanks to multiple robotic Explorer missions and the achievements of Skylight I’s lunar orbit initiative, the ground team had a very thorough understanding of the landing site, which was entered into the lander’s computer; as long as the system didn’t fail, it could handle almost any contingency.

Here, one inadvertent advantage of the separate lander became evident: if an emergency occurred during descent, the ascent module could immediately abandon the landing part and ignite the engine to escape, similar to the Escape Tower during the spacecraft’s launch.

Its fuel was sufficient to re-enter orbit at any time, ensuring it would never crash with the astronauts into the lunar surface.

Therefore, the crew of Dawn III was relatively laid-back, aside from daily routine checks and familiarizing themselves with the landing process, they were free to arrange observation tasks.

Fang Lin saw Zhang Zhiguang sitting by the porthole window looking down and knew he was memorizing a speech again.

"On behalf of China..."

The entire moon landing process was planned to be broadcast live to the world. After the landing, the first step and first words of Zhang Zhiguang would be recorded by the lander’s exterior camera before setting up more professional broadcasting equipment for the flag-insertion and live speech to the world.

The speech was collectively written by higher-ups and had to be recited flawlessly; each sentence carried a fixed meaning, representing the message the authorities wanted to convey to the world through the moon landing.

The speech wasn’t long, less than 500 words, but it carried great significance.

Moreover, at that time, a very significant object would be placed at the landing site. It’s said that this object caused quite a heated debate among the authorities, but it was eventually approved to be included.

However, from Fang Lin’s personal opinion, he thought it was a very correct decision to include this object, even if it used up some extra payload.

"Old Fang, can you help me see what’s going on with this?"

Following the voice, Fang Lin found Ding Jihua at the back half of the command module, hugging a laptop. Ding removed his VR and gently tossed the laptop over.

"Look, why does it keep showing an anomaly? I’m sure I followed the steps correctly."

Fang Lin saw it was the simulation control panel for ’Explorer IV’.

Strictly speaking, Dawn III has four ’crew members,’ with three ’people’ landing on the Moon.

The fourth member was currently affixed to the lander’s floor, a secret payload not to be disclosed; its name was "Warrior II-M," and while its aerospace registry number was ’Explorer IV,’ its factory nameplate declared it the ’Warrior II-M Lunar Version.’

’M’ for Moon, indicating it was a special edition of Warrior II for lunar missions. It had been listed in the moon mission’s payload directory since April, just moved up from Explorer IV to Dawn III.

It was named "14" for a simple reason: it’s the first ’Explorer IV,’ and the two numbers combined to make "14."