Chapter 759 - 731 Artemis

"Maybe I should wear a pair of sunglasses,"

Robert had just entered the satellite assembly workshop when the reflected light stung his eyes, causing him to immediately turn away.

The assembly worker following him closed the door quickly, blocking the external light. Under the specialized diffused illumination of the interior, the huge cylindrical object in the middle finally stopped shining brightly.

Without a concentrated light source, the "artificial sun" looked like an oversized mirror, but at that moment its surface seemed blurred, not as smooth as one might imagine a mirror to be.

Robert approached to confirm that its surface was no different from ordinary aluminum. It was purely the external sunlight that was too bright and the reflective surface that was too large.

The brightness of a cloudy day outdoors could also be tens of thousands of nits, far brighter than most artificial light sources.

"It looks like a huge roll of aluminum foil,"

That was Robert’s first impression of "Artemis," a 52-meter-high, more than 7-meter-diameter super cylinder capsule, weighing 157 tons and named after Artemis, the ancient Greek goddess of the night and the sister of Phoebus Apollo.

Its reflective body was made of aluminum foil less than 0.0045mm thick, but it wasn’t the common ultrathin foil. A synthetic fiber mesh was embedded during rolling, giving it extraordinary toughness, making it hard to tear.

To develop this roll of foil, NACA had poured in 6 billion US Dollars crazily over four months, testing material combinations at no cost. When broken down to Artemis’s usage, each gram of the woven aluminum foil cost over 46 US Dollars, surpassing 60 US Dollars with the overall cost taken into account, equivalent to the price of gold.

When John visited a few days ago, he joked that if one didn’t consider the anchoring effect of gold, using gold foil as Artemis’s material might be more efficient.

For Robert, however, that wasn’t really a joke at all; the softer gold was of course a more ideal material. Even now, when it’s pegged to currency, gold played an irreplaceable, significant role in aerospace and precision electronics.

Artemis was as valuable as gold. The cost of using it was extremely high. Still, the support for it was not insignificant. All of America was looking forward to Artemis’s launch.

When Artemis was fully deployed, it would have a diameter of over 1100 meters, with a reflective surface area of 993.4 thousand square meters, equivalent to approximately 100 hectares or 247 acres. It was unquestionably the largest man-made object in human history.

This was equivalent to the combined deck area of 54 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, or the footprint of five Bird’s Nest stadiums, larger than the Forbidden City.

According to calculations, Artemis’s effective illumination area reached 320,000 square kilometers, twelve times brighter than the Moon.

What did this mean? Besides Alaska, Texas, California, and Montana, the remaining 47 states of America were all less than 320,000 square kilometers in size.

There were 129 countries in the world smaller than this figure. Even the Island Country and Germany were only a bit more than 300,000 square kilometers in size. Without considering the shape of their territories, Artemis could essentially cover their entire land area.

When Artemis shined upon Earth, it would create a spot of light with a diameter of 315 kilometers.

If the center of the spot was planned to be in Harrisonburg, Virginia, it would cover the majority of six states including Washington D.C., Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia, benefiting 17 million people.

This was a genuine macro engineering project, so the pressure on Robert was unimaginable.

Of course, the pressure on Artemis was greater; once deployed, it would experience a light pressure equivalent to a thrust of 4400 newtons. If left unchecked, Artemis would fly past the orbit of Mars after more than 90 days...

In NACA’s estimates, at least 1.2 billion US Dollars per year would be required to maintain Artemis, higher than 10% of its cost.

"Mr. Wrightford, this is our control team,"

The head of the assembly center introduced several young people to Robert. This was a control team specially formed by NACA for Artemis, responsible for monitoring its orbit after launch.

Robert greeted them; the Artemis team would take on important responsibilities immediately after next month’s launch.

As a behemoth weighing more than 150 tons, the SLS Block2 that was to launch it could only take it to a 400-kilometer orbit, far from the geosynchronous orbit of 36,000 kilometers.

Initially, NACA intended to launch another booster to lift it into a higher orbit, but with deeper research, someone proposed a simpler solution: Let Artemis fly up by itself.

Once deployed in low Earth orbit, Artemis could gain thrust by capturing the Sun’s light pressure, adjusting its reflective surface to regulate thruster force. If operated correctly, it could self-ascend into the desired orbit in 5 to 7 days without expending much fuel.

This process was extremely important. A single miscalculation could lead to a massive loss of fuel at best, or at worst, Artemis could end up wandering aimlessly, never to be retrieved.

It was September 4 now. In another 20 days, Artemis would be transported to the launch site, and Robert hoped that nothing would go wrong.

...

"What, what is this crap!"

In the Presidential Office, Robert, who had just flown in, looked at the document in front of him, unable to believe his eyes.

He was suddenly notified to fly to Washington that afternoon, expecting it to be related to extraterrestrial civilization information, but to his surprise, the reality was different, yet the impact wasn’t any less shocking than if it were about aliens.

"We find it hard to believe too, but radar doesn’t lie to us, and there’s lots of publicly available data—this is real,"

Colonel Anthony from the Air Situation Intelligence Room pulled out the key document, proving the authenticity of the information to Robert.