Chapter 704: Celebrating New Year’s Day in the Sky

Translator: Henyee Translations  Editor: Henyee Translations

Moscow.

Federal Security Service.

A man in a gray leather jacket was sitting behind an office desk. He held a fountain pen in his hand while reading a report.

Suddenly, he heard knocking sounds coming from the door.

The man looked toward the door.

“Come in.”

The door was pushed open, and a skinny man walked in.

“We have our latest report from the Foreign Intelligence Service, as well as news from the Federal Space Agency,” the skinny man said as he placed the document on the table. He said, “It looks like the Chinese have indeed succeeded.”

The man sitting behind the desk began to tap his finger on the table. He picked up the document and began to flip through it.

A minute passed by.

He put down the document and looked at the agent standing in front of him.

“That’s all the intel we have?”

The agent nodded solemnly and continued, “The local army patrols are too strict, there are also reconnaissance aircraft patrolling at high altitudes in the surrounding airspace. It’s too dangerous to get close, so we can only observe at a distance.”

The man in the gray leather jacket nodded and didn’t ridicule his subordinate.

He paused for a second and stood up from his desk. He grabbed the new document, as well as the previous report he was reading.

“I will report this to Mr. Vladimir. Make sure the Foreign Intelligence Service is on the lookout. If there are any new findings, report them to me immediately.

“Especially what kind of propulsion system they’re using…

“I want to know what it is!”

There was one thing Lu Zhou guessed incorrectly.

Even though the ground command center did go into chaos after discovering he was missing, after they heard that Lu Zhou was safe and sound in Skyglow, the chaos disappeared.

After all, he was already on the spacecraft, there was no point panicking.

It wasn’t like they could turn the space shuttle around and make him come back?

Therefore, after Hou Guang confirmed Lu Zhou’s safety, he readjusted his mindset and continued to lead the command center.

5 hours and 27 minutes into the flight.

When Skyglow was passing on top of China, they made contact with CTV through the ground command center. Just like they had planned, Skyglow sent a 25-second congratulatory video on New Year’s Day.

This video was originally going to be filmed by the two astronauts. But now there were more than two people on the flight. Nie Yun and Nie Yan didn’t want to pretend that Lu Zhou didn’t exist, not to mention Lu Zhou was keen to participate in an interesting thing like this. Therefore, the two-person video was changed to three people.

Lu Zhou waved at the camera. On behalf of all of the astronauts and the ground command staff members, he wished everyone in China a happy new year.

While Lu Zhou was sending this video to the ground command center, America, which was 13 hours behind Beijing, finally stepped into the new year.

However, countless people lost sleep last night because of the sudden news report by Columbia TV.

According to Twitter’s official statistics, during the SuperBowl, almost a third of Americans were discussing the aerospace spacecraft that was launched from the other side of the globe.

This was extremely rare…

For a long time now, aerospace was America’s pride and joy, it was even part of their culture. This wasn’t only because Hollywood produced so many science fiction movies, but also because ever since the cold war, no one had ever surpassed the United States in the field of aerospace.

However, the successful launch of this weirdly named aerospace spacecraft destroyed that pride.

Especially when people heard that the rumored Skyglow was using ion thruster propulsion!

Everyone was in shock and disbelief…

Especially people in the aerospace industry, engineers at Space-X, Blue Origin, and so on. When they saw the news broadcast, they could hardly believe their eyes.

NASA’s most advanced ion thruster propulsion could barely send an egg into the sky. Yet, Star Sky Technology, a company that produced lithium batteries, was able to fly a rocket using ion thruster propulsion?

Could there be anything more science fiction than this?

They wanted to believe that this was just an early April Fool’s joke…

In addition to the engineers at Space-X and Blue Origin, the NASA employees were also having a horrible time.

This was their time to enjoy their comfortable vacation, like taking their family to Hawaii to enjoy the warm sunshine. However, because of that damn aerospace spacecraft from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, their vacation abruptly ended.

Not just this, but ever since last night, there had been countless reporters gathered at the headquarters of NASA. People coming to work the next morning had to squeeze through the reporters and their microphones, just to get in the building.

In order to get rid of these annoying reporters, NASA held a press conference as a last resort. They invited all of the reporters to the building reception hall and gave this daunting task to a freshly recruited intern.

In the midst of the chaos, the conference began.

Because there were so many reporters there, the entire reception hall was a mess.

There wasn’t any time for the presenter to speak. The reporters crazily shoved their microphones and recording pens in the presenter’s face.

“Hello, I’m a reporter from Columbia TV. I want to ask you, is it true that China’s latest space shuttle is using an ion thruster propulsion system?”

“Does the successful launch of Skyglow mean that China has caught up with us in the aerospace field?”

“I want to know where the taxpayers’ US$40 billion per year is being spent on!”

“We did receive a briefing regarding the new space shuttle launch in China. However, they didn’t specify what kind of launch technology they were using,” the NASA spokesperson said. He twirled a pen in his hand and quickly said, “We will keep a close eye on this matter, but that’s it for now.

“But I want to say that a successful initial launch doesn’t mean anything. There’s also the orbital operations, return to the atmosphere, etc. The entire launch has to be completed, for this to be regarded as a successful space flight.”

There was a small commotion in the scene.

The New York Times reporter noticed a story he could twist, and he immediately reached out with his microphone and asked, “So what you’re saying is that the ion thruster technology in Skyglow is going to fail on its return? Is this NASA’s statement?”

“I never said that.” The spokesman opened his mouth and expressed his views in an ambiguous way as he said, “We don’t know whether or not Skyglow is actually using an ion thruster propulsion system. Also, the success of China’s launch depends on whether the astronauts can make it back to Earth safely.”

The New York Times reporter eyes’ lit up.

It wasn’t just The New York Times reporter, other media outlets reporters were doing the same.

The venue erupted in chaos.

Breaking news!

NASA predicts that there is a flaw in Skyglow’s design, Skyglow will crash into the atmosphere?!

The spokesman on stage was sweating, he didn’t know what to do.

As expected, this intern was too inexperienced.

Even though he tried to make his statements ambiguous, the reporters still decided to twist his words.

However, NASA wasn’t concerned that the press conference was in chaos. Compared to how media outlets viewed this matter, they obviously cared more about how Skyglow was doing…

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