Chapter 1096 Conducting Aerial Reconnaissance of China?

After receiving the order, Marville quickly got up and left.

O'Keefe also quickly returned his attention to the TV screen.

However, this time, he was more concerned about the duration of the show than the content.

He even took off his watch and put it aside.

One minute.

Two minutes...

In the end, this mediocre live broadcast lasted for about 18 minutes and 30 seconds before the screen was finally cut off.

In the studio, it also returned to the format of a general talk show.

Almost immediately after, Hannah Griinger, who had just been asked, also raised her head:

"I just checked and found that during the duration of the program, the target spacecraft should be operating in the corresponding orbit from the eastern coast of China to the central Pacific region."

"This result can basically correspond to the lighting situation presented in the picture."

To put it bluntly, it is a real live broadcast.

It is not made by splicing and editing of images.

However, this somewhat peculiar location confuses many people.

After all, most of the positions in this section don't even correspond to the sky over China.

And no matter what kind of black technology, it is impossible to support the signal broadcast for such a long time——

Even if there are relay satellites in synchronous orbit, it is unlikely to be positioned on the vast ocean.

"I remember... China should have a measurement and control station in the Pacific?"

After a period of silence, someone suddenly asked.

Signals from geostationary satellites are not easy for the ground to capture. Therefore, even for the United States, which has a TDRS relay satellite system, space-to-ground communications still need to revolve around ground measurement and control stations.

However, someone soon explained:

"Thanks to our... uh... efforts, they will soon withdraw from that measurement and control station. Now there is only one maritime survey ship."

China's Pacific Measurement and Control Station was built in 1996. In the following years, it ensured the completion of multiple space launch missions, including the first four Shenzhou spacecraft and Beidou-1.

However, due to its sensitive location, the United States has always been worried that this monitoring and control station will become a tool to monitor its missile tests.

Therefore, in 2003, the situation here is turbulent.

Although the outcome has not yet been finalized, it is already difficult for the measurement and control station to function normally.

Seeing that the topic was getting more and more sidetracked, O'Keefe quickly coughed twice.

After all, operating behind closed doors on someone else’s territory is not an aboveboard thing to do:

"Although these pictures claim to be live broadcasts, there is likely to be a delay of more than ten minutes... The actual location of the incident should be directly above the territory of China. There is nothing surprising."

This explanation is reasonable.

After a brief pause, O'Keefe continued:

"But... even so, nearly twenty minutes of continuous communication is completely inconsistent with the distribution pattern of their measurement and control stations... It shows that they must have some actions that we don't know about in terms of aerospace infrastructure construction..."

Aerospace infrastructure…

After hearing this word, the atmosphere suddenly became tense.

Everyone immediately understood why O'Keefe was so serious.

In fact, for NASA, or for the United States, simply launching a Shenzhou 5 spacecraft is not very good-looking at best.

It won’t pose any real threat——

Although it is said to be "the third country to independently achieve manned spaceflight".

But the gap between the gold content of this third place and the first and second place is still a bit obvious.

Mainly reflected in basic abilities.

China currently has neither rockets with sufficient carrying capacity nor satellite networks sufficient to support a complete space operation system.

It even lacks experience in large-scale aerospace projects.

It is still impossible for most countries to choose to cooperate with them on a large scale.

And there has always been nothing wrong with this idea.

Whether it was the International Space Station or the cooperation between China and Europe on satellite positioning systems, they were all disrupted without any doubt.

In the field of aerospace, China still can only play its own game.

And it is precisely because of this "no threat" premise that Americans are willing to show some face-saving generosity.

But now, everyone at NASA suddenly realizes that they do not seem to be able to control the overall situation as they imagined...

If the other party is allowed to build aerospace infrastructure.

Even if it is just a version with backward functions.

It is also equivalent to giving other people another choice.

As for the consequences of doing so...

Colleagues in the aviation manufacturing industry have already demonstrated it to them once.

Perhaps China itself will not pose a huge threat in a short period of time.

But the other party can rely on its huge market and some magical technologies that they don’t know where to come from to help other opponents who are also at the poker table...

All in all, the problem is huge.

…

It must be admitted that Marville moved very quickly.

Of course, China in this era has only a few launch missions a year, and some of them are purely commercial launches of foreign payloads, so it is not difficult to make statistics.

So even before the TV interview was finished, a summary sheet was placed in front of O'Keefe.

But facing this form, everyone was in trouble for a while.

There are only a few geosynchronous orbit satellites that meet the requirements in this not-so-long list.

And most of them have very clear functions and obviously do not meet the requirements.

The only one that can barely take on the task of relay communication is ChinaSat 22, which was launched in 2000.

In fact, its more accurate name should be "FH-1".

However, NASA was confused about what this abbreviation refers to.

On the surface, ChinaSat 22 should be a civilian satellite responsible for radio and television signal transmission and basic communication services.

But industry insiders basically know that this satellite is definitely for military use.

Malville also saw everyone's thoughts, but obviously held an objection:

"From the signal characteristics detected in the past, Zhongxing 22 does not have the ability to relay communications to spacecraft. It is just an ordinary communication satellite..."

"But... who knows if there are any new functions that have never been used before?"

Hannah frowned immediately:

"Besides, there are no other suspicious objects, right?"

The former obviously wanted to say something else, but her second half of the sentence was well-founded and could not be refuted.

However, someone else raised a different opinion:

"More than two months ago, they also launched a MEO orbit with four satellites in one rocket. From the perspective of the time window, it seems more suspicious..."

This person is naturally talking about the Qingluan satellite group.

In the publicly available model list, they are called HTS-1 to HTS-4 respectively.

However, these four satellites really do not have any characteristics of relay satellites.

Therefore, even Malville felt that this speculation was a bit outrageous:

"The feasibility of using medium and low orbit satellites for relay communication has been verified by Iridium to be unfeasible..."

Hannah, who had just disagreed with him, also joined in:

"Moreover, the rocket carrying capacity of launching them is less than two tons...which means that these four satellites are less than 500 kilograms in size..."

For a while, everyone's opinions diverged.

Fortunately, O'Keefe was still in control of the overall situation at this time:

"Don't worry about which satellite they used..."

With his statement, the conference room suddenly became quiet.

"Since it is a high-throughput space-to-earth communication...the ground station can't escape after all."

O'Keefe didn't look up, just looked at the table and analyzed:

"According to the communication window just now, the tracking and control station located in the westernmost part of their territory should be the most critical link...and it happens that this place is very close to Central Asia."

"So I will apply to the top to conduct a reconnaissance flight over this area before their spacecraft returns!"