Opening Heaven Spaceship

Normally, from the appearance of a spaceship prototype to its final design and mass production, the process would not be this fast.

In the human world, even a slightly slower pace would take more than a decade.

Throughout that process, the spaceship would undergo repeated testing, refinement, and optimization. Only after the accident rate had been reduced to its lowest level would it be mass-produced and introduced to the market.

But for Li Qingsong, the entire process took only around half a month.

Everything happened at an unbelievable speed.

After the first batch of 100 Flying Sky Type-1 near-surface spaceships was delivered, the second and third batches soon followed. Within just one year, the number of Flying Sky Type-1 spaceships flying above Luoshen Star exceeded 1,000.

Though they were all Flying Sky Type-1 models, they differed in size, tonnage, appearance, engine power, purpose, and other aspects.

Some spaceships specialized in carrying people and fell under the category of Passenger Ships. Some specialized in hauling heavier cargo and were Heavy-load Spaceships, while others were small, fast, and nimble, falling under the category of High-end Fast Spaceships.

Under the Flying Sky Type-1 series, there was no shortage of spaceship models.

But the good times did not last. Before long, the first spaceship crash occurred.

A Heavy-load Spaceship suddenly suffered a power failure during flight. A large amount of liquid oxygen and methane mixed together, turning into a massive bomb that exploded in the dim skies of Luoshen Star.

Not only was all the cargo aboard destroyed, but several clones were killed as well.

Li Qingsong was not surprised in the slightest.

Spaceships blowing up was perfectly normal. What was there to make a fuss about?

If Li Qingsong were to spend years or even decades refining a spaceship design as humanity once had, waiting until it was truly mature before putting it on the market, where would he find that kind of time?

Since that was the case, spaceship malfunctions and even explosions were inevitable.

But the matter had to be viewed from two sides.

Rushing into mass production and large-scale deployment would inevitably cause all kinds of hidden dangers and design flaws to erupt frequently.

That would certainly result in some losses, but it would also expose those risks and flaws with the highest possible efficiency, allowing them to be addressed in a concentrated manner.

The various hidden dangers that would originally require more than a decade of repeated refinement to uncover and eliminate could now all be exposed in less than a year of mass production and use. The efficiency had increased by far more than tenfold.

The downside was nothing more than blowing up some spaceships, destroying some cargo, and killing a few clones. Li Qingsong did not care.

Thus, on one side were frequent spaceship malfunctions and even explosions; on another, spaceship engineer clones working day and night; and on yet another, continuously iterated and optimized spaceship production lines.

The more violently the spaceships blew up, the more spaceships Li Qingsong put into service.

In the first month, Li Qingsong blew up more than fifty spaceships. In the second month, that number dropped sharply to only twenty. By the seventh month, not a single spaceship exploded.

After that first year, at the cost of more than three hundred exploded or scrapped spaceships, the overall performance of the spaceships manufactured in Li Qingsong's spaceship factories had more than doubled. At this point, he had even built the first true spaceship.

Powered by the newly developed high-efficiency methane-oxygen engine, it could reach an unprecedented speed of 900 meters per second, directly surpassing Luoshen Star's First Cosmic Velocity and entering orbit around it!

"Ignition!"

At Li Qingsong's command, unprecedentedly fierce, blazing flames erupted from the rear of the enormous spaceship, which still had a hemispherical structure, stood around five meters tall, and measured around sixteen meters in diameter.

It roared into the air. After reaching a certain altitude, it began changing direction and shot fiercely upward at an angle.

The numbers on the speedometer climbed rapidly until they reached 900 meters per second, or roughly 3,240 kilometers per hour.

At that moment, it was already fifty thousand meters above Luoshen Star's surface.

The engine shut down, and gravity inside the cabin suddenly vanished. The clones' bodies began to drift upward as though they were in water.

But because of their seat belts, they remained restrained in their seats.

At this moment, the spaceship Li Qingsong had named "Opening Heaven Type-1" was orbiting Luoshen Star once every roughly 110 minutes.

Those that could only fly through the near-surface space of Luoshen Star and could not enter orbit were Flying Sky-type spaceships.

Those that could enter orbit were Opening Heaven-type spaceships.

A few hours later, this Opening Heaven Type-1, numbered 01, finally caught up with the Deep Space and docked with it.

The clones and some supplies were then transferred to the Deep Space, completing the first space cargo operation.

Li Qingsong had carried out this kind of work many times before with Landing Spaceships. But none of those previous occasions had excited him more than this one.

Because this time, he was using a spaceship he had built himself!

From this moment on, he finally truly possessed the ability to travel through space!

With a spaceship capable of entering orbit, he could build space stations in space, construct zero-gravity factories, deploy vast numbers of satellites, probes, and telescopes. The range of his activities would be greatly extended, and he would finally no longer be confined to the planet's surface!

At that moment, it was as if a great door had slowly opened before him, as if the heavens and earth had suddenly become vast.

After a brief burst of excitement, Li Qingsong immediately made up his mind.

"I want to build a large Space Laboratory!"

At the current stage, a large Space Laboratory was immensely significant to Li Qingsong.

The reason was simple. Although Luoshen Star's surface gravity was low, it still existed. Yet some experiments and research could only be conducted in a zero-gravity environment.

For example, biological breeding, high-precision mechanical processing, highly integrated chips, and so on.

If he could have a large Space Laboratory, Li Qingsong's technological development would inevitably advance even faster.

At the same time, this enormous construction project would inevitably require numerous Opening Heaven Type-1 spaceships to take off and land repeatedly, making multiple round trips into space to carry cargo.

And this would have the same effect as the earlier large-scale use of Flying Sky Type-1 spaceships, exposing flaws and hidden dangers within a short time. In this way, Li Qingsong could rapidly improve the spaceships' stability and reliability, ultimately enhancing their performance.

Thus, in addition to the spaceships crisscrossing the planet's near-surface space, numerous spaceships quickly began flying at high speeds through space as well.

Besides the spaceships used to transport construction materials for the Space Laboratory, Li Qingsong also specifically dispatched large numbers of spaceships into space for high-speed, long-duration flight tests. He used every possible method to put them through the wringer, then every possible method to optimize and improve them.

Time quietly passed under these circumstances.

During one routine spaceflight test, Li Qingsong suddenly discovered something near a spaceship that looked like a metal plate.

The object was roughly one meter across and slightly curved, like wreckage that had broken off from some larger mechanical construct.

"This doesn't look like something I made?"

With some confusion, Li Qingsong maneuvered the spaceship slowly toward it.