The Decision to Livestream a Nuclear Explosion! (Part 2)

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Seeing the thoughtful expressions on everyone's faces, Xu Yun felt somewhat reassured.

It seemed his arguing had actually helped a little.

There was another thing he couldn't say out loud: in the Rabbits' early scientific experiments after the founding of the country, almost no project had failed in its final test.

Whether it was weapons or aerospace projects, the Rabbits' first "setback" wouldn't come until eleven years later.

That was when Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center launched a Chang Kong 1 satellite. The Storm 1 launch vehicle failed because it had been rushed into service.

Objectively speaking, there had been serious problems with the project itself.

At the time, the country urgently needed electronic reconnaissance satellites. So even though separation component failures had occurred repeatedly during ground testing, they went ahead with the launch anyway.

General Zhao, who had been responsible for the satellite launch, had bluntly said that the odds of success were no more than around 40 percent. The Rabbits had therefore prepared for the possibility of failure even before the launch.

So the first major project failure in the true sense of the word was probably the 1974 launch of the Long March 2. Six seconds after ignition and liftoff, the rocket began to pitch back and forth with increasing force. At the twenty-second mark, it lost stability, and the flight termination system was finally activated.

The best-known aerospace launch failure, meanwhile, was the famous Long March 3B launch. Academician Long Lehao, chief designer of the Long March 3A, went gray-haired overnight over it—within a week, his jet-black hair had turned completely silver.

There were many reasons why these projects had failed, but one key point was this:

Many early modern devices had lower power and performance requirements, which also meant a lower likelihood of something going