Expedition

Time flew by.

In the blink of an eye, half a year had passed.

Testing on the three Gonggong-class spacecraft had been fully completed, with a small number of minor issues corrected along the way.

The Gonggong-class had no major fatal flaws. With comprehensive testing complete, it meant they could officially enter service.

More than a dozen Vanguard-class transport ships carried vast quantities of supplies to an orbit 400,000 kilometers above Blue Star, where the three Gonggong-class spacecraft were currently docked.

The massive stockpile of supplies filled the Gonggong-class storage compartments to the brim.

Additionally, twelve rocket boosters were mounted onto the Gonggong-class hulls. These rocket boosters weighed 60,000 tons.

Each rocket booster weighed 5,000 tons and carried 3,700 tons of N30 Fuel, enough to accelerate the Gonggong-class to a speed of 16.5 kilometers per second.

Of the sixty astronauts sent on this mission, half were men and half were women, clearly a ratio specifically arranged for a long-term assignment.

These astronauts were all married couples, between the ages of twenty-seven and forty, and were expected to work on Jupiter for around ten years.

Naturally, the journeys there and back would also take a long time.

Jupiter was approximately 630 million to 930 million kilometers from Blue Star. With the Gonggong-class's initial speed of 16.5 kilometers per second and maximum speed of 23 kilometers per second, it could travel up to 1.987 million kilometers per Blue Star day.

At maximum speed, a one-way trip would take 317 to 468 Blue Star days, while a round trip would take 634 to 936 Blue Star days.

But that was only under ideal travel conditions. After all, the spacecraft needed to accelerate at departure and decelerate before entering orbit, while supplies also had to be replenished in the Asteroid Belt along the way.