Wearing an exoskeleton and carrying necessary survival supplies and repair tools, Jiang Ling walked through the outer hatch of the engineering ship's central airlock and began her N+1th spacewalk.
Her exoskeleton's limbs were equipped with magnetic modules, allowing her to move smoothly without the aid of the spacecraft's external handrails. Stepping on the outer armor plating of "Home" felt unique, like walking on a meteorite. Except for the ground beneath her feet, everywhere she looked was a glittering constellation of stars, as if this entire tiny world belonged to her.
At the bottom of this small conical world, there was a caterpillar holding a hollow cylinder and gradually crawling towards Jiang Ling. Its body was covered with a snow-white orbiter coat, and its exposed joints were made of bright silver metal that reflected the dazzling sunlight - it was obvious that it was what Jiang Ling was looking for.
Unit 2 was quietly resting on the crawling robotic arm of the "Home." Jiang Ling easily climbed onto the seat of the open-top spacecraft. Its original name was the "Multi-Purpose Single-Person Thruster." The original model came from the renowned cost-effective Black Star Shipyard, but the basic parameters of the pirated improved version posted online had long since been completely distorted.
Unit 2 naturally cannot be the latest model that is just a new name, but it is not an old version with many safety redundancies installed. Its long axis is 6.5 meters, its diameter is 2 meters, its mass is about 10 tons, its maximum load is 15 tons, its maximum acceleration is 20 meters per square second, its signal radius is 10 kilometers, it uses hydrogen-oxygen rockets for propulsion and to change its flight attitude, and it uses a third-generation civilian vehicle-mounted fusion furnace for power. The rest of the avionics system was assembled by Jiang Ling himself.
It looks very much like the triangular boom of a tower crane. The main structure is three retractable titanium alloy tubes. The pipe structure can easily accommodate a lot of space debris, and most system cables can pass through the tubes; the driving seat is at the rear of it, and some lattice storage boxes are welded on both sides and in front of the seat. In addition to their basic functions, these storage boxes also have certain bulletproof capabilities. Under the seat is the fuel tank of the thruster, which is somewhat like a certain infamous piston aircraft; the three rocket engines of the thruster are further behind the seat, and their thrust will act directly on the structural tube, so the flight attitude during acceleration is very stable.
It is essentially a simple rocket modified from a section of space station truss. It cannot be said that it has no protective capability, but it can only be said to be useless, so people who often do outdoor work call it a "space three-wheeled rocket."
However, despite its simplicity, Unit 2 has all the necessary modules. Jiang Ling even installed a liquid storage tank for collecting excrement.
As she transferred her belongings into the storage box of Unit 2, Lin Shuang sent the available orbital data to her exoskeleton, and the helmet display began playing the estimated rendezvous simulation.
For this artificial intelligence, the unknown model of satellite is very likely a sphere with a diameter of ten meters. Its original circular orbit will become flatter and more difficult to predict over time. There may be debris around it, but those fragments will probably not have too high a speed. They should orbit the satellite in a circle, otherwise they would have flown to a higher orbit long ago.
Jiang Ling didn't quite trust the results of the computer simulation, but she still patiently watched the dozens of seconds of screen recording before carefully operating Unit 2 to separate from the robotic arm, officially starting this extraordinary and destined to be impossible extravehicular mission.
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