Transcript translated from Mandarin. Broadcast live from Ceres Port, host Chen Yifei (陈逸飞), The Belt Times.
CHEN: Commander Wu, welcome to Ceres, and welcome to The Belt Times. You’re standing where Fleet Commander Kovács stood a little over two years ago, giving very much the same kind of interview. Does that feel strange to you?
WU: It feels earned, more than strange. Pathfinder proved the hardware and the route. We’re not testing anything Kovács didn’t already test for us. That’s the whole point of the name — a pathfinder finds the way, and then someone follows it.
CHEN: Let’s start with the ship itself, since most of our audience has only seen Shennong from a distance, docking. Walk us through it — how does a colony-class hull come out of the same programme as Pathfinder’s frigates?
WU: Same design lineage, same shipyard, parallel tracks from the start. Deimos was building both hull classes off the same drive licensing and the same lessons from the Kaluga era — Pathfinder’s design cleared first, ours cleared alongside it but took longer to finish, because we’re two to three times the mass. Pathfinder needed eight to twelve months once cleared for construction. We needed closer to two years. Bigger hull, more systems, more redundancy — you don’t rush a ship that’s carrying people who didn’t sign up to be tested on.
CHEN: And that’s really the difference, isn’t it — Pathfinder spent years at Ceres working up to departure. You haven’t.
WU: We haven’t, and we won’t. There’s nothing left to prove. The Kuzmin Drive’s been running at these distances since the licensing opened up. Pathfinder’s been out there for years without incident. Every hour we sit here is an hour of consumables and an hour of everyone aboard wondering why we’re still parked. We resupply, we finish the paperwork nobody actually has to process because the Council already cleared this under direct Charter authority — no permit queue, no Luna filing — and we go.
CHEN: Let’s talk numbers, then, since you brought up consumables. How many people are actually aboard Shennong?
WU: Crew complement is a hundred and eighty — pilots, engineers, reactor techs, medical. Colonist and specialist manifest is just under a thousand: agricultural engineers, hydroponics specialists, fabrication crews, the people who are actually going to break ground on Ganymede once we’re cleared to. All told, a little over eleven hundred souls. It’s not a frigate. It’s closer to a small township that happens to move.
CHEN: Our listeners have asked — and I’ll admit I’m curious myself — how fast does something that size actually travel? Are we talking about a leisurely cruise, or does Shennong push the drive the way Pathfinder does?
WU: People assume mass means slow. It doesn’t, not with this drive — thrust scales with reactor output, and our reactor section scales with the hull. We could hold a full standard gravity the entire transit if we wanted to spend the fuel budget on it. We don’t, deliberately. We cruise a little under that — roughly three-quarters of a standard gravity — and put the difference into cargo instead: hab modules, hydroponics stock, farming equipment. Nobody aboard is uncomfortable at three-quarters gravity, and everybody eats better on the other end for the trade.
CHEN: That’s Ganymede you’re describing — the farm colony Kovács announced back in 2100. Is that still the plan, unchanged?
WU: Unchanged. Ganymede is the mission. Everything on this ship — the hydroponics stock, the fabrication crews, the agricultural engineers — exists to break ground there and start growing food for people who aren’t just the ones who planted it. That’s not a metaphor I’m reaching for, either — ask anyone why this ship is called Shennong and they’ll tell you the same story I was told: the sage who taught people to farm, so I’d say the name picked itself.
CHEN: Commander, before we close — I understand you have something for us that wasn’t on the schedule when we sat down.
WU: [pause] We do. It came in as we made final approach into Ceres orbit, still being verified when we docked. Pathfinder has reached Jovian space. Both frigates confirmed, on course for Europa, first target under the tasking Kovács laid out here in 2100. The moment it was confirmed aboard Shennong, we relayed it onward — to CAI, and to Governor Liu’s office. As far as I’m aware, this is the first this has been said publicly, so consider it said here first, on your programme.
CHEN: That’s — Commander, that’s a significant thing to be sitting on during an interview about hydroponics stock.
WU: [laughs] It’s a significant thing to be sitting on at all. But I didn’t want to lead with someone else’s news. Kovács earned that headline. I just happened to be the one carrying the relay when it came through.
CHEN: Commander Evelyn Wu, of the Shennong, thank you.
WU: Thank you. We’ll see you from Jupiter next.
[Editorial note: Tianshui Wire Network and UN Weekly have since confirmed the Pathfinder signal independently. This transcript is presented in full as the first public disclosure.]