Lu Yong (right) communicates with workers in the workshop.
He is a core member of the product development team and the general manager of the company. At the Xingjian Special Glass Company in the Qinhuangdao Development Zone in Hebei Province, Lu Yong, dressed in overalls, is busy in the workshop.
"You can't make a mistake, if you make a mistake, it's big!" Since its inception, Lu Yong's company has set a record for 20 years without a single quality error. Some satellites launched by China in recent years have used the company's independent research and development products - space anti-irradiation glass covers. This is the spacecraft's "talisman armor" that shields the solar cell array from the impact of high-energy particles and harmful rays in space.
However, 20 years ago, this was a fantasy.
At that time, Lu Yong ran a furniture factory and ran smoothly. Glass factories that produce aerospace and medical products, just across the wall from furniture factories, are facing difficulties.
At that time, there were many varieties of aerospace glass that were difficult to manufacture, which made Lu Yong see business opportunities and also ignited a passion for Lu Yong, who had the desire to serve the country.
In 2000, Lu Yong borrowed 300,000 yuan from the furniture industry to aerospace glass manufacturing. With a burst of energy, he visited a number of glass material research institutes across the country, almost traveled to domestic optical processing and manufacturing enterprises, flipped through books, consulted experts, and recruited technical personnel. After a year of hard work, the company finally mastered the raw material formula and production process of glass covers, and the products passed the provincial identification and reached the standards for satellites.
Half a year later, the customer finally came, but the request was to order "120 mm×40 mm" and "170 mm×40 mm" two specifications of glass cover sheet. At that time, the largest in China could only produce "60 mm×40 mm" glass cover sheets, while the company could only produce "30 mm×40 mm" size.
"Despite the employees' objections, I took the order with gritted teeth." Lu Yong said that it should be a backwater war, this is an international order, and it is a good opportunity to "get ahead" in the market.
At that time, there was no domestic inner circle slicer for the production of these two large-scale glass covers. Lu Yong led the technical staff to visit and learn from the slicer enterprises, and learned from the slicers used in other industrial fields, and finally successfully completed the transformation of the slicer, and successively produced the new specifications of the glass cover sheet.
In 2003, when he received a letter from the space department and was told that a previous batch of products had been used on the manned space vehicle "Shenzhou V" launched by China, Lu Yong had tears in his eyes. He bought brushes and red paper, posted the announcement in the factory area for the first time, and couldn't wait to cheer for all the hard-working workers.
In 2010, after thousands of experiments over the years, the OSR (secondary surface mirror) glass substrate was fully localized, and the price was nearly 90% lower than that of foreign countries under the premise of stable quality. In 2015, the ultra-thin flexible irradiation-resistant glass cover developed by the company saved more than 3 million yuan in launch costs for a satellite.
Over the years, due to the need to invest a lot of money in equipment transformation and product research and development, Lu Yong sold the furniture factory that had been operating for many years, and then sold his own house, and the whole family squeezed into his sister's house. The workshop production area is insufficient, so Lu Yong vacated his office and moved into an old van. This old van was used for 4 years. "The space mission must not be delayed, and production must be guaranteed first." Lu Yong said.
Along the way, the company has passed through several dangerous shoals. Faced with the danger of bankruptcy, Lu Yong has never given up. "I think it's an ideal, it makes you have faith and don't look back."
In November 2018, Lu Yong, as a representative of enterprises, participated in the private enterprise symposium in Beijing. Lu Yong said that in the future, more funds will be invested in research and development, and enterprises will maintain lasting vitality through scientific and technological innovation.
Editor-in-charge: Fan Junqing