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pTrevTrevs

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  • About me
    Space Shuttle Door Gunner
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    76th Space Shuttle Attack Wing, Shackleton Crater, American Lunar Territory

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  1. Right here. EDIT: Actually the IUS itself is from BDB, but the ASE is from the link above.
  2. That would be the MMU port from Cormorant Aeronology, and it totally didn't work right. I tried to cover it up with my choice of screenshots, but the port that I connected to SPARTAN actually broke off when I released the flyer, and I wasn't able to truly retrieve it. I'm not sure if I built it incorrectly, or if KSP just does not like the closed-loop part trees that get created when a vessel docks to itself.
  3. STS-51-G: Arabian Nights: June: 1985: Discovery's fifth flight to orbit carries a special significance to the nation of Saudi Arabia, marking its first foray into manned spaceflight. Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, flying as a payload specialist, will help deploy the Arabsat 1B spacecraft and become the first Arab, first Muslim, and first royal figure to fly in space. In addition to Al Saud's historic flight, STS-51-G will deploy two HS-376 satellites and operate the first in a series of small free-flyer Shuttle payloads known as SPARTAN.
  4. So I use this one: Technically I don't think it's meant for KSRSS, and to be honest it's kind of jank (runway lights seem broken and Vandenberg AFB isn't set up right), but it *does* work. I placed my own buildings around the Edwards map decal to make the base appear more populated, though.
  5. STS-51-B: Spacelab 3: With the outstanding success of STS-9 and Spacelab 1 the Shuttle program experienced a massive influx of new research opportunities, as the potential of the Spacelab pressurized module slowly became understood. Already it has served as a cargo space for Skylab freight on STS-12, but STS-51-B would fully realize Spacelab's capabilities as an independent orbital research laboratory. Somewhat counterintuitively, this second scientific flight of the Spacelab pressurized module would be designated Spacelab 3, a side affect of NASA's modernized STS naming conventions. Over the course of seven days in orbit, the crew of Space Shuttle Challenger would conduct experiments across a broad range of disciplines, including materials processing, fluid mechanics, and animal biology. The latter would be accomplished using a pair of squirrel monkeys and twenty-four rats, serving as live test subjects. Spacelab 3 would also be the first demonstration of the Spacelab hardware in a fully operational configuration, paving the way for even greater achievements further down the line... Short post tonight, both due to my lack of energy and the mission's overall uneventfulness. Hope to have more for you all in the very near future, however!
  6. Let me just say, I don’t have any Soviet mods like Tantares installed right now. Sorry.
  7. STS-51-D: Tower of Power: In 1974, less than six months after the crew of Apollo 19 left the lunar surface, the launch of the Skylab space station very nearly ended in catastrophe when a premature fairing jettison tore off the station's micrometeoroid shielding and one of its two primary solar array wings. Despite an impressive repair effort undertaken by the first two crews of the the station which saw the installation of a new shield and the salvaging of the remaining SAWs, Skylab suffered from a chronically short power supply throughout the 1970s, a problem which would only grow as the years lengthened. In addition to normal wear and tear on the electrical systems, in 1978 one of the four solar panels on the Apollo Telescope Mount failed entirely, as its connection wiring experienced a complete physical disconnect from the station's electrical system. Skylab crews quickly learned to work around this handicap by limiting station experiments and budgeting power usage, but by 1984 the electrical situation ahs become too serious to ignore. By now, Skylab was over a decade old, and its solar panels produced a mere fraction of their former electrical output. To solve this problem as soon as possible the STS-51-D mission, originally slated for deployment of the third Syncom IV satellite, was remanifested to carry the affectionately-named Power Tower, a new utility module designed to replace the station's aging solar panels with a pair of massive rollout solar arrays producing 25kW of electricity. Planned for April of 1985, the flight would last ten days and involve some of the most intensive examples of on-orbit construction in history, including two EVAs. The flight would use Space Shuttle Discovery, once again cleared for flight after her secret mission in January, and carry a crew of six. As the skies cleared on April 12, 1985, all appeared well except for one thing...
  8. STS-51-C: [REDACTED]: January 24, 1985, Space Shuttle Discovery is minutes away from her third flight into orbit. Right on the mark at T- 00:09:00- much later than usual- press coverage begins, with pre-launch commentators on a noticeably shorter leash than normal. As the first mission dedicated entirely to the deployment of a Department of Defense payload, STS-51-C is not permitted the usual fanfare and ceremony accompanying a typical Shuttle launch, and the general public knows next to nothing about its objectives. All that is released by the DOD's public relations officers is that the mission will launch from Kennedy Space Center LC-39A, deploy its payload into a higher orbit using the Inertial Upper Stage, and return home three days later. Until the USAF deems the flight worthy of being declassified, that is all they will ever know...
  9. STS-51-A: Two Up, Two Down "Say the line, Trev!" sigh Ace Satellite Repo Company, Spacecraft For Sale! Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about STS-51-A. Originally slated as a simple satellite deployment mission, the second flight of Discovery received a radical makeover when the two HS-376 spacecraft deployed in February of 1984 by STS-41-B failed to ignite their PAM-D perigee kick motors. Unwilling to eat the insurance payment for losing two spacecraft on a Shuttle launch, NASA organized an effort to capture both satellites and return them to Earth for repairs and relaunch. Such a feat had never been attempted before, but if any vehicle could achieve it, it was STS. The two stricken spacecraft, Palapa B2 and Westar 6, were both drifting in LEO, right where Challenger had left them months before, and their recovery would necessitate intricate coordination between astronauts on EVA using MMU jetpacks and the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System. Furthermore, STS-51-A would attempt to deploy two additional satellites to GEO on its flight, the first an identical HS-376 to the two spacecraft that were to be recovered, the second a Syncom-IV Navy comms satellite. In November of 1984, the show begins... Historically, this would also be the final flight of the Manned Maneuvering Unit. Despite its three successful spaceflights, NASA determined the system impractical in the face of the SRMS's versatility and- after the Challenger disaster- too dangerous. I have no plans to retire the MMU in my own service, but we shall see what missions I can scrape up for it. Today, of the two flown articles, MMU-2 is on display at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, while MMU-3 hangs suspended above Space Shuttle Discovery in the Udvar-Hazy Center in Washington, D.C.
  10. It's possible to just turn off the name on the relevant parts and use a conformal decal to make your own. In my opinion it even looks a little better.
  11. *sigh*, It's been awhile... STS-41-G: Radar, Radiation, and Refueling: October 5, 1984: Space Shuttle Challenger launches on STS-41-G. This busy yet underrated mission will see the deployment of an earth observation satellite, the operation of a new ground imaging radar, and a spacewalk to test a new method of fuel transfer in orbit. It will be the final spaceflight of FY1984, and will therefore also be the final shuttle mission to carry the -41 suffix.
  12. Eh, probably not. Might add Endeavour eventually, but I don't really have much in the way of plans past STS-51-L. I can see it getting hard to decide which orbiter to use for which mission, and once Atlantis arrives it'll only get harder to do so.
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