I wrote this up on my blog, but then thought it might be a good idea to share here, so you can all laugh at my stupidity... It all started when I began playing the game in “Career Mode†while my other half was out yesterday evening. In-between firing numerous sub-orbital and orbital tests to score “science points†with meagre hardware, I ran into and out of the house, gathering our children, and putting them to bed. Once out of the way the real point scoring could begin, with an attempted moon landing (or “Mun landingâ€Â, in the cartoon world of Kerbal Space Programâ€Â). While inventing the Heath Robinson-esque contraption in the vehicle assembly building, I couldn’t help thinking of Kennedy’s speech – “We choose to go to the Mun not because it is easy, but because we are stupid, and we should really be doing the washing upâ€Â. Almost unbelievably, I landed on the moon at my first attempt. It was incredibly tight on fuel and electricity, and navigation was performed in the same manner as Tom Hanks in Apollo 13 – pointing the rocket in an approximate direction, and giving it some welly. More by luck than judgement, we scored a free return braking manoeuvre into Mun orbit, and had just enough fuel after filling our pockets with dirt to fall back towards home, and spash down with applause and broad smiles. There’s a saying about pride coming before a fall, isn’t there. The moon shot scored a lot of points. There’s a second moon in the game – further away than the first. With the points I won, I researched construction techniques, and engines – which gave me everything needed to build massive multi-stage rockets. The kind you would need for a distant moon shot. Half an hour later a much bigger, much more complex moon rocket stood on the launch pad, with a happy looking astronaut live on webcam from the cockpit. He didn’t look quite so happy when the launch aborted a few thousand feet above the pad. I think the correct term would be “induced oscillation†– the entire rocket turned into a jelly as it picked up speed, and the autopilot chased the problem – essentially shaking the entire thing apart. Luckily the explosive bolts and parachutes worked perfectly, and my little astronaut dude lived to fly another day (or ten minutes later in this case). After applying liberal strengthening bars throughout the rocket (the in-game equivalent of duct tape), the colossus left the launchpad cleanly, and ripped into the night sky. Staging went wonderfully. The transfer orbit to the distant moon went wonderfully. Descent in the lander to the surface went wonderfully, and the little astronaut dude has great fun doing 30ft leaps while recording notes about his superhero-like abilities. We filled our pockets with dirt, got back in the lander, and headed for home. Confidence is a funny thing. Rather than go for a direct return to earth, I thought “I know, lets try and circularise our orbit, and land back at the launchpadâ€Â. While heading towards earth and playing with using some aero-braking in the upper atmosphere, I pressed a wrong button, and watched helplessly as the rocket engines departed the re-entry capsule, and we floated on, powerless. We still had a chance to survive… a remote one, but a possible one. The capsule was going to aero-brake, and it’s elliptical return trajectory would reduce. Each time it whistled past the earth it would brake a little more, and each time it’s orbit would come closer to re-entry. It was going to take days, but it was possible. On day ten of watching my helpless astronaut play cards in the capsule, waiting for re-entry, something unplanned happened. The tip of the reducing orbit entered the sphere of influence of the closer moon. Suddenly our orbit changed, and we were not going home any more – we were doomed to orbit for eternity – unless an audacious rescue mission could be mounted. It was already past midnight. Back at the vehicle assembly building we pulled out the blueprints for the previous mission, removed the lander, and added an extra crew capsule – an empty one. In bright sunshine the new rocket ripped into the sky, and departed for something never tried before – orbital rendezvous with a stranded spacecraft on an eliptical orbit. After much head scratching, and much burning of rockets, we ended up within 80,000 metres of the capsule. Given the vast reaches of space, and being millions of miles from home, and travelling at thousands of kilometres an hour, I thought that rather a success. After another half an hour of head scratching, and further burns in this direction and that, using the alignment of the sun and planets as a sextant of sorts, we ended up within 16 kilometres of the stranded capsule. Another half an hour, and the 16 kilometres became 100 metres. It would all have been much easier if we had invented RCS thrusters yet, but we had not, and it didn’t stop us. We also hadn’t invented docking ports yet, Jebediah – the now bearded and rather smelly stranded astronaut – threw himself from the capsule, and floated over to the rescue ship. We finally splashed down on the good earth at about 2am. Two hours to rescue a stranded pretend astronaut, from pretend space, in a pretend disaster of my own making. I then went to bed, and couldn’t sleep for an hour, re-playing the mission in my head – wondering how we are going to recover the stranded capsule.
