MaxKot

I made it! Thanks everyone for the help, especially @Streetwind! Aggressive turn to 45° pitch by 5 km did the job. I'm so used to the 45°-by-10 km trajectory for rockets that I wouldn't figure it out on my own.

Thanks for looking into my question! Sorry, I copied an earlier version from SPH instead of the latest one from VAB. So silly of me Here is the craft I was talking about. Here are the screenshots of the craft. I guess strapping a booster under the rocket engine should do the job and that's what I would do if the first attempt failed. But since the first launch showed it can get to the orbit, getting the craft as is to the orbit has become a challenge for me to beat

I built a delivery vehicle for my scanner probe. Stage 2 is somewhat under-powered and my first launch had some problems with the craft reacting to much to pitch controls so to make it gain some some speed I was turning towards horizon very early on. I didn't expected it to make it to the orbit and I was very surprised to see my apoapsis reaching 90 km. Then I managed to circularize the orbit with as few ass 110 delta-V and I had about 70 delta-V for de-orbiting and landing after separating the probe. The delivery vehicle craft had the battery packs and solar panels placed on the outside and they burned on re-entry. Other than that the delivery vehicle landed nicely on the KSC runway. My delight was ruined when I switched to the probe to see that I completely forgot to place some solar panels on the probe. I loaded an earlier save, added the solar panels on the probe and now I can't make it to the orbit again. You can see the updated ship here. The ship was built in KSP 1.11.2 with MechJeb 2 2.12.0.0, SCANsat v20.4 and Kerbal Engineer Redux 1.8.3. The changes after reaching the orbit on the first attempt are the following: 1. I moved two OX-STAT panels and two Z-100 battery packs to the inside of the cargo bay. 2. I added six OX-4L 1x6 solar panels on the probe. 3. I removed monopropellant from the cockpit. 4. I removed all items from the pilots inventory (EVA jetpack and EVA experiments kit). I only had one crew member, a pilot, on both the successful attempt and the later attempts. Could someone please explain what ascend profile should I use for this craft? The added weight from the solar panels is small and somewhat compensated by removing the monopropellant and inventory items so I think the reason I can't even reach a circular orbit now is the ascend profile.