juicest

I have my 'Thank you for you donation' email, and my receipt email from paypal, but no confirmation email. Paid $10 on the 13th. Edit: Received confirmation email yesterday.

My limited understanding of orbital mechanics says you should fire directly backwards against your direction of travel, rather than straight at the planet. You reduce your speed to lower your orbit's altitude so that it's inside the atmosphere, and that drags you down. I think pointing at the ground is 90-degrees off of that, which means you're mostly just speeding up in a different direction. Is that correct?

After watching illectro's video for pointers on how to easily enter and adjust an orbit, popping open the orbital speed chart, and a little mid-flight Wikipedia surfing, I managed a few orbits at 144.4km Apo to 143.9km Peri, staying within 1-2m/s of 2178m/s. Aimed for the KSC as a landing zone but waited way too long to do my reentry burn and lost sight of it over the horizon at 15km altitude, headed for the middle of the ocean. Sort of takes on a zen garden, bonsai tree thing when you get into it. Also, Assassin2: Were you aiming directly at the surface of the planet when you tried to come back, or in the opposite of your direction of travel?