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Hey, everyone. C7Studios' SXSW recap will be coming in two parts. Here is the first part, covering the KSP tournament at LANfest. The second part, covering the panel with NASA will be seen next week. Enjoy. One of the highlights of SXSW was the official KSP tournament at the LANfest sponsored by Intel area. The mission was to land as many Kerbals as possible on another celestial body, with increasing point multipliers for the difficulty of the planet. We were joined by a few special guests, such as Doug Ellison from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs, and Dahud Lefthanded, a KSP-TV streamer. While walking around the event I met a young boy and his father who had driven over to attend the tournament. I was really impressed by how well designed his rocket was. He had managed to move into third place early on in the tournament. From there on, he was neck and neck with the top competitors. The competition for second and third place was very heated. In the final moments, Doug and another KSP fan managed to pull ahead of the boy while Dahud won by a wide margin. Felipe and I decided that he shouldn’t go home empty handed, and provided him with a signed KSP shuttle. After the prizes were handed out, Doug decided to give his prize (a shapeways 3D printed Kerbal) to the young boy. He then sat with him for the next 30-45 minutes going over all the fascinating things that NASA was working on. He showed him how to bring up displays of all the gravity and temperature data for Earth in 3D using JPL’s Eyes on the Solar System software. http://eyes.nasa.gov/ As well as providing a tour of NASA’s current missions. He asked the boy to fly to Mars and pick out the landing spot of Curiosity, which he was able to do easily. His father was sitting next to him, beaming with pride the entire time. It was great to see a young person so passionate about Space and science.

Hey, everyone. C7Studios' SXSW recap will be coming in two parts. Here is the first part, covering the panel where members of the KSP team partnere up with members of NASA. Enjoy. Last Saturday, Felipe and I participated in the “NASA and Kerbal Space Program : The Asteroid Mission in Real and Virtual Worlds†panel at SXSW. We were joined by Jason Kessler, (Program Exec of Grand Challenges), and Jason Townsend (Deputy Social Media Manager) at NASA. There, audience members got to see an exclusive video that demonstrated the main stages of the Asteroid Redirect Mission in Kerbal Space Program. Starting with the identification of unknown objects, redirection of the asteroid, and finally some research! NASA also presented a video showing the stages of the proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission in real life. Jason Kessler also spoke about his work with NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge. It was really neat to hear him talk about how people can get involved in helping to protect the Earth, by discovering all the Asteroid based threats to human populations. http://www.topcoder.com/asteroids/ Afterwards, Felipe spoke to the crowd about all the work we did in order to support the ARM inside KSP, such as major changes to the joints systems and improvements to the math we use to calculate orbits. I spoke a bit about how we designed the new parts, and implemented “The Claw!†Which will allow you to snag unsuspecting space faring objects, or even hapless Kerbals on EVA. We also covered the results of the community survey, to see how people have been affected by playing KSP. I was expecting to see that KSP had increased a few people’s interest in aerospace, or that a portion had learned something from playing the game. What I didn’t expect was that these numbers would be so high! Over 97% of respondents stated KSP had increased their interest in Science and Space, as well as 95% had been taught something about Astrophysics or Rocket science they didn’t know before. Both Felipe and I were really glad to see such a positive response from the community. It’s a real validation of the work that we do. Overall, the panel was a lot of fun, the crowd turnout was great, and it was an absolute honor to share the stage with representatives from NASA. Afterwards we had a great time meeting fans of KSP and talking to them about the game. We gave away a ton of Kerbal stickers as well. I’m looking forward to our next event.

Kerbal Space Program: Asteroid Redirect Mission is right around the corner! We are elated to have reached one of the final stages in the development of this free update - Experimentals! Tests are being made and things are being tightened up in this final phase before its release. Keep an eye out on the forum and all of our other social media channels for further news.