Just a tip on how to put satellites in orbit...

[Trenchfoot]

Make sure they are orbiting the target in the same direction as the red target orbit is... I've wasted two missions now 50k plus... I was down to 1m per sec burns and wondered why it wouldn't trigger. :facepalm:

[Pecan]

You and MANY other people. It's a point I make in my (not yet finished) Beginner's Guide, "Target orbits are also shown there for satellite missions – check which way around the 'blips' on these orbits travel; an awful lot of people get the heights and positions right only to find they're going in exactly the wrong direction!"

Too late to help you, but at least you know you aren't alone.

[ElWanderer]

I've managed to join The Retrograde Club even after checking the direction of the lights... not sure how I managed that. At least I had enough delta-v to reverse the direction. The higher the orbit, the slower the orbital velocity and the more easily you can correct it.

[42_aerobrake_passes]

Depending on how over-engineered your launch was, it's often possible to raise your apoapsis to be just short of leaving the SOI, then burn retrograde at the new apoapsis to turn around. It's the situation as large inclination changes (after all, going retrograde is basically just a 180 degree change in inclination); with the much slower velocity at the top of a highly elliptical orbit, making major changes to your direction is much cheaper, to the point of the saving exceeding the cost of getting your apoapsis up that high then getting it down again. With a sufficiently large amount of dv on reaching low orbit, it's possible to satisfy several orbit contracts with the same launch, even if some of them are retrograde to the others.