Can i go back to kerbin and left my spaceship in orbit?

[Newhoodboy3007]

Hello,

I am now with my MK1 in a stable orbit,

but i have a question. Can i left my MK1

in this stable orbit and go to my space center?

Thanks for answering

[Red Iron Crown]

Welcome to the forums!

You certainly can leave your ship in orbit. Just mouse over the altimeter at the top of the screen and you'll see a little menu drop down, select "Go to Tracking Center" and you'll be returned to KSC. From there you can reselect the vessel if you'd like to control it again.

[Deutherius]

If your craft is really in a stable orbit, yes - when it stops being an active vessel (i.e. you switch to a different, far away (2.5 km in 0.90, more than 25 km now, I think) vessel, or go back to the space center, as RIC said), it goes "on rails" - meaning it's trajectory won't change, unless one of these four things happens:

1) your trajectory is on a collision course with a celestial body (that doesn't have to be obvious at first - you can orbit low around the Mun at 4 km altitude just fine, until you encounter a nasty mountain that you didn't notice before)

2) your trajectory is intersecting an atmosphere of a celestial body deep enough* - the game figures your craft would reenter anyways and deletes it

3) your trajectory intersects another celestial body's sphere of influence (you can be in a nice orbit around Kerbin only to find out that the Mun will pull you in and fling you out into interstellar space 15 orbits later)

4) any combination of the above

These can be easily avoided, of course:

1) make sure you have enough of a safety margin above the ground on atmosphereless bodies (kerbal wiki usually has info on highest terrain - if not, consult kerbalmaps)

2) make sure your periapsis is not dipping too deep into the atmo (few km is probably fine, just don't overdo it) of an atmospheric body

3) always make sure you are far enough from any planet's/moon's orbit that you don't want to interact with. You can calculate exactly how far you need to be from parameters given by kerbal wiki.

*deep enough may vary - this used to be a minimal periapsis of ~20 km for Kerbin before 1.0, dunno about now. Different bodies will have this value different.