Rescued 3 kerbals from space, now 3 empty capsules clutter low orbit. How do I get them off map?

[Agent 86]

I have now had this great game for a couple of weeks. I have rescued 3 kerbals from space.

These now empty capsule litter my low orbit. How to I eliminate them from my global views?

Many thanks for your consideration.

Edited June 27, 2015 by Agent 86

[Kryxal]

Go to the Tracking Station, select them from the list on the left, click on "Terminate Flight" in the lower-left corner.

[Zyffyr]

In the future when doing such contracts, before exiting the pod use the Rename function and change the type to debris.

[Agent 86]

Go to the Tracking Station, select them from the list on the left, click on "Terminate Flight" in the lower-left corner.

Great, that solved the problem. Thanks.

- - - Updated - - -

In the future when doing such contracts, before exiting the pod use the Rename function and change the type to debris.

Great and thanks. I will try to remember that.

[bigcalm]

To my cost, I've discovered that the "Terminate" button is transparent and can select craft beneath it. Be cautious when terminating vessels as if there's another craft directly underneath the "Terminate" button, that craft will be selected, and then be deleted rather than the one you wanted. Squad -- please fix - it cost me millions in Shunts waiting to go to other planets before I realised this was happening!

[Reactordrone]

Recently I've been rescuing the stranded kerbal and then pointing my rescue ship to 90° and manoeuvring the ship so the engine is pointed at the target ship while I'm still pointing prograde. A quick blast of the engine at 100% thrust usually drops the periapsis of the pod by 15-20km so that it will deorbit within a couple of orbits.

In my newest save I've been able to rescue all of the Kerbins in LKO without leaving any debris.

[Snark]

To my cost, I've discovered that the "Terminate" button is transparent and can select craft beneath it. Be cautious when terminating vessels as if there's another craft directly underneath the "Terminate" button, that craft will be selected, and then be deleted rather than the one you wanted. Squad -- please fix - it cost me millions in Shunts waiting to go to other planets before I realised this was happening!

Yeah, I'm very cautious about "Terminate". Before I do that in the tracking station, I always click on the "show crew" button over on the right edge, to verify that the thing I'm about to terminate doesn't have any crew members on it. Did not know about the transparent-button thing, thank you very much for the warning!

A really simple UI tweak they could make to the "terminate" button that would make it a lot friendlier: Make it so that if you click it for something that has any crew on board, it pops up a big warning dialog that asks you "this craft has N kerbals aboard, completing this action will kill all of them. Are you sure you want to proceed?" Wouldn't help you from accidentally terminating something that's unmanned but valuable, but at least would be an improvement.

Normally I try to avoid using terminate at all, and when I rescue kerbals, I have them rename their vessel to "debris" before leaving. However, that's not always possible: if their wreck is something that's not a command pod (like a hitchhiker module, or such), then it can't be renamed and the only way to get rid of it is either to deorbit it or terminate.