Fourth of Jool Eye

[icekatze]

hi hi

In honor of the Juno spacecraft's upcoming flyby of Jupiter, I thought up the notion of doing a flyby of Jool.  Jeb and Valentina were all for it too, but since we were in a bit of a time crunch to get things done before the big day, we weren't going to be able to do things the easy way.  Oh no, Jeb and Valentina didn't want to wait, they wanted to go fast, and that means making a giant, oversized, inefficient rocket that could leave right now.  And I ain't never heard of this Hohmann fellow.

Above you can see the space ship on the launch pad.  Everyone is excited and ready to go.  Even Bob, who lost a bet to Bill during a game of Go Fish, is strapped in and apparently ready to get things over with.

It was a pretty straight forward launch.  And by straight forward, I mean straight up, since this monstrosity was way too unwieldy to try pitching prior to SRB separation, which also thankfully happened around 20,000 meters where the atmosphere is thinner.  You can see Valentina is eagerly awaiting the fireworks display that is about to happen when all the SRB's hit the rest of the exhaust, and each other.

Here you can see the stage 1.5 separation, as stage 2 kicks into high gear.  Honestly, getting this beast into orbit without a refueling mission was one of the hardest parts about this mission.  Not the hardest part, I'd wager, but certainly in the top three.

And finally the main engines kick in for the 3km/s+ orbital ejection burn.  It is really hard to get orbital angles correct without any kind of instrumentation.  The folks down at the labs have come up with a handy "old envelopes pressed against the monitors," technique of estimating angles, but I think I ended up burning too much propellant anyway.

Patching conics... Wow, I really messed up my ejection angle, but nothing a bit a lot more delta V can't solve.

And here we see our intrepid dare devils, perhaps only a mote in Jool's Eye.  Back at mission control, we were a little bit worried about whether we'd have enough delta V to get back to Kerbin.  We didn't have any tools to estimate the departure window for a flyby pass, not that we arrived when we were expecting to anyways.  We were all just crossing our fingers and hoping that the engineers had overdone it again.  Actually... and this is kind of embarrassing to admit, but we almost sent the ship off into interstellar space, but we realized the mistake and changed the flyby trajectory from being retrograde to prograde, or was it the other way around?

Anyway, we just needed a little bit of a kick to put the ship back on an intercept course with Kerbin.

So, in the end, it took more than 4 years to get back.  I guess that's what happens when you shoot from the hip and fly by the seat of your spacesuit.  Everyone looks real excited to finally be coming home so that I can stick them in another rocket and shoot them into space again.

Since I wanted to leave the nuclear powered cruiser in orbit (something about nuclear engines exploding in the atmosphere, etc, etc.) just in case I wanted to use it again, I undocked the command module and fired up the de-orbiting rockets.  I was a little bit nervous about whether the ablative docking port technology would hold out, but it didn't explode.  And in the end, isn't that what really matters?

Cheers!