EuROSTAR: Europe's Space Program (RSS/RO/RP-1)

[jimmymcgoochie]

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Following the end of World War 2, a number of German rocket scientists were taken to America, along with some V-2 rockets and designs, to kick-start the US rocketry program; meanwhile the Peenemünde research centre and some of its staff were in Soviet hands, providing them with the foundation of their own rocketry program.

This didn't sit well with some in the British and French governments, who believed this technology should be shared with all Allied nations either as part of their ongoing cooperation or as war reparations; the Brits in particular were keen to get their hands on the V-2s that had wrought so much destruction in the latter stages of the war.

In another timeline, the US McMahon Act would lock the fruits of the Manhattan Project away from those who had played a crucial role in developing them, souring the relationship between the UK and US for years afterwards

But not this time.

This time a combination of diplomatic efforts on both sides of the Atlantic and the growing threat of the Soviet Union drove the Americans to not only share the nuclear secrets of the Manhattan Project but to provide copies of the schematics for the V-2 and early Wasserfal prototypes to their European allies.

This improvement in trans-Atlantic diplomacy led to increased economic activity between France, the United States and the United Kingdom, kickstarting an Anglo-French recovery effort to repair the damage done by the war and leading to funds becoming available for a joint rocketry research project.

And so, in January of 1951, the European Research Organisation for Scientific and Technological Applications of Rocketry (EuROSTAR) was born, operating out of Woomera, Australia due to the vast expanse of sparsely populated land around it, favourable weather conditions for much of the year and the minimal risk of accidentally starting World War 3 if a rocket went off course and crashed into Soviet territory.

Some enterprising engineers managed to "find" a Gloster Meteor that the RAAF had marked for scrap after a mishap during landing, fixed it up and gave it a fresh coat of paint before flying it out to Woomera.

It soon became clear why the plane was meant to be scrapped!

The pilot was able to bail out and parachuted safely to the ground but the plane was reduced to twisted wreckage scattered across the Australian desert.

With a largely British team now dedicated to designing a new supersonic jet, attention turned to developing a scientific sounding rocket to fly through the highest reaches of the atmosphere and gather data as it went. Several ideas were floated before the French Veronique, a sub-scale version of the Wasserfal engine, was chosen to power the rocket despite concerns over its reliability (or lack thereof). The Verity sounding rocket would be twice the size of the WAC Corporal already in use in the US and launch without the aid of a solid booster.

The first Verity rolled off the production line in March 1951 and was ready to launch a few days later. The engine lit on the first attempt and the rocket soared into the air, disappearing through the clouds.

Radar tracking recorded Verity 1's flight beyond 100 miles (160km), while the rocket's onboard sensors recorded the atmospheric pressure dropping to undetectable levels and large temperature swings at different altitudes.

With limited work space inside the assembly building, the next Verity launch would have to wait for the plane team to finish their work on the XJ-1 Trident. Powered by three Derwent jet engines, the Trident's goal was to push to the sound barrier- and beyond- and record what happened in as much detail as possible.

The first flight succeeded at breaking the sound barrier, cruising at Mach 1.1 in level flight, but also revealed structural issues with the aircraft and an alarming tendency to become tail-heavy when low on fuel, making it very hard to maintain control during the landing. 

The airframe was strengthened and a second flight carried out, flying all the way to 16km altitude before the cockpit began to depressurise and gathering valuable flight data as it cruised at supersonic speed. The longer flight meant even more fuel was used and the pilot barely managed to keep the plane under control during the approach and landing. Something will need to be done to make this plane less of a deathtrap.

A second Verity was ready to launch by late August, carrying a much heavier payload to about 106km.

Thermometers and barometers are all well and good, but what effects does exposure to microgravity in space have on living organisms? Two lab rats were about to find out atop the first Verity S rocket designed to return its payload to the surface under a parachute. The Veronique's success streak continued for a third launch and the mission was a go.

The return capsule separated as planned and parachuted safely to the ground a few miles from Woomera.

With the rats unharmed by their trip to space, more launches will be done with different animals to compare the results. The capsule is large enough to hold a variety of small animals such as mice, insects or possibly a cat, though the ethics board might have something to say about that last one.

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Full album: https://imgur.com/a/CyOZZ61

More nations have joined EuROSTAR since its inception including Spain, Italy and- West Germany?

[jimmymcgoochie]

Another Verity S carried an ant farm into space and back. The ants didn't seem to mind.

Before it became the V-2 ballistic missile, the A-4 was used to send cameras into space. Missile-based photoreconnaissance is probably not the way forward, but you never know until you try, right?

Plans for the new heavy sounding rocket, the SR-2 Eagle, were in their early stages when a delegation of German rocket scientists arrived at Woomera. Not everyone was happy about this development given recent history, but with the ever-present threat of a Soviet invasion into West Germany and then the rest of western Europe, any contribution West Germany could provide to improve the security of western Europe would be to their mutual advantage.

The new arrivals were quickly integrated into the SR-2 team and after some negotiating the rocket's name was changed to Adler, the German word for eagle. Several variants of the design were created to fulfil different mission requirements, though all shared the same basic design and carried a camera assembly in an internal payload bay which would be released after engine shutoff and parachute back to the ground with the main avionics unit.

The launch travelled several hundred miles downrange before the return capsule landed safely under its parachute. Finding it in the middle of the desert took a while though...

A second launch a few months later went further still.

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At some point I noticed that the Adler had a mass spectrometry experiment on it even though I haven't unlocked that yet in this save. Strange that nothing stopped me from doing that, it seems rather exploitable...

The SR-3 Verity also got an upgrade with the addition of a second stage to create the SR-4 Viscount. This second stage is powered by a Sprite peroxide rocket motor originally developed by de Havilland as a rocket-assisted takeoff (RATO) booster for the Comet jet airliner.

This second stage increased the payload capacity and maximum altitude over the Verity, without taking any longer to build or costing any more than the Verity S with the biological sample capsule.

The next rocket launch was a Verity S, which got away on the second attempt after an engine fault forced the first launch to be scrubbed and the engine repaired. A rabbit was sent into space this time, with the capsule triple-checked to make sure it couldn't escape after landing; Australia has history with rabbits...

A newly developed jet engine has been shipped out to Woomera from Rolls Royce in the UK. The Avon, an axial flow turbojet, promises significantly more thrust than the Derwent and a significantly faster top speed. Rather than build a brand new plane, engineers took the existing XJ-1 Trident and replaced the three Derwents with two Avons to create the XJ-2 Geminus.

The new engines increased the top speed from about 350m/s to just over 500m/s, a marked improvement.

A flurry of rocket launches followed:

A biological sample capsule was added to the Adler's return section and a few frogs got to ride into space along with the camera.

The XJ-2 made several flights but quickly ran into fuel issues- specifically, not enough of it- as it was pushed to faster cruise speeds. Something different will be needed in order to fly even faster and higher.

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Full album: https://imgur.com/a/0ApvDdD

A rocket-powered plane is in development, designed to be carried up to altitude by an old Lincoln bomber retrofitted with jet engines and then released to fly on its own. It should be ready for its first flight before the end of 1953.

Just as soon as the scale models stop crashing every time they try to land.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Another brand new rocket design took to the launchpad. And by brand new I of course mean "stick the return-y bit from the Verity S on top of a Viscount and call it a Viscount S".

With that done, attention turned to the task of launching a rocket a whopping 3000km downrange from the launch site; by an interesting coincidence, most of the land area of both the UK and France is within 3000km of Moscow. These facts are entirely unrelated.

The launch surpassed the goal, reaching around 3500km distance in total and setting an altitude record in the process.

Another Adler launch gave another species the opportunity to experience the wonders of spaceflight. This time it was the turn of Hammy the hamster, who definitely wasn't "borrowed" from one of the researchers' children while they were at school.

It's fine, Hammy will be back home safe by lunchtime and nobody will be any the wiser-

...oh.

Oh no...

The abort sequence was triggered and the return capsule detached and deployed its parachute, but there just wasn't enough altitude for the chute to open fully meaning the impact was at an unsurvivable 45m/s instead of the usual 6.

(The scientist who "volunteered" Hammy for this flight is now frantically driving around nearby pet shops looking for an identical looking hamster.)

In other news, the Avon jet engines on the XJ-2 Geminus have received a significant upgrade with the addition of afterburners, boosting the plane's top speed to beyond Mach 2 at the cost of significantly higher fuel consumption to the extent that the first flight actually ran out of fuel shortly before landing.

Faster flights will require more fuel so drop tanks will be added in future.

In what could have been an unfortunate repeat of the previous attempt, the next Adler P suffered an engine failure on the launchpad and had to be rolled back and repaired before launching on the second attempt.

This run of low reliability on the A-4 engine is just one reason why efforts are being made to accelerate the development of a replacement: the best candidate so far seems to be a combination of kerosene and high test peroxide (HTP) which has a rather low ISP but makes up for it with simplicity- decomposed HTP can be used to spin the turbopumps and is hypergolic with kerosene- and a dense oxidiser allowing a lot of propellant in a smaller tank volume; it also simplifies the RCS system which also runs on HTP.

But that's a story for another day.

The XJ-2A reached 600m/s and sustained it for several minutes, a feat that it will repeat several more times to gather data on Mach 2 flight.

Another new* rocket design, the Adler Q adds a larger capsule for a larger animal in a double-height payload bay. It was the turn of Lucky the golden labrador to take to the sky.

The mission proceeded without incident.

The more advanced capsule needs significantly longer to generate the full suite of data, suborbital missions won't be enough. The photographic camera array is also reaching the limits of its utility, there are only so many pictures you can take of the same areas around Woomera before they cease to be useful.

All four pilots- Walter, Romano, Elise and Horvath- took the XJ-2A out for a Mach 2 cruise around the Outback. They were all slightly concerned by the temperature warning lights but completed their designated runs and gathered all the data necessary to design the next generation of high-speed aircraft.

Pilot training has already begun for the new high-speed, high-altitude plane.

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Full album: https://imgur.com/a/f2YyAZR

A deal has been struck to import a few pump-fed XLR-11 engines, as used on the X-1 rocketplane in the USA, for use on the new plane. Discussions are ongoing about acquiring XLR-25s from the short-lived X-2 project as well as for a large booster engine for use on a rocket, though the latter will likely be too expensive in the short term.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Misnamed Adler Q montage!

Each one did a contract and gathered a moderate quantity of science.

An upgrade to the Veronique engine changed its propellants to increase ISP. This upgraded engine immediately failed on the first launch, though it worked second time around.

The first XLR-11 rocketplane engines arrived from the US, but there's no plane to use them on- or is there? The XJ-2 Geminus is no longer useful as a jet, but its flight characteristics are good and it should be good enough to do some low-level rocketplane stuff while a new plane is under construction.

So, naturally, on the first flight this happened:

It turned out to be very unstable due to a weight distribution issue and the pilot only just managed to regain control and fly back to Woomera.

The next launch would send a small monkey up to 3000m/s in space aboard a DR-1 Horizon SP.

Or at least, it would have if the new Veronique hadn't failed again. The monkey returned a lot sooner than planned and no data was gained.

An identical rocket was ready to go a few months later and this one actually worked!

Construction of the new XR-3 Gyrfalcon high-performance rocketplane was completed in early 1955, featuring a novel wing design: it is in effect a biplane with the lower wing swept backwards and the upper one swept forwards, linked at the wingtips. The lower wing is equipped with full-length flaps to make landing much easier, while the upper wing has the pitch and roll controls along with a pair of canards near the nose. Powered by a new and more powerful XLR-25 engine and with a pressurised cockpit able to fly up to 75km, it's a substantial upgrade over the jerry-rigged XR-2.

Pilot Elise was first to take it out for a spin.

Literally.

A momentary fault in the flight control systems made the plane develop an uncontrollable pitch-up force that quickly turned into a tumble, but Elise dragged it back under control and managed to complete the rest of the flight.

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And by fault in the flight control systems I mean I switched off atmospheric autopilot by accident and it immediately spun out.

Aside from the big spin, Elise's report was glowing: the plane is stable (when the control systems are working), glides extremely well and holds its speed at subsonic velocity, can remain airborne at under 70m/s- and immediately threw itself off the side of the runway as soon as the nose wheel touched down.

More work will be needed to make the Gyrfalcon more controllable in the air and on the ground, but apart from that things are looking good. And no, a supersonic rocket biplane is not an oxymoron.

A brief interlude in the form of an Adler P launch, sans return capsule for maximum altitude:

And then it was Horvath's turn to take the Gyrfalcon's controls. The flight went well enough, but the landing...

Once again the nose gear caused a violent left turn; unlike last time the right wingtip hit the runway hard enough to break the little wheel added to prevent exactly this sort of thing, and the rest was inevitable. Horvath ended up rolling sideways down the runway at motorway speed before the cockpit finally came to a halt, scraped and dented but substantially intact.

Pilot and science data both survived making this landing officially "good".

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Full album: https://imgur.com/a/SORAOu2

A replacement Gyrfalcon will be built as soon as the engineers figure out why the first one was so unstable on landing. Scale models are already being tested, though the results so far aren't promising.

[jimmymcgoochie]

The Gyrfalcon lives!

Landing stability issues were solved by switching to two nose wheels as the original single wheel couldn't take the strain. It still doesn't stay entirely straight on the runway but it's much more manageable and doesn't swerve off to one side and smash itself to bits.

EuROSTAR is investing heavily in R&D, bringing in more researchers to accelerate the development of the next generation of rocket engines, electronics and scientific instruments.

The new Gyrfalcon made frequent flights thanks to a rapid turnaround: from landing to relaunch took just 8 days including the addition of new drop tanks for each flight, airframe checks and mounting it to its carrier aircraft.

Once the engineers were satisfied with the data gathered from high-altitude flight, it was time to move on to study the effects of hypersonic flight to aid the development of a larger, even faster rocketplane. Following pilot feedback about sluggish acceleration after separation, Super Sprite booster engines were added to the drop tanks on two flights to alleviate the problem; the first flight reached the altitude limits of the aircraft at just over 75km, but one of the booster engines failed on the second and nearly caused a spin before the pilot dropped the tanks early to regain control. This incident along with the increased complexity and marginal performance improvements meant that the boosters were ditched for all subsequent flights.

The rocket teams were still hard at work making the occasional Adler heavy sounding rocket, but these generated minimal public interest.

Fearing budget cuts, Team Adler and Team Verity collaborated on the next launch nicknamed Adler XL, carrying the heaviest payload to date.

A payload record that stood right up until the very next rocket launch, the debut of the DR-2 Penumbra. Breakthroughs in kerosene-HTP rocketry have led to the development of the Gamma series of "keroxide" rockets which provide nearly all of the Penumbra's power.

A late failure on one of the Veronique side boosters couldn't stop this launch from throwing its payload (1000 units!) to over 1400km downrange, at which point a fault in the data recording system prevented any further data from being recorded.

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MechJeb's flight recorded actually stopped recording the flight, saying the data storage was at 100% which didn't happen on the 3000km downrange launch a while ago...

Nevertheless, it was a very successful mission and demonstrated that the Gamma engines were ready for use.

At this point, the plan was to use a licensed copy of the American S-3D (aka LR-79) kerolox booster engine as the first stage of an orbital launch vehicle called the OR-1 Goliath, however negotiations over the licensing costs were still ongoing with little headway being made. One engineer suddenly had a brainwave: why not use the current keroxide engines instead?

This concept had already been studied and dismissed due to a lack of delta-V, but the plucky engineer ran the numbers again with a few small design changes and realised that it might just be feasible to put a small satellite into orbit by adding a third stage.

And so the OR-0 Sagittarius was born.

Powered by 100% British Gammas- 28 of them in total!- and split into three core stages plus four boosters, the new design was capable of sending a small payload into a low Earth orbit; the orbit would decay in a matter of days and the battery last for mere hours, but none of that would matter compared to the PR coup of launching the world's first artificial satellite.

Artist's impression of the OR-0 Sagittarius launch.

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Full album: https://imgur.com/a/9M891O2

EuROSTAR has a bold plan that has revitalised the entire workforce: put a satellite in orbit by the end of 1956! Of course, they're not telling anyone outside the organisation that that's the plan; if anyone asks, it's a giant firework for the new year's day display.

[jimmymcgoochie]

It might be four weeks behind the (admittedly rather overambitious) target date, but Sagittarius Nova 1 is finally ready to launch on the 27th of January, 1957.

Depending on how you count them, that's either 28 or 1216 Gammas- 28 chambers in total, four Gamma-301 boosters, Gamma-8 first stage, Gamma-2 second and third stages.

Nova 1 was deployed into orbit successfully, gathered temperature, pressure and mass spectrometry readings and transmitted them down to listening ground stations. It was also easily picked up by amateur radio operators across the world until the battery ran out some hours after launch, attracting worldwide attention and stunning both American and Soviet space organisations who had until that point assumed that the public activities at Woomera were merely a cover for a military ICBM program.

Europe had just won the first leg of the Space Race.

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So what if it launched from Australia? If they're allowed in Eurovision, they're allowed in a European space agency 

Once the celebrations were over, work began on EuROSTAR's next rocket, a DR-2 Penumbra that aimed to accelerate to over 4000m/s orbital velocity and then return to the surface. Getting up to speed was the easy part, getting back down without being incinerated by the atmospheric friction... not so much.

At least until someone remembered an old Super Sprite rocket stage originally built as a spare for a Viscount launch but never used.

Once up to speed and altitude, the upper stage turned around and spin-stabilised the return section before releasing the payload and its deceleration stage pointing retrograde. The Super Sprite maintained its reliability streak and Lucky the dog endured a somewhat bruising but survivable deceleration and a spicy re-entry before parachuting safely to the ocean below to be picked up by an Australian naval vessel.

It was now clear that larger mammals could survive the rigours of a rocket launch and the harsh environment of space, at least for a while, so planners turned to the next logical step- putting an animal into orbit and bringing it back down, alive(!) and intact.

But before that, it was time to debut a brand new orbital launch rocket. The negotiations with the United States had concluded in late 1956 and Rolls-Royce began producing licence-built copies of the S-3 kerolox booster engine under the name RZ.1, which was now ready to power the first stage of the OR-1 Goliath.

With two of the Gamma-301 boosters used on the Sagittarius giving it a helping hand off the launchpad and an entire Penumbra on top, with extended nozzles on the Gamma-8 to match the Gamma-2's efficiency, Goliath was only slightly heavier than Sagittarius but significantly more capable, launching the much more sophisticated Nova 2 satellite into a polar orbit where its science package could gather data over the next month or so, its batteries kept charged by solar panels covering the satellite's surface.

Nova 2 remained operational for a whole month after launch, completing all its primary scientific missions and further cementing Europe's lead in the Space Race. In early October the Soviets finally launched their first satellite, a somewhat underwhelming affair that was on a par with Nova 1's capabilities but used a significantly larger and heavier rocket; meanwhile America languishes in third place after their first launch attempt didn't even make it off the launchpad.

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Full album: https://imgur.com/a/iexLXeG

Following a significant number of inquiries, work has begun on an upgraded version of the Nova satellite that can carry a wide range of ancillary payloads for commercial customers, a potentially lucrative source of income that could fund future scientific endeavours like, say, sending a probe to the Moon?

[jimmymcgoochie]

In a blinding flash of creativity, the larger Nova with expanded payload options was named the SuperNova. Any questions? No? Good.

It still has no guidance systems of its own, but has been upgraded with a Super Sprite kick stage to get into its target orbit as the Gamma engines can only be started once- for now.

The solar panel facing almost side-on to the sun was the only issue on this mission and even then it was a minor inconvenience that made no real difference.

Doing several contracts at once is pretty lucrative- let's do it again!

Next up, a suborbital test of the Aster- a special satellite carrying a live mammal to space and back again(!)- to check all the systems ahead of the full orbital launch. The Sagittarius rocket can't put an Aster into orbit, but it'll get close enough to give the new ablative heatshield a good test.

The Aster reached over 6km/s orbital velocity before the final stage cut out, turned retrograde and fired its retro-rockets for a full trial run of the deorbit system. Solid rockets can be a bit variable in their thrust and burn duration, however the capsule remained stable enough for a safe re-entry.

Everything looks good for the orbital launch; unlike the Soviets, our four-legged friend will be returning to Earth alive and (hopefully) unscathed by 24 hours spent in orbit.

Following the success of the Chimaera and Gyrfalcon rocketplanes, a team has been hard at work designing something new and even better to continue the push towards space. A new, fully pressurised cockpit should allow flights right up into space while twin XLR-25 engines will dramatically increase the speeds that the new plane can reach compared to the Gyrfalcon, which used only one engine.

The XR-4 Aurora is a more conventional design than the Gyrfalcon with trapezoidal wings, rear elevators and front canards and featuring a three-axis RCS system.

The first flight immediately pushed higher and faster than the Gyrfalcon ever could, peaking at over 125km and 2500m/s respectively. Romano wasn't entirely happy with the flight though, reporting that something had definitely broken on the nose during the intense heating as he descended back into the atmosphere.

It seems nobody remembered to tell him that the "spike" on the nose was designed to break away in a controlled manner if it reached a critical temperature, allowing it to take the brunt of the heat to protect the rest of the aircraft whilst improving the aerodynamics during the ascent.

Unfortunately, at this point Romano is the only remaining pilot as the other three have all retired. This won't do at all!

Damien and Olga will be straight into training to fly the Aurora, allowing an increased flight cadence and paving the way for a crewed mission to orbit in the near future.

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Full album: https://imgur.com/a/gQHkBwN

Design work continues for the next big mission, working name Blue Moon.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Somebody in the PR department decided to do a public vote on which animal should be sent to orbit aboard Goliath Aster: a dog named Jake, a koala named Kevin or a chimp named Susan. A slight oversight when setting the vote up (namely the fact that sending mail from Europe to Australia is really expensive) meant that all the votes came from Australia and Kevin won by a landslide.

The science team weren't particularly happy about this- and neither was Kevin!

The craft spent a full 24 hours in orbit, at which point the mission team realised they should probably have positioned the capsule so it would deorbit over Australia before separating the upper stage; as it was, it had to deorbit towards central Africa which was in the dark.

Aside from air-dropping a grumpy koala on some very confused residents in the middle of the night, the mission was a resounding success from a scientific, technological and PR point of view, fulfilling the promise made after Sputnik 2 of bringing our animal astronaut home alive. Getting him back to Woomera might be a bit more of a challenge though.

A few days later Romano took the XR-4 Aurora out for an altitude record attempt, aiming to push above 140km. A fault in the RCS system caused serious control issues and this attempt was aborted, however it still met the secondary objective and landed safely.

The fault was traced to the fuel systems and a fix applied. The braking parachute also failed to deploy again, but after several safe landings without it the decision was made to remove it rather than try to fix it.

Just over a week later, Romano did break the altitude record and breached 140km, though the RCS system still didn't work properly as the previous fix caused other issues in the fuel system that will need further work.

The next flight had no complications whatsoever and completed the hypersonic flight research. New pilots Damien and Olga just finished their training to fly the Aurora, but will now be straight back into the classroom with Romano to learn how to operate a space capsule in low Earth orbit.

Over the last couple of years the Goliath has proven itself to be reliable and effective, but too small to carry the more advanced payloads needed to push beyond Earth orbit in a meaningful way. A new rocket was therefore designed to meet this need, using a broadly similar layout but with a larger first stage powered by twin RZ.2 engines with improved thrust and reliability. Well, that was the plan...

The first launch of the OR-2 Princess, a name chosen due to the design being derived from an earlier proposal named Black Prince, was to carry a probe called Blue Moon towards the Moon where it would gather data and then crash into the surface to kick up dust and debris from the surface to be studied by telescopes. Despite the assertions from Rolls-Royce that the new RZ.2-Mk4 was more reliable than its predecessor, this launch suffered two separate engine failures on the launchpad, first one and then the other on consecutive launch attempts.

Although frustrating, these early failures gave some valuable insights that could be applied to the engine design for the future to improve its reliability even further than originally expected. With the modifications made, the third launch attempt was a success.

Another first for this mission was the use of a single-chamber Gamma engine to power the lunar transfer stage. Sometimes less really is more- the single engine offers a substantial delta-V advantage over using a Gamma-2 due to the reduced weight, while the lower thrust means that the transfer burn can be controlled more precisely.

And then it was off to the Moon.

A direct hit on the first attempt provided plenty for the telescopes to study, which along with all the data gathered during the flight makes this an exceptional scientific success. Bagging another first in the Space Race doesn't hurt either.

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Full album: https://imgur.com/a/hX8b77z

Feeling somewhat left out by the almost entirely British Princess, a French team have been hard at work developing their own rocket engines and have taken a leaf out of the Gamma's book by designing variants of the same engine optimised for sea level and vacuum performance. Designs for the OR-3 are already being drawn up and these new Viking engines could be the key to creating a rocket to rival the mighty Sovlet R-7.

[jimmymcgoochie]

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A spot of prototyping before the report proper.

Just ignore the fact that the first stage engines (RZ.2) are basically American (LR-79/S-3D) and the third stage engines (X-405H/Vega) actually are American. There are only so many European engines in RP-1 and only so far you can go with Gammas.

And while I'm here:

Launch abort testing to ensure that the capsule can be thrown free on the launchpad and still deploy its parachutes in time. It took a few attempts to get that second bit working.

The Goliath has had an upgrade- the Mk2 version does without the side boosters as the improved RZ.2-Mk4 has enough power to lift it by itself, though the initial TWR isn't great.

This launch put two satellites into orbit for three contracts, each of which removed the vessel once its parameters were met. Don't ask how that works. Just don't.

Not all Goliath launches will be using the Mk2 configuration, such as this: the first Nebula imaging satellite which is going into a polar orbit and so needs all the help it can get.

Yes, it's just three cameras stuck together, but think of all the science! It remained in orbit for a day and used up all its film before the return capsule was launched back down to Earth.

Next to launch was a Princess rocket carrying a SuperNova satellite to a Molniya orbit.

This launch was the first to make use of an upgraded Gamma that can restart in flight.

Another Goliath Mk2 launched two SuperNovas at once:

And then Romano decided to retire immediately after completing Mercury proficiency training. Your loss, Romano, the first orbital flight is imminent!

With the most experienced pilot now gone, it fell to Damien to take the XR-4 Aurora out for a high-altitude flight. Turns out doing that X-15 proficiency training was worth it after all.

That meant that Olga Martin had the honour of becoming the first person to orbit the Earth aboard Dawn 1, launched by a Princess rocket in what's becoming my signature capsule-wider-than-upper-stage configuration.

None of that "landing before completing an orbit" nonsense here- in fact the mission spent an entire day in orbit before the batteries and life support started running out. Science was done and Olga did some broadcasts for listeners on the ground; admittedly most of the broadcast directed at Moscow was just her blowing raspberries at them.

In another first for EuROSTAR, the return trajectory was vaguely on target and the capsule overflew Woomera before landing about 200km away.

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The failed contract is an X-planes high that was automatically cancelled when first orbit completed. Should have read the small print...

A thoroughly successful mission. First crewed orbit on the 25th of June 1960, well ahead of the USA and USSR to secure Europe's lead in the Space Race.

Of course, the USA and the USSR will inevitably catch up and overtake in some areas, there's only so much EuROSTAR can do with a fraction of the workforce and funding. But for now, everyone is just enjoying the success of Dawn 1 and the rich bounty of scientific data it gathered.

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Full album: https://imgur.com/a/cfZqQdd

Contacts in the USA have discovered that the recently formed NASA had been funding the development of a new upper-stage rocket engine named Vega, but cancelled the project due to rising costs and repeated delays in favour of the Agena. Negotiations are now ongoing to buy out the Vega project and bring it into the EuROSTAR fold, giving it a new lease of life while dramatically reducing the time and effort needed to develop a new engine from scratch.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Rocket watchers at Woomera have been left bewildered by the launch of a Princess Mk3 late one night, since none of them could find any record of a Princess Mk2.

In reality the Mk2 has been superseded by EuROSTAR's purchase of the X-405H Vega project and subsequent incorporation of the Vega engine on the second stage of the Princess Mk3. Efforts to improve the Gamma series have paid off with the development of the Larch, slightly improving ISP and thrust while reducing weight, but the Larch-8 of the Princess Mk2 was found to offer less performance than the Vega on the Mk3.

Vega was unfinished when it was acquired and is still somewhat unrefined with reliability issues around engine ignition almost as great as those related to the Veronique a decade ago, however on this flight the engine worked with no problems.

This launch has some lofty goals- throw a probe at the Moon and hopefully hit it- which are only possible due to the improved performance of the Princess Mk3. The first Blue Moon probe was duly dispatched by the Larch-1Vac upper stage and then positioned with its solar panel towards the sun.

Shooting at the Moon is a tricky business, get the velocity wrong by even a couple of metres per second and you'll miss entirely. As the days went on and trajectory analysis was performed it became clear that Blue Moon 1 was right on track.

Valuable data was sent back right up until impact, with the only problem arising from the mission being a lack of bandwidth to send all the data back as it was generated- one or two bits per second at best.

Telescopes all over the world saw the brief flash as the probe impacted on the night side of the Moon, right on schedule. 

Mission accomplished and already mission planners are gearing up for a second one.

One Goliath Mk2 carrying a pair of commercial satellites later...

And then it was time for the Goliath to get the Mk3 treatment with a Vega second stage. Its first launch was another Nebula imaging satellite sent into a polar orbit.

A few days in orbit to take lots of nice pictures, then the return capsule was sent back down to land in the Australian outback.

There's nothing more to be gained from using this camera system, it lacks the resolution to get useful images of surface features.

On a more positive note, EuROSTAR's first interplanetary mission was launched aboard a Princess Mk3, destination: Venus.

The first of the Procyon science probes, Procyon Venus is kitted out with the best scientific instruments available and cutting-edge avionics that can function even in deep space, allowing mid-course corrections and full attitude control for the long flight to Venus.

The probe's RCS system is something of an experiment too, since the long-term storage of HTP in space has never been attempted but it has shown a tendency to slowly dissociate into oxygen and water over time when stored on the ground for longer periods. The next best alternative is nitrous oxide, offering slightly better ISP at the cost of significantly lower propellant density.

With news of a Soviet probe heading towards Venus in the same transfer window, it'll be interesting to compare their scientific findings, assuming both make it to Venus and are able to send data back.

Back on Earth, Damien is getting his first orbital flight aboard Dawn 2. More experiments have been prepared for him, but the big event of this mission will be the attempted rendezvous with the Nebula 2 satellite which is still in orbit, minus its return capsule.

The extra performance of the Princess Mk3 meant that the rocket's third stage had a healthy fuel margin left over to do some orbital manoeuvring and so facilitate a rendezvous within the 24 hour deadline imposed by the life support systems on this rudimentary capsule. This resulted in a much higher orbit than Dawn 1 to let the target "catch up" to Damien.

The final approach was done with the spacecraft's own propulsion system as Damien brought Dawn 2 within touching distance of Nebula 2, taking a few pictures as he did.

With the mission's goals all met, the plan was to return to Australia for a landing- until Damien realised he was about to fly over Europe itself and could "drop in on family" by deorbiting right away. By the time radio contact was established via the Madrid Deep Space Network site, he was already dropping through the atmosphere.

He flew over the Strait of Gibraltar...

...crossed over Cornwall and Wales on his way over the Irish Sea...

...and then flew over the north coast of Scotland and left the UK behind as he kept heading nearly due north towards the Arctic Circle.

He would later claim to have done the world's fastest Land's End to John O'Groats trip, a claim hampered slightly by him not actually going to Land's End nor John O'Groats.

By the time the parachutes opened he was somewhere east of Iceland and starting to regret his hasty decision to deorbit early. The Atlantic Ocean in late February isn't a good place to go unprepared.

Fortunately for Damien, and EuROSTAR, some fishing trawlers saw Dawn 2's descent and managed to pick him up a few hours after splashdown, eventually handing him and the capsule over to a Royal Navy destroyer the next day to be taken back to the mainland.

His ears were still ringing from the dressing-down he got from the EuROSTAR board of directors when the next Goliath Mk3 took off, carrying a weather satellite and a high orbit science probe that was quickly put together when no suitable rideshare satellite could be found for the very particular orbital parameters required by the weather satellite.

The Nova-Sci probe has a few newer experiments that weren't available for the old Nova-SolPolSci probe that was the second artificial satellite back in 1957 and will provide a steady stream of data about the Earth and the space around it.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/dUj0ecM

Some engineers have put their heads together and come up with a daring plan to turn the Blue Moon lunar impactor into a lunar orbiter by, quote "welding some solid rocket motors on the bottom and pointing it the right way before detaching from the TLI stage", unquote. This would have some obvious benefits- bragging rights at UN meetings, much more science data generated and time to transmit it all back to Earth, etc.- so this plan is being studied to assess its feasibility. Margins would be very tight, but it should be just within the Princess Mk3's capabilities.

[jimmymcgoochie]

A Molniya orbit is high inclination, high eccentricity so the satellite appears to loiter in the sky over high latitudes, with an orbital period of 12 hours. Extend that orbit even further so it takes a sidereal day and you get a Tundra orbit with less satellite downtime as it flies low over the other hemisphere.

Neither of them seem particularly useful for either Europe or Australia, except possibly for the far northern reaches of Scandinavia, but someone is willing to pay to find out and EuROSTAR is never going to turn down good money.

That launch went pretty under the radar because nearly everyone was focussed on the race to Venus- Procyon versus Venera. 

At first it looked like Venera 1 would win the race, but no signal was ever received and trajectory analysis suggested it hadn't got closer than 50,000km to Venus. The very next day, Procyon Venus sent back its first images and scientific data.

A fully successful flyby, launched on a significantly smaller rocket and at a significantly smaller cost. EuROSTAR is picking its battles in the Space Race, and picking them well. In keeping with that theme, the very next launch set out to capitalise on the Blue Moon's success by modifying the flyby/impactor probe into an orbiter. It wouldn't be pretty and it would push the Princess Mk3 to its limits, but the results would be well worth the effort.

The probe was fitted with cutting-edge solar panels that greatly improved their power generation while also slashing the cost of manufacture, given a suite of lightweight science experiments to maximise the chances of success and thrown in the direction of the Moon; the upper stage then pointed the probe in the right direction for its capture burn, spun up to stabilise it and then released it to coast all the way to periselene. With no guidance, solid braking rockets and the capture burn controlled by a timer since the probe would be behind the Moon and so out of communications, this was a long shot.

All eyes in Mission Control were fixed on the mission clock- they had calculated the time it would take the probe to re-establish communications if the capture burn didn't happen, known as red time, and if it worked exactly to plan- green time- it would take a bit longer due to the near-700m/s deceleration.

Red time came, and went...

Green time came-

Signal acquired! It would take a couple of orbits before the full details of that orbit could be pinned down but just getting any orbit at all was a huge success.

The mission had been announced as a Blue Moon and the world was expecting another impactor mission, so the surprise announcement of a lunar orbit in June 1961 caught everyone off-guard. To the Soviet Union it was another slap in the face following the public success of Procyon Venus and failure of Venera 1; to the United States it was yet another humiliation- not only were they losing to the Soviets, but the Europeans were using American rocket engines better than America!

It was about to get worse: the Procyon interplanetary probe was quickly adapted into a lunar orbiter and launched a few months after the Blue Moon orbiter, carrying a much more sophisticated science package and a full attitude control system, using its upper stage with a relightable Larch engine to perform the transfer and capture burns.

Procyon Luna was positioned in a polar lunar orbit, however Mission Control soon discovered the existence of a  "too perfect" orbit and some of the sensors couldn't complete all of their observations owing to the probe's orbit not being eccentric enough. The propellant reserves had been almost entirely depleted trying to resolve this issue, to no avail; the lessons would be learnt for the next one.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/PTtcIjo

EuROSTAR had enjoyed a string of big successes of late, but these had also highlighted the fundamental limitations of the Princess rocket. If we can do all this with a relatively small rocket, many had said, just imagine what we could do with something the size of the R-7.

With the construction of a new, larger launchpad now finished and the new OR-3 rocket now being produced to use it, they were about to find out.

[jimmymcgoochie]

In an ideal world, a brand new rocket would be tested with a dummy payload, a big lump of concrete to make up the weight or something similar, before being used to launch something important. Such a test launch would ensure that the rocket was fully functional without risking an expensive payload, but who has time for that nonsense when there are valuable scientific payloads to be launched and a Space Race to win?

Thus the OR-3 Kronos' first launch carried a real payload, a Sirius probe to the Moon. The Kronos was designed to use up to 6 solid boosters to give it a helping hand off the launchpad, however this payload is lighter than its 10 ton capacity so none were needed.

Sirius braked into lunar orbit a few days later, by which point the keen-eyed rocket watchers had noticed that Sirius bore a striking resemblance to the Procyon, had been mounted to the same upper stage that had previously launched Procyons to Venus and the Moon and then mounted on top of the Princess' third stage, all ensconced inside the Kronos' capacious fairings. It didn't take long for the calculations to be done, then checked and double-checked when the results showed Sirius would arrive at the Moon with enough fuel left in its upper stage to reduce its orbital velocity to zero.

Sirius was going to try and land on the Moon.

And it did.

In just over a year EuROSTAR has gone from just throwing probes at the Moon to putting one in orbit and now landing one safely on the surface. Earth's loyal companion has been studied in increasing detail, old questions answered and new ones asked in their place.

The next launch was also destined for the Moon with a radar scanner to map the terrain and an impactor probe to kick up some more material from the surface for telescopes to study.

It was later concluded that a guidance error resulting in a less efficient transfer burn, compounded by the extra weight of the impactor, resulted in the Procyon Luna Scan probe being left with insufficient fuel to reach its target orbit; it was left with an aposelene much higher than intended, meaning the scanner couldn't function for much of the orbit as it only works within 500km of the surface. Perhaps it was hubris after all the successes that had come before.

Next to launch was Kronos Draco, a set of four orbital relays and a lower-altitude Earth terrain scanner going into a polar orbit. Launching five satellites in one go is a record for EuROSTAR and indeed for anyone, but once again the Kronos didn't need the help of any solid boosters to launch the payload.

The initial launch was to 495km to deploy Draco Scan, which was duly sent on its way to begin its radar mapping along with some long-term science experiments.

With that done, the Vega engine ignited for the third and final time to boost the apoapsis above 3000km before the Gamma-powered upper stage took over propulsion duties, setting up a resonant orbit to ensure even spacing of the four relays.

A problem with the propulsion system on the third relay delayed its circularisation burn by several minutes, but a second burn later corrected the orbit to ensure that it was within parameters. Further refining over a two-day calibration period synchronised the orbits to ensure they'd stay in position with contact to the next relay ahead and behind. They won't cover the entire surface of the Earth, but they'll cover a good area and provide a connection to some vessels in low Earth orbit when they can't directly reach a ground station along with some valuable bandwidth for commercial operators to bid over.

If at first you don't succeed...

No impactor probe plus a proper transfer burn positioned the second Procyon Luna Scan probe in the desired orbit to cover the whole surface of the Moon.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/BYyW3cr

There've been a lot of Moon-bound missions lately, but with transfer windows approaching for Mars, Ceres and Vesta it might be time to try another interplanetary mission or two.

[jimmymcgoochie]

The official photographer was away attending the birth of his first child, or some frivolous nonsense of that nature, so there were no official photographs taken of the GeoNova mission's launch. As the name suggests, it's a Nova commercial satellite sent into a geostationary orbit, mostly to prove it could be done and to experiment with communications systems using such an orbit.

The results were promising and several telecoms companies have expressed interest in launching similar satellites in future.

Sticking with the commercial satellite theme, the very next launch carried a brand new commercial satellite system called Magnetar into orbit. Significantly larger than the SuperNova, Magnetar offers a mass and size budget several times larger to meet the needs of the latest generation of commercial communications satellites.

Communications systems sold separately, we just supply the spacecraft and the ride into orbit.

Another satellite market has been identified as potentially valuable- weather satellites. They're generally much smaller than the big communications sats and so a Goliath would be overkill, but their orbital requirements are quite different so there's no chance of a rideshare. With the Gamma engines now phased out and replaced by the improved Larch, the old Sagittarius blueprints were dusted off and given a comprehensive upgrade: new engines here, new engines there, new engines everywhere!

The Sagittarius Mk2 that resulted used three boosters rather than the four of the original, but still produced more thrust on takeoff. It also features a single-chamber third stage engine and upgrades to the guidance and electronic systems.

A new Nova-XXL satellite was also created, larger than the standard Nova but smaller than the SuperNova.

It's not as lucrative a market as for communications satellites, but the Sagittarius is pretty cheap to build.

Yet more commercial space operations, but this time with a Dawn mission to low orbit to conduct various experiments from paying customers. Just being able to say your experiment was run in space would bag you some significant bragging rights in some circles of academia, so it's no surprise that most of the customers are universities.

Following Damien's deorbiting incident on Dawn 2, it's not surprising that Olga is flying this one.

After a full day in space it's time to come home. Last time Olga landed within 300km of Woomera, but she reckons she can do better and the mission planners have risen to her challenge.

Most of the Woomera staff were standing outside, squinting against the midday sun to try and spot the capsule as it flew overhead. A combination of atmospheric variance, imprecision in the measurements and timing and a slight inclination mismatch meant that Olga missed her pinpoint landing- but not by much!

Helicopters arrived on scene within minutes of touching down, just as the air conditioning drained the last of the batteries in the capsule. A successful mission with the most accurate landing to date, but Olga won't be happy until she drops her capsule right onto the launchpad itself.

Spoiler

And then I went and did what I always do in RP-1: saw some big juicy contracts and made the rash and potentially ruinous move of accepting them. Lunar orbit in 5 years? /ooc

And then it happened...

A draft text for a speech by US president John F Kennedy leaked, in which he would commit the United States to the goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth by the end of the decade. Upon hearing this, a member of EuROSTAR staff scoffed and said "End of the decade? We could do that inside five years!"

Unfortunately he was on live television at the time, it got blown up out of proportion and then some bright spark in the PR department thought it would be a good idea to announce a sponsorship scheme where any individual or group that paid into a "Moon Boots Fund" would get their name written on the side of the Moon lander, engraved on the flagpole or stitched into the fabric of the flag itself. And now the governments of several European nations are publicly backing the effort while privately running around in a panic because there's no way they can afford this and it was supposed to be a cover story for making nuclear missiles and what do you mean the Soviet Union says they can beat us there? Fat chance, Russkies, you're on! Wait, is this live?

At this point it would take more time, effort and money to try and disentangle from the whole sorry mess than it would to just land on the Moon...

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/wqjTzKm

The huge influx of funding has paid for massive upgrades at Woomera- a second assembly line to build two rockets at once, improved research facilities, a larger launchpad to cope with the next generation of launch rocket (currently nearing completion) and more besides. Various technologies are being studied- hydrogen rocketry, improved heatshields, improved life support systems- and a design for a new two-person crew capsule are also being drawn up to give the lucky Moonwalker some company on the long trip there and back, plus the ability to fully stretch out both arms without both touching the sides of the capsule.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Spoiler

A sneak peek at the newly designed OR-4 Constellation.

The Moon's surface has now been mapped to over 80% coverage with more to come. 

(Side note, if you open the SCANsat window and switch to maps of the Mun, then go into the colour settings, you can change the cutoff values for the terrain map. By default the maximum is something stupidly low like 5km meaning most of the terrain is just white, but crank that value up to maximum- 16km- and suddenly you can see everything clearly. Tweaking the minimum setting to ~5km worked best for me, your mileage may vary but it's definitely worth changing the maximum.)

Another LEO cluster mission, Lyra is a quintet of navigation satellites launched by a Kronos into a polar orbit. They're equipped with some limited relay capabilities as well, albeit with a very short maximum range and the low altitude orbit will limit their coverage.

One of the two Vega engines failed on its third ignition causing a spin, but the Larch upper stage was able to recover and had enough delta-V to make up for the loss. The satellites were put into a resonant orbit before separation to spread them evenly around the planet, with circularisation burns over the next day or so.

By the time the last satellite was in position, it was clear someone had miscalculated: instead of spacing 5 satellites correctly, the resonant orbit had mistakenly been set for 6.

This might actually be a good thing though as due to the relatively low orbit correct spacing would probably result in the satellites being unable to communicate with each other. As it is, they can chain a connection the whole way along the network and connect to the Sirius relays too. Task failed successfully?

There was just enough time to get a Vesta flyby probe ready to launch, but the Mars and Ceres windows came and went with no launches; judging by the Vesta launch, the identical Ceres-bound probe probably wouldn't have made it.

Procyon Vesta is the first spacecraft to use radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) as its power source rather than solar panels, which would need to be prohibitively large and heavy to produce the same power output so far from the Sun.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/3rKCO43

Procyon has worked well for relatively close targets, but something bigger will be needed to visit Mercury and anything beyond Vesta. New scientific instruments and propulsion systems are in the works to create a next-generation science probe with the eventual aim of not merely flying past a planet but braking into orbit and studying it in far greater detail. There's also the small matter of landing people on the Moon in less than five years...

[jimmymcgoochie]

Commercial weather sat launch, nothing special.

The Larch-8 engine had a performance loss during the ascent, cutting its ISP in half, but this rocket has such a huge margin that it still easily made it to its target orbit.

Engine problems continued for the launch of the first OR-4 Constellation, carrying an Algol probe bound for Jupiter.

(ooc: I did this launch twice after noticing some config errors on the probe itself that I specifically remember fixing during an earlier refit, and on both occasions there was a failure on one of the Vega engines- first time another ISP loss, second time an outright failure on ignition. It still flew to orbit with that failed engine without too much trouble holding its attitude and the third stage even did part of the transfer burn.)

Despite the third stage losing an engine on ignition the mission went ahead as planned, flying off towards Jupiter with enough delta-V to attempt an orbital capture.

It seems the power calculations were a little bit off, three RTGs isn't quite enough to power all the experiments at once. It can still fulfil its mission, but it might take a bit longer to gather and transmit all the data.

Staying a bit closer to home, a Kronos launch sent a Sirius Mk2 lunar lander towards the Moon.

It ended up in a polar lunar orbit where it will wait for a suitable landing site to be under its orbit and in daylight.

Days later a Procyon Luna Mk2 orbiter is sent up on the new Princess Mk4- in a somewhat radical departure from previous models, the Mk4 has ditched the third stage engine and instead uses the third stage tank to hold extra fuel for the second stage, resulting in slightly improved payload capacity and reduced complexity at the cost of overburning the Vega engine a bit (though within tested burn time).

It reached its target orbit without incident and will be busy science-ing away as well as mapping the lunar surface with its video camera to find sites of interest for future landers.

Spoiler

Final scores for this report:

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/CvY3zXv

I'm off on holiday for a couple of weeks so there won't be any further updates until I'm back. Watch this space ()

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

Let's get back down to business, starting with another Magnetar commercial satellite launch.

Then it was time to land that Sirius Mk2 lunar lander which had been waiting for me to find it again in the tracking station and remember it existed the near side to be in daylight.

 

Two Sagittarius Mk2 launches a few weeks apart carried two rather different payloads- the first was an orbital scanning and science probe sent to a polar orbit, while the second carried a Nova-XXL weather satellite.

It only took a few days for the Nova-Scan satellite to sweep over the entire surface of the Earth, sending down visible-spectrum images of the planet that could be stitched together into a low-resolution map. This data proved to be very popular and soon a backlog of orders had built up for maps and images of specific areas of the world, both in data and printed form.

With the constellation of 6 weather satellites now complete, it's unlikely that any further Sagittarius launches will take place.

Despite the best efforts of the assembly crews, only one of the two Algol Mercury probes was ready for launch when the narrow transfer window came around, the second missing it by a couple of weeks.

The launch and transfer burns proceeded without a hitch, though a sizeable course correction will be required due to some issues with the guidance systems on the ground struggling to accurately plot the probe's trajectory towards Mercury. Trying to hit such a small target, so close to the Sun and with such an inclined and eccentric orbit, was pushing the limits of what early 1960s technology could manage, but with close to 1500m/s of propellant remaining for just such an eventuality there's every reason to believe that the mission will be a success.

Someone at some point realised that if the new two-crew capsule was going to be useful then it would probably help to have more than one pair of astronauts to fly in it. The long list of applicants was checked and double-checked before two lucky winners were picked. Welcome to the team, Rene and Lynda! Now get into that classroom for the next 400 or so days.

While they're busy with their studies, another new rocket was rolled out to the pad. Much like the Princess Mk4, the Goliath Mk4 has ditched the third stage with its Larch-2 engine in order to gain some extra delta-V; unlike the Princess Mk4, the Goliath Mk4 didn't keep the third stage tank in order to save some weight to help the relatively low TWR off the launchpad.

This launch is a bit special as it carries two small probes outfitted with cutting-edge automation systems and the hardware to link together in space.

Spoiler

The contract only specifies that it has to be a new vessel and that two vessels must dock; this is about as cheaply as it can be done.

Over the next day or so the two probes were flown apart and then together again, testing both the automated systems and manually flying them from the ground. Apart from a few issues with the two probes being unable to figure out which one of them was pointing forwards and so being unable to manoeuvre while docked, the tests were an outstanding success, paving the way for future crewed missions to perform some dockings of their own and opening up the possibility of putting a more permanent habitat into space which crews can visit periodically, or just giving them a bit more elbow room than a cramped capsule.

Behind the scenes at Woomera, a number of development projects have been running in some diverse areas. The Board of Directors had already intervened in Project Tharsis when the team had come to an impasse about what their new hydrolox rocket engine should be capable of, directing the team to split in half and have one half focus on a more versatile engine with the ability to relight while the other half aimed for pure efficiency and the longest possible burn duration. (This decision would prove to be particularly fortuitous...)

At the end of October, all the teams were invited (read: required) to present their progress to the Board, who were themselves under scrutiny from the various government departments whose funding still represented a sizeable portion of EuROSTAR's income despite the increase in commercial operations.

First up were the team tasked with creating a commercial satellite system designed to be bigger and better than Magnetar. Project Quasar would require launching a much larger Kronos, but compensated for this initial cost by offering five times the payload capacity of Magnetar and putting said payload into geostationary orbit thanks in no small part to the use of the relightable hydrolox engine created by Project Tharsis.

Putting a large satellite into an orbit that meant it would stay still in the sky to an observer (or receiver) on the ground had obvious advantages for telecommunications systems and many commercial entities had been clamouring for such a system ever since the launch of the experimental GeoNova satellite the previous year.

Production of the Quasar was approved unanimously and the first model was given a high priority in order to be launched by the end of the year.

Next to make their case were Project Polaris, who had designed a lunar sample return mission to bring back some lunar regolith for study on Earth.

This team had also created their design with the relightable hydrolox engine in mind, using it to power the lunar transfer and capture. They had even designed the hydrolox stage to be reusable for other payloads in a similar manner to the American Centaur, a feature that clearly interested several other teams.

Project Enhance was next, reporting on the development of a new first stage engine based heavily on the RZ.2 but delivering more than twice the thrust while also improving efficiency, especially at low altitude. If said engine bore an uncanny resemblance to the Rocketdyne E-1, well, that was to be expected- after all, the E-1 was based on the S-3D which had been license-built in Britain as the RZ.1, plus the EuROSTAR delegation that had ultimately purchased the Vega engine had seen several other engines including the E-1 and if some files related to the E-1 had accidentally been shipped over with the files for the Vega...

Regardless of its slightly dubious origin, the new engine looked set to replace the RZ.2 across EuROSTAR's fleet of launch vehicles. The team had modelled a new 150-ton rocket to replace the Princess, a two-stage rocket using the new engine on the first stage and a hydrolox second stage to achieve double the Princess' payload to orbit.

They had also run the numbers on an upgraded Kronos, again swapping to a hydrolox upper stage to achieve a 10% increase in payload capacity while doing away with the need for solid boosters thanks to the new engine's superior thrust.

Last to report were Project Tandem, whose work on the new second-generation capsule was almost complete. They had gone as far as creating a full-scale mockup with the correct mass and testing a launch escape system on the ground.

When asked what they planned to name this new capsule, the presenter shuffled her papers nervously and replied "Penguin". Seeing the baffled looks on the Board members' faces, she explained that the repeated references to a "Gen 2" capsule had led to the homophone "Gentoo" and from there to Penguin. Only slightly less confused, the Board approved the capsule for production.

With all that admin over and done with, everyone went off to lunch. Everyone loves a buffet lunch!

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/8XRa79W

Update- apparently Imgur broke this album too.

Edited July 28, 2023 by jimmymcgoochie

[jimmymcgoochie]

Most rocketry enthusiasts have heard of the Gamma, the British kerosene-peroxide rocket engines that powered the world's first satellite launch and played a key role in the first probes to visit the Moon and Venus. What most of them don't know is that there was also a Delta engine under development with performance very similar to the LR-79 which was later license-built as the RZ.1; while Delta was ultimately cancelled, its legacy lived on in the upgraded RZ.2 and the knowledge gained from this independent kerolox project would soon play an important role in Project Enhance which produced the upgraded RZ.3 and the brand new Epsilon.

Producing more than double the thrust of the RZ.2-Mk4 and with higher specific impulse from sea level to vacuum, Epsilon is expected to power the next generation of EuROSTAR's launch rockets. The Kronos Mk2 was already slated for production and now it was time for the Constellation to get the same upgrades.

The design uses a novel propellant feed system: kerosene and liquid oxygen are pumped from the boosters to the core under pressure, driven by the booster engines; when the boosters are drained and the propellant flow decreases, pressure-sensitive valves automatically switch to allow the core stage tanks to take over. The system has been tested extensively on the ground to ensure that the changeover is as smooth as possible and that no bubbles can enter the engine feed lines and the team are confident that it'll work exactly as designed when the first launch occurs. This design change combined with the greater thrust of the quad Epsilon engines over the seven RZ.2s means only two engines are required per booster, allowing the old OR-2 Princess' first stages to be reused as boosters with the necessary modifications for the fuel crossfeed system.

Another significant change is the removal of the second stage and its twin Viking-4B engines, as calculations showed it was no longer necessary with the new Epsilon engines and booster-to-core crossfeed system. The third stage with its quad Vega-Mk2 engines remains unchanged so the Constellation Mk2 is now entirely kerolox-powered, simplifying fuelling and reducing the risks to ground personnel by eliminating the toxic hypergolics used by the Viking engines.

All these changes have resulted in a 15% increase in payload to orbit with a conservative margin- assuming that everything works of course!

While the Epsilon will eventually be rolled out to the entire fleet, rockets that were already under construction or late in the planning phase will still use the old RZ.2-Mk4 engines, including this one- the first Kronos Quasar geostationary commercial satellite.

The first real test of the RZ.20 hydrolox engine went without an issue, the engine lighting twice to park the satellite in the desired orbit.

Following that success, all eyes turned towards Mercury as the audacious Algol Mercury probe neared its destination.

The probe flew past at blistering speed, sensors and science equipment straining to extract as much data as possible for the relatively short encounter with the innermost planet.

Mission planners were disappointed to realise that they'd made a mistake with the trajectory, sending the probe past on the dark side of the planet and meaning they'd get no close-up shots of Mercury's terrain, however the data returned was still fascinating.

Neither the USA nor the USSR had a Mercury flyby mission anywhere on their radars, so the launch of Algol Mercury had caught them completely by surprise and its success marked yet another first for Europe, stretching the lead in the Space Race that little bit further.

With all eyes still on Mercury, the second Algol Mercury probe that had missed the earlier transfer window now had its chance to fly sunwards. No changes had been made to the probe as it waited in storage for a few months, but the trajectory team will make extra-sure it flies past the daylight side this time!

Closer to home, the prospect of studying the lunar far side up close has so far been stymied by a lack of communications back to Earth. Because, you know, it's the far side and thus the Moon itself blocks the signal back to Earth. Seeking to remedy this issue, a quartet of Solaris lunar orbit relays were launched to position themselves in a high polar orbit of the Moon, which should ensure that a signal can be sent back to Earth from virtually the entire surface.

The launch had more than its share of engine troubles- first one of the usually reliable RZ.2s lost thrust early in the ascent causing a shallower than planned trajectory that the second stage struggled to recover from, then one of the usually reliable Vega-Mk2s failed at the start of the trans-lunar burn, however the other engine's gimbal was just able to keep it pointing straight until the fuel was depleted and the RZ.20 upper stage took over.

Once again the new hydrolox engine worked as expected, igniting a total of four times to power the lunar transfer and capture burns and set the four relays in a resonant orbit to ensure even spacing before deorbiting itself.

Over a period of just over a day the four relays performed their circularisation burns, establishing the relay network.

The next day, news bulletins across Europe had a small segment about the Procyon Vesta probe, launched to the second-largest asteroid belt object the previous year and expected to fly past at close range that day. Unfortunately that was only a prediction, since communications with the probe had been lost some time before- a EuROSTAR representative assured reporters that this had been anticipated and that ongoing work to upgrade the joint US-European Deep Space Network sites in Goldstone, Madrid and Canberra would enable the big receiver dishes to reconnect with the probe as it began to fall back towards the inner solar system in the coming months.

Its true fate wouldn't be known for some time, but if contact could be re-established and the flyby confirmed then it would be the furthest object reached by a probe so far and yet another first for the Europeans- and the second interplanetary flyby of 1964, and it's only February!

(Artist's impression of Procyon Vesta approaching the dwarf planet 4 Vesta)

Another Venus transfer window arrived, and with it another probe takes flight from Woomera to make the journey across interplanetary space- but this time it aims to reach orbit of Venus, allowing much more data to be gathered than from a brief flyby.

Algol Venus is a sophisticated science probe carrying all the latest scientific instruments and was launched towards Earth's nearest neighbour by the first twin-RZ.20 stage.

Following repeated delays as the design was endlessly reworked, another Venus mission is under construction to catch the tail end of the transfer window. Canopus Venus will be even more ambitious, carrying a small probe that will be dropped into the atmosphere and attempt to reach the surface- data from the flybys has largely quashed the myths of tropical jungles covering Venus' surface, but only by piercing the omnipresent clouds can this be truly verified one way or the other.

In what might be the last launch of the original Kronos Mk1, a Sirius Mk2 lunar lander was dispatched to the Moon.

A landing site was chosen which was just over the horizon, with a small ridge blocking line of sight to the Earth. This allowed the new relay network to be tested while still allowing a direct signal until the last moments of the landing.

The lander's design is tried and tested and it didn't disappoint, touching down gently in the target area- a large crater with a relatively flat floor not dissimilar to the Mare that dominate the near side.

And finally, a month after its predicted flyby, the upgraded DSN stations picked up a signal from Procyon Vesta and instructed it to begin transmitting its data. A veritable treasure-trove of scientific information came back, confirming that the probe had flown less than 100km over the daylight face of the dwarf planet and cementing its status as the first flyby of an asteroid belt object and the outermost body thus far visited by a probe.

Some minor corruption was found in the data sent back by the probe, perhaps unsurprising since the data storage system wasn't designed to hold its data for such a long period before transmitting it and over a year of spaceflight had started to take its toll on the probe's systems, not to mention low level radiation from the twin RTGs. The data will be studied in detail to see what improvements can be made to the hardware and designs of future outer system missions.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/3dln8tH

Teams continue to work overtime to get Canopus Venus ready for its launch window- the next one is nearly two years away (and there are contracts that'll expire before then!) so there's a lot of pressure to get the job done.

Edited August 3, 2023 by jimmymcgoochie

[jimmymcgoochie]

The race to get boots on the Moon is still only in its early stages- nobody has ventured beyond low Earth orbit or sent more than one astronaut into space in the same capsule, and nothing has ever gone to the Moon and come back in one piece- but it's already clear that a really big rocket will be needed. How big exactly depends on how the mission will take place: an all in one craft that flies to the Moon, lands and then returns to Earth, separate lander and capsule, single launch or several and if more than one launch is needed, Earth or lunar orbit rendezvous... There's a lot to think about!

A design team were given the vague brief of creating something twice the size of the OR-4 Constellation with twice the payload capacity per launch. They quickly decided that using larger fuel tanks would be prohibitively expensive and so opted to reuse as much as possible from existing designs, including the newly developed booster crossfeed system from the Constellation Mk2 and a sustainer style version of the Epsilon. This was the result:

If it looks a lot like an OR-4 with four oversized boosters, well, that's actually pretty accurate. Each booster uses a pair of Epsilons rather than RZ.3s and is four metres in diameter rather than three, while the core stage is lengthened and uses four sustainer Epsilons. There are some similarities with both the American Atlas and the Soviet R-7 and its derivatives, but neither of those is nearly as large as this 1500-ton heavyweight.

The upper stage is exactly the same as the Constellation, the only change being uprated avionics systems, while the payload capacity was estimated at 50 tons using relatively conservative numbers, rising to 55 tons if more optimistic figures are used. That's enough to launch the entire Sagittarius rocket that put the first satellite into orbit, into orbit itself; yet it's still not enough to launch an entire Moon landing mission in one go unless said Moon landing mission was extremely lightweight and very cramped for what would almost certainly be the sole occupant for the two to three week journey. The design will be studied in more detail and refined where possible before a final decision is made regarding its production in the future.

After a lot of hard work, the Canopus Venus mission is finally ready to launch.

The first launch of the new Constellation Mk2 started out without any issues, however one of the core engines suffered a fault and lost thrust shortly before booster separation resulting in a flatter than expected trajectory. The rest of the burn until MECO was a tense time, but no further issues emerged and the guidance systems were able to recover from the deviation to put the payload into a parking orbit ready for departure.

Canopus Venus  is making use of some new anti-degradation systems that it's hoped will prevent the slow decomposition of HTP in the tanks, an issue that affected previous Venus-bound probes that had diminished RCS efficiency on arrival due to heat from the sun accelerating the breakdown. It's the first time a keroxide rocket has been sent to another planet and if things don't go well the orbiter and its transfer stage may be sacrificed to try and get the lander down on the surface, using Algol Venus to relay the signal instead.

Another first launch occurred shortly afterwards with the first OR-5 Empress A launching the first Penguin crew capsule into low Earth orbit. A few people were worried about launching EuROSTAR's only active astronauts on an untested rocket- and those fears seemed to be justified as a guidance issue caused the avionics to reset and the launch to proceed on a less refined trajectory.

Spoiler

Translation: I somehow managed to make it too heavy for the avionics to handle and had to fly it to orbit myself instead of having PVG do it.

Despite the early trouble, the launch was successful and Damien and Olga became the first two astronauts to fly into orbit in the same capsule.

After a couple of small orbit corrections, it was time to begin the first ever extra-vehicular activity. But who would be the first to head outside? The audio from the capsule abruptly cut off for several minutes, leaving ground controllers frantic, before returning with a disappointed Damien revealing that he had lost the rock-paper-scissors-off and so Olga would be going out first.

In her excitement, she forgot her safety tether! Good thing those nitrogen thruster packs work, otherwise Damien would have had to try and fly the capsule over to save her.

Spoiler

I actually had to do that once when the EVA pack didn't work, but that was really my fault for using KSP 1.11 with the new inventory system when RO and RP-1 were only meant for 1.10.

Olga thoroughly enjoyed her time floating free in space, scooting around with the jetpack and taking plenty of pictures with a small camera before she accidentally pointed it too close to the Sun and broke it. After she returned to the capsule it was Damien's turn to head outside where he did much the same thing.

Meanwhile, over at Mercury...

A close flyby of Mercury's north pole, mostly in daylight, gave some spectacular close-up views of the terrain and some additional data to corroborate what had been gathered by its predecessor.

Back around Earth, the shakedown tests continued on the Penguin including several more orbit changes, tests of the various systems (the fuel cells kept cutting out but the problem was solved by opening the water dump valve) and then a re-entry that was supposed to land them near Woomera but somehow dropped them well short, splashing down in the Indian Ocean.

Sending a crew of two into orbit AND for almost a week AND doing the first EVA made worldwide headlines, further securing Europe's lead in the race to the Moon. The crew had also performed several science experiments that hadn't been possible with the much smaller Dawn capsule and its single occupant and the results would be studied closely to inform future missions.

Those who studied them would soon be working in brand new, state of the art research facilities in Australia and across Europe as the member states' governments along with universities and research institutions began to realise that those grandiose dreams of European boots on the Moon began to seem more and more plausible.

The reaction elsewhere in the world was more muted: the American public were once again outraged by the lack of progress in their own space program, still third place and somehow falling further behind in the Space Race, with a series of leaks from Rocketdyne revealing how similar the E-1 was to Europe's Epsilon apparently intended to drum up anti-European sentiment but instead highlighting the fact that America had had the same technology for years and yet had left it to gather dust on a shelf; things weren't going much better in the Soviet Union, with many eastern European nations growing increasingly dissatisfied with the disparity between themselves and their neighbours to the west in terms of standard of living, political and social freedoms and now in space too, an area which the Soviet leadership had hoped to dazzle the world with their technological superiority, leading to growing unrest and a number of brief uprisings which were brutally suppressed; elsewhere in the world, the goings on in space had next to no impact, but some still had cause to hope: if the same nations that just twenty years earlier had been busily blasting each other to bits could set aside their troubled shared past and work together towards a common goal, maybe other seemingly intractable issues could be solved after all...

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/LxM28Xj

[jimmymcgoochie]

The Princess might be quite old and largely superseded by the Empress, but there are still some missions where it's the best rocket for the job. One of these missions is the new SuperAster, intended as both a test of a new heatshield designed to survive a re-entry from a direct lunar return and to see what effects said return would have on a large mammal ahead of sending humans out there.

The launch sent the capsule and Nigel the macaque on a two day long trip once around the Earth, reaching over 120,000km altitude yet with its periapsis firmly inside the atmosphere so it would return to the ground and land close to Woomera again.

The mission was a complete success: the heatshield handled the heat without any problems and Nigel suffered no ill effects of his trip to deep space or the rather harsh re-entry conditions- he was trained to sit in a little padded chair which ensured he wasn't harmed by the G-forces.

Spoiler

I just noticed that the advanced biological sample experiment gave 50 science yet it reports getting 78 in total, which is weird since I don't remember putting any other science experiments on it...

With the heatshield now flight-proven as much as it can be without actually going to the Moon and back, the next launch was a big one: the first Rigel lunar lander was designed to land on the Moon, scrape up a sample of the surface material and then bring it back to Earth in a small return capsule.

The first launch attempt was scrubbed after a booster engine failed to start due to parameters that were ever so slightly outside the maximum tolerances.

(0.03% above failure, TestFlight? Not cool!)

The rocket was rolled back for a full engine inspection, during which time Canopus Venus arrived and prepared for its capture burn. The mitigation systems had done their jobs and the HTP decomposition rate was negligible, an encouraging sign for future missions to other planets that could also use Larch-powered capture stages.

The initial capture burn produced a fairly loose orbit, with ample fuel reserves to bring the apoapsis lower ahead of lander deployment. Confirmation of the orbit made news headlines around the world- the first time that a manmade object had orbited another planet.

Barely a week later, Rigel 1 grabbed more headlines when it landed on the far side of the Moon after a flawless launch and transfer.

A problem with the guidance system on the lander nearly spelt disaster late in the descent, causing the lander to start flying back the way it had come before the fault- caused by flying low over a hilltop and then towards lower lying terrain- was corrected by Mission Control via the Solaris relay network, working exactly as designed.

The announcement of the far side landing also came with the revelation that Rigel 1 intended to return to Earth with a small amount of lunar material- only a few tens of grams from the top layers of the surface, maybe, but the EuROSTAR switchboards were soon jammed with calls from thousands of universities and research institutes all clamouring for even the tiniest sliver of Moon to study. The lander's two-part design also meant that the base would remain on the surface with its own scientific equipment, transmitter and solar panels to continue studying the landing site after the return stage had been deployed, though some damage due to engine exhaust was expected and would provide some valuable data of its own on solar panel damage and degradation by rocket exhaust and lunar dust.

The furore was still going on as Algol Venus arrived, braking into orbit a month after Canopus Venus and positioning itself to gather as much scientific data as possible and to act as a backup relay for the atmospheric probe/lander when it was deployed. The positions of the planets and the spacecrafts' orbits weren't particularly conducive for that though, with Venus getting in the way of a signal in the projected landing zone.

A more favourable alignment should occur in a few months, though with the caveat that the planets will be further apart by then and so the signal strength would probably be weaker and data transfer rates correspondingly slower.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/tpiG8Wr

Rigel 1's guidance issue has resulted in a landing site that's further south than initially planned, meaning it'll launch into an inclined orbit that doesn't align with the Moon's orbit of Earth and increasing the delta-V cost of returning it- potentially beyond the delta-V it actually has. Even as the phones are ringing off their hooks from people wanting some of that lunar sample, mission planners and engineers are working feverishly to try and find a way to get the sample back to Earth at all.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Obligatory Quasar GEO commercial sat launch to start, it's the same old same old so I'll skip to the contracts completing from now on.

A few weeks of timewarping later and I remembered that the Moon is tidally locked so Rigel 1 will never be in a good position to launch. No time like the present, then:

(It only occurred to me much later on that while the launch could be whenever, the resulting orbit would probably produce a more favourable return opportunity if I waited long enough.)

The orbital misalignment resulted in a more difficult return burn which meant there was no fuel left to try and fine-tune where the return capsule would land when it got back to Earth- hopefully it'll land somewhere that the CIA or KGB can't get their hands on it!

The capsule touched down in western Mexico and the recovery team had already flown in to be ready to move in as soon as its parachute opened. It took less than an hour for the capsule to be located and loaded onto a truck to be driven to the nearest airfield to be flown back to Australia and the team left Mexico with a token fine for littering, since the capsule had landed in a nature reserve.

Once returned to Woomera, the capsule was carefully opened and its payload extracted and divided up to be sent out to all the various universities etc. who had managed to secure a precious gram or two of genuine Moon dust. EuROSTAR's on-site research facilities kept some for themselves, of course, but they were more interested in studying the capsule and its heatshield to find out how they had fared during the month-long mission.

Demand for lunar samples vastly outstripped the supply, but those who hadn't been picked in the first lottery selection (chosen to avoid any accusations of favouritism) would automatically be entered into the next one when the next Rigel mission was launched. With the proof of concept completed, minor upgrades were made to the design- additional science instruments on the lander and directional solar panels to replace the side-mounted ones on the return stage, which proved to be only marginally able to keep the batteries charged.

A month later the Mars transfer window was open and, just like the Venus window before it, a Canopus orbiter/lander and an Algol orbiter were ready to depart. Canopus Mars launched first, mostly because it took longer to prepare it for launch and so Algol Mars could follow it more quickly in the limited time before the transfer window became much less friendly.

One of the four Vega-3 engines on the second stage failed to ignite, however the other three were able to compensate for the imbalanced thrust and burned for longer to make up the delta-V and the mission wasn't compromised. The probe departed for Mars and settled in for the long trip to the Red Planet.

Algol Mars followed suit less than two weeks later with no engine problems but a slightly less favourable transfer that will result in a slightly longer trip to Mars because that's just how the transfer window lined up.

Rocket watchers were then treated to something unexpected: the first, and possibly only, launch of a Goliath Mk5- RZ.3 first stage, Larch-2 second stage- carrying a small docking target probe for the upcoming Penguin 2 mission.

The Nova Docker probe was positioned in a 250km circular orbit to await the crew's launch in a couple of months.

Next to launch was Rigel 2, now with more science!

The twin objectives are to land on the far side and return a sample to Earth, but the far side is mostly in darkness right now so it'll have to wait a while before landing. Unlike Rigel 1, Rigel 2 is in a prograde orbit aligned with the Moon's orbital plane and so shouldn't encounter the same alignment problems that Rigel 1 had when it's time to come home.

Another launch of a Quasar to geostationary orbit, but this is no ordinary Quasar: Quasar Quad-Net is carrying four smaller relay satellites to form a geostationary network that will help to cover some signal gaps in low Earth orbit, with some additional profit from selling access to commercial operators and other space agencies.

The Quasar stage boosted the four relays into a 3:4 resonant orbit so each satellite could circularise into a geostationary orbit on subsequent orbits.

  Once in position, the orbital periods of the satellites were carefully adjusted so that they would stay in place with minimal additional effort. A few days of calibration later and the network was officially switched on.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/H4rLh5F

As part of the big push to the Moon, longer duration missions will be required to find out if a crew can actually function in space for long enough to perform a lunar landing, and if they'll be healthy enough to come back again without their bones turning to jelly on re-entry. To that end, EuROSTAR has committed to launching a vessel into Earth orbit that can be visited by Penguin crews for longer periods of time- first one month, then two or three- although there's a fairly big argument going on about what exactly to call this vessel: space station, orbital harbour, astronaut hotel?

[jimmymcgoochie]

Rigel 2's landing had a couple of complications.

One, it was supposed to be landing on one of the lunar Mare but instead found itself flying towards a series of hills.

And two, the magnetometer fell off.

Spoiler

(I have no idea what happened to it, it's visible in this screenshot of the orbital capture burn but then disappears by the time it lands.

The landing systems managed to compensate for these problems and a safe landing ensued on the far side of the Moon.

The lander spent about an hour on the surface gathering data and that all-important surface sample before the return stage launched.

A slightly more favourable landing site latitude meant a slightly more favourable return window, leaving a bit of extra fuel to fine-tune where the return capsule would re-enter the atmosphere. (It helped a lot that the return trajectory was going to be close to Australia anyway.)

The next launch sent rookie astronaut Lynda Wilson into space for the first time, along with veteran Olga Martín. Penguin 2 has a series of longer-duration experiments for the crew, including some tests for engineer Lynda to perform using power tools to evaluate their utility in microgravity.

After a week in orbit running experiments, Penguin 2 headed over to the docking target probe launched earlier and completed a textbook docking. As in, this docking will become the textbook example for all future flights since nobody has ever docked a crewed spacecraft to anything before.

They remained in orbit for a few more days, beating duration and altitude records, before returning. They were supposed to perform EVAs, but Lynda suffered several bouts of spacesickness that put that plan on hold until her next flight on Penguin 4.

(The orbital flight contract got confused by the docking and didn't complete because it insisted the vessel wasn't crewed when it clearly was.)

And another Quasar launch to GEO for commercial profit.

In a somewhat unusual development, a team had been looking at the feasibility of recovering used boosters for re-use, potentially reducing the cost of each launch by a sizeable margin. The best option they could think of involved adding wings and jet engines to the Kronos' first stage to allow it to fly back to Woomera after separation, however they couldn't quite get it to work as well as they'd hoped: the wings, jets and fuel added too much weight and adversely affected its performance as a rocket, while the heavy engines at the rear and unaerodynamic nose made its predicted flight performance marginal at best.

Still, it looked pretty good in the sketches!

They went as far as building a scale model and dropping it from a plane, but it flew just as badly as expected and crashed in the desert.

The Constellation's twin side-mounted boosters preclude the addition of wings, since there would be too much risk of them colliding during separation, and smaller rockets just don't have the mass budget to add wings and jets and are both cheap enough and used rarely enough for it not to matter, so this idea will be put on hold for now.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/WTnBey6

It's now February 1965, half way into the "five years to the Moon" period. On one hand, things are going well: multi-crew missions are ongoing, orbital rendezvous and docking have been demonstrated and the Rigel missions have shown that landing on the Moon and coming back is possible and that the heatshields can take the heat; but on the other, there's still no concrete plan for how to get the crew out to the Moon, to the surface, or back to Earth again.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Time to plan some lunar missions, starting with the lander. It will need to pack a sizeable fuel reserve to land and return to orbit plus any orbital manoeuvring, yet have enough finesse to make a controlled landing. The best engine for the job is the RZ.20 with its high ISP and ability to repeatedly relight, however it lacks the fine control necessary for a gentle touchdown; that problem could be solved by adding some partially throttleable hypergolic thrusters similar to those used on the Rigel landers, which have the versatility for a landing but not the efficiency for the descent and ascent.

A mockup was created and tested mathematically using data from previous missions including Rigels and Quasars.

The results were promising- healthy delta-V margins were predicted, while a heavy reliance on tried and tested hardware (the lander's fuel tanks and engine were heavily based on the Quasar) should mean relatively few complications will arise during the final design and construction phases.

Spoiler

Not all the tests went entirely to plan...

Now that engineers have a good idea of what the lander will look like, they can focus on getting it to the Moon along with the capsule that will transport the crew there and back again. A single launch mission was ruled out due to the time and cost required to build a huge new launchpad and associated infrastructure for the huge rocket it would require, while lunar orbit rendezvous would require two Constellation launches with at least a two week delay between them, making the rendezvous more difficult. Ultimately the mission planners settled on an Earth orbit rendezvous mission in three launches: first a large trans-lunar booster would launch into LEO on a Constellation- only partly fuelled due to mass constraints- followed by a top-up tanker based on the Quasar and launched on a Kronos to fill up the tanks, and then the combined Penguin-based capsule and lander would launch together on a second Constellation and join with the booster to be flung at the Moon.

Re-using existing rockets and designs as much as possible and performing critical rendezvouses while still in low Earth orbit would minimise risk and allow an abort at more stages of the mission, while the Quasar tanker would also have the delta-V to launch itself to lunar orbit as a backup Earth return stage in case of engine failure on the capsule.

While the lunar plans were taking shape, back on Earth it was time for science specialist Rene Sørenson to have his first orbital flight with veteran pilot Damien O'Reilly commanding Penguin 3's mission. The crew had a series of experiments to run for their week-long mission and there was even time to give Rene a taste of EVA action.

The re-entry was targeted for Woomera and ended up less than twenty kilometres away, not a bad result after re-entering from an apoapsis of almost 1000km!

The next mission to launch was Algol Ceres, intended to make the first visit to the largest body in the asteroid belt a permanent one by capturing into orbit and studying it in great detail.

Everything was going so well...

...until it wasn't:

Double engine failures on the HM-7 and Larch-1 killed the mission completely, leaving it drifting aimlessly out of Earth's gravity well.

A hasty meeting was convened to make a decision: Algol Vesta was already built and the Vesta window was two months away, but if launched as soon as possible it might be able to visit Ceres instead, with a replacement able to be built just in time for the Vesta window. The next transfer windows for Ceres and Vesta are quite different- the Ceres window is a lot less favourable while the next Vesta window will be a lot better, so the decision was made to launch Algol Vesta to Ceres instead.

A quick bit of spray-painting later...

No engine failures this time! A course correction will be required in solar orbit but the mission is looking good so far.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/WmpDEsB

Lunar mission plans are almost finalised and key technologies are being prepared- improved MLI to further reduce hydrogen boiloff and an upgrade to the RZ.20 with an increased expansion ration to increase vacuum ISP- with an initial Earth orbit test flight of the Penguin Mk2 capsule planned with a science module of a similar mass to the lander.

[jimmymcgoochie]

It's time for Canopus Venus to deploy its atmosphere probe. Venus will still get in the way so the Canopus orbiter won't be able to relay the signal from the atmo-probe/lander, but adjusting Algol Venus' orbit using most of its remaining propellant would allow it to act as a relay instead.

The timing had to be just right so Algol Venus was in position overhead. This proved trickier than initially thought as the two spacecraft were actually orbiting in a roughly similar plane but in opposite directions.

The probe hurtled into the atmosphere at just under 8km/s, racing across the terminator which bathed the clouds in eerie blue light.

Venus' atmosphere is a lot harsher than Earth's: at 100km Earth's atmosphere is barely noticeable, but at the same altitude on Venus the probe was pulling over 10 gees as it decelerated hard, coming to a near halt horizontally while it was still above 65km altitude and beginning a long, slow fall to the clouds below.

The parachute was designed to be resilient to both temperature and aerodynamic forces, but the magnitude of both was too much for it to bear and it was torn to shreds when it deployed. The heatshield then crumpled on impact which cushioned the probe itself from what would have been terminal damage.

The science experiments had been recording everything they could from the moment the probe separated from its orbiter and they painted a vivid picture of the conditions under the clouds of Earth's nearest neighbour. Hopes of finding a lush jungle planet, already shaken by the orbital data, were dashed for good: Venus was no tropical paradise, but a horrid nightmare of blistering heat, immense pressure and at least one layer of cloud that seemed to be made of pure sulphuric acid. The probe survived for just over two hours before succumbing to the inevitable, well before its batteries ran out but just long enough to transmit the critical data.

It was, however, the first probe to enter another planet's atmosphere and land intact on its surface, yet again cementing Europe's lead in the Space Race.

Somewhat less impressive was the discovery that a mistake in the blueprints for the Rigel lunar lander had resulted in the magnetometer being attached incorrectly.

Instead of being bolted to the base of the lander, the magnetometer was instead bolted to the top of the decoupler underneath it and so was detached with the upper stage instead of staying with the lander down to the surface.

An internal investigation has been opened to find out a) who's responsible for this blunder and b) why nobody spotted the mistake before two Rigels flew with their magnetometers incorrectly attached. In the meantime, Rigel 3 performed its descent and landed near the lunar north pole on the near side.

The return stage had been redesigned slightly from previous Rigel missions, using smaller and lighter thrusters in an attempt to improve the tight delta-V margins. This ended up backfiring completely as the new thrusters were less powerful than the previous design and also had no gimbals or thrust vanes for steering and the use of near-constant RCS thrust to maintain control combined with the less efficient ascent trajectory caused by a lack of thrust more than made up for any small gains from the lighter thrusters. Rigel 3's return stage was running on fumes by the time its return trajectory was finalised, even more so than Rigel 1, but it still managed to return the capsule and its precious sample to splash down in the Pacific where a Royal Navy destroyer was waiting to collect it.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/RliTQSK

Preparations are now well underway ahead of the planned missions that will lead up to a crewed Moon landing: a test of the new Penguin Mk2 in low Earth orbit, then a full dress rehearsal of the landing using the Penguin Mk2, the Europa lander, the Blitzar TLI booster and a Quasar-based refuel tanker, and finally the landing itself.

[jimmymcgoochie]

There are still some tests to run on the Penguin capsule before it goes to the Moon and Penguin 4 will be completing those. 

Olga and Damien have been trying some more advanced re-entry simulations to try and improve their accuracy; nine days after launch, having pushed the capsule's life support systems to their limits, they put the training into practice. The previous record was just under 20km from Woomera...

...which was absolutely smashed as they touched down within the perimeter fence.

With all key systems now certified, the Penguin Mk2 is greenlit for the initial test flight in low Earth orbit ahead of lunar missions. It'll use the same capsule (with improved heatshields) but a much larger propulsion module powered by an upgraded RZ.20 rather than a Larch-1 and is intended to brake itself and the lunar lander into orbit of the Moon with enough fuel left over to return to Earth after the landing is complete.

Meanwhile, over at Mars...

The capture stage had plenty of delta-V left after the capture burn, but was detached anyway to maximise solar panel exposure as panel wear was higher than anticipated and combined with the weaker sunlight this means the probe is struggling for power.

Spoiler

Capturing into Mars orbit is so much cheaper than Venus orbit, that capture stage can put this probe into a low circular orbit of Mars with over 2km/s left, but was about 1km/s short of doing the same at Venus.

Algol Mars is also approaching its destination, but before it gets there the first Penguin Mk2 is ready to fly. This mission will test its ability to fly with nearly ten tons of extra mass docked to the nose- for lunar missions this will be the lander, but for now it's a science module of similar size and mass with some pretty sophisticated equipment on board for Rene to play with- er, perform experiments with.

The Penguin Mk2 is the first spacecraft ever to have a docking port on each end- this is to allow it to dock to the Blitzar lunar transfer stage and the lander at the same time for the TLI burn. This is also the first time a spacecraft has launched without a trained pilot at the controls, since Olga and Damien were still in their mandatory rest period after their last mission.

The automated docking system did its job perfectly and the flight testing could begin, along with a sizeable number of science experiments and the first use of laboratory equipment aboard a spacecraft to process samples and generate data that could be transmitted back to Earth. In the future, such equipment could replace the need to transport physical samples back to Earth for analysis, but for now it's just a prototype and duplicate samples will be brought back at the end of the mission to compare with the transmitted data.

Algol Mars then arrived at its destination and successfully captured into orbit.

Algol Mars' orbit was deliberately left more eccentric to gather data from a wider range of altitudes. By coincidence, it's also going in the opposite direction to Canopus Mars, just like their siblings over at Venus, which might make things a bit more complicated when planning the lander deployment.

Spoiler

Again, probe built for Venus is OP for Mars:

Despite the additional space offered by the lab module, the fact that they had to put on their EVA suits and depressurise both sections before they could move between them was proving increasingly wearing on Lynda and Rene. Neither module was all that spacious either and after two weeks they were getting short-tempered and irritable with each other and controllers on the ground. 

The final test of the Penguin Mk2 was to boost itself and the lab module up to a very high apoapsis, simulating a lunar capture burn, before undocking from the lab and commanding it to deorbit itself with its RCS. With that done, Lynda had the chance to perform the first EVA in "deep space" at over 100Mm altitude.

The new heatshields worked as expected* and after enduring a re-entry velocity of close to 10km/s the capsule splashed down safely in the Pacific to the east of Australia. Data comparison between the samples returned and the data generated by the science module's lab is ongoing and has resulted in some changes to the planned "space station" due to launch by the end of the year.

Spoiler

* after I copy+pasted the ablator configs from the D-2 capsule because the Mk1-2 pod's configs seem to be quite old and neglected and decidedly NOT lunar rated despite the part description saying it is. I might try making it into a new part and opening a PR on the RP-1 github?

With OrbLab 1 nearing completion, there was just time for a course correction by Algol Ceres to set up its encounter with the largest body in the asteroid belt, with enough propellant left over to capture into orbit- assuming the anti-degradation systems do their job for the remainder of the flight and the HTP doesn't decay.

And now it's time to launch OrbLab 1. It was decided to launch it into a 55 degree inclination orbit to ensure regular flyovers of Europe, allowing all those who have funded EuROSTAR's successes (through their taxes or the various "your name on the rocket/lander/flag/etc." fundraisers over the last few years) to see the station fly overhead in the night sky

The fact that this also means it'll fly over many major cities and interesting places in the USA and USSR is entirely coincidence, and the fact that it's carrying photographic equipment to take pictures of terrain and weather features on the surface below is entirely scientific.

A short time later Olga and Damien launch aboard Penguin 5 to visit the station.

The crew will still have to EVA to get over to the station, however it's much roomier than any previous spacecraft and even has wall-mounted sleeping bags and a prototype space toilet.

The rendezvous was uneventful, with the exception of a nice sunrise as they were moving in to dock:

The initial plan is for a 30 day stay, however OrbLab 1 is provisioned for up to 120 days of occupation by a crew of two and has a second docking port available to allow a supply craft to dock while the crew are present. The crew will be putting it through its paces for a few months, which means Lynda and Rene will be flying the first mission to the Moon.

Beginning what's become known as Moonflight 0 is the launch of the Blitzar booster stage. The first launch just after the start of 1966 was scrubbed after a booster engine failed to ignite due to a sensor issue, forcing a rollback and some sensor replacement before launching on the second time of asking; the second launch also had engine trouble, this time on the second stage as one of the HM-7s failed to ignite, but the other four engines were able to burn for longer to make up for the failure and Blitzar 1 made it to its target orbit.

Two more launches will be required: a Quasar tanker to fill up the Blitzar's fuel tanks, since it's too heavy to be launched fully fuelled, and the capsule and lander which will launch together. A second Quasar tanker will be on standby for the duration of the mission in case the Penguin Mk2's engine fails, at which point the Quasar tanker will fly itself out to the Moon and serve as a booster to push the crew back to Earth.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/fHTHOxO

Will 1966 be the year we see European boots on the Moon?

[jimmymcgoochie]

An abnormally large group of journalists, reporters and photographers gathered in Woomera, braving the heat of the desert summer to watch history in motion.

They were about to be treated by two rapid-fire launches: first, a Quasar tanker to top up the orbiting Blitzar's tanks.

A short time later Rene Sørenson and Lynda Wilson sat in their Penguin Mk2 capsule as a sudden downpour pelted the windows in front of them, sending onlookers scurrying for cover. Just when it seemed the launch would have to be delayed until the next day, the rain stopped and the launch could proceed as planned, minus any photographs of the launch. One plucky photographer had driven to a point downrange of Woomera and managed to snap a picture of the rocket after booster separation; he was promptly arrested for breaching the safety cordon.

Spoiler

Read: stupid RSSVE bug made it too dark on the ground to get a screenshot of the launch.

Once in orbit, the lander's name was finally revealed: Europa. (How original...)

It took just under a day for the Quasar tanker to rendezvous with the waiting Blitzar...

...with the "lunar stack" of Penguin Mk2 and Europa arriving a day later. Keeping track of four separate vessels all trying to manoeuvre around each other at the same time was a logistical headache for mission controllers on the ground, but with Lynda and Rene looking out the windows and some very careful movements all around, the docking was done and Moonflight 0 was ready to depart.

The journey to the Moon was uneventful. Lynda and Rene spent some time running scientific experiments in deep space to compare the results with those from low orbit and snapping some photographs of the Earth growing ever smaller in the windows.

The Blitzar booster expended the last of its propellant to begin the lunar capture burn, after which the Penguin Mk2's own engine took over.

The mission plan required first a loose capture into an elliptical orbit, followed by a second burn to lower the orbit a few days later. This gave the crew ample time to run more experiments in lunar orbit and a photograph that was later published as "the first picture of everyone":

Trying to take a picture with a free-floating camera in space wasn't easy, especially when your colleague keeps arguing about which way "up" is; however it also showed how terms like "up" have a very different meaning in space.

The pair spent nearly a week in lunar orbit, taking the Europa lander on a series of manoeuvres to test the propulsion systems before returning for rendezvous and docking practice, after which the remaining supplies were transferred to the capsule and Europa was programmed to deorbit itself, meeting the Moon at last.

With the lander gone, it was time to come home.

Recovery crews were already racing towards them as Lynda and Rene touched down safely in the Australian desert, landing just as the sun came up and so avoiding the heat of the desert summer before being flown by helicopter to the quarantine site at Woomera.

The success of Moonflight 0 brought significant rewards financially, scientifically and technically, but perhaps more importantly it showed that all the necessary components for a Moon landing were now in place and had been tested as far as they could be short of actually landing on the Moon.

Closer to home and flying relatively under the radar, metaphorically speaking, Olga and Damien's mission aboard OrbLab 1 met its initial 30 day target duration and then another 30 days after that before the decision was made to bring them home. They returned to Earth a few days after Moonflight 0 and splashed down in the Southern Ocean to the south of Australia, ensuring that they'd be rested and recuperated in time to begin training for the Moon landing mission with Lynda and Rene.

The success of OrbLab 1 didn't grab the headlines nearly as much as Moonflight 0, but it nevertheless demonstrated a lot of key technologies that would be required for longer-term crewed spaceflight and highlighted some areas where technology currently fell short- the prototype space toilet was on the receiving end of some scathing reports by both Olga and Damien for being uncomfortable, difficult to use and in full view of the entire station. And the smell...

With those two successes and a huge influx of funding, EuROSTAR could begin a series of facility upgrades and constructions: an even larger Vehicle Assembly Building, so large that the current one could fit inside it, was constructed around the existing VAB to minimise disruption, giving it the appearance of a set of nesting dolls; the astronaut training and support facilities were upgraded with pioneering underwater EVA practice pools and artificial lunar surfaces; the tracking and communication systems at Woomera and the three DSN sites were all upgraded to yield greater bandwidth for broadcasting live audio and video from the lunar surface; the research and development facilities at Woomera were also upgraded with cutting edge equipment and state of the art computers, with significant funding invested in other sites across Europe to ensure that new technologies would continue to be developed and new discoveries made (and to appease a fair few politicians who weren't very impressed with the "European" space program spending nearly all of its time and money in Australia).

While all that was going on, Canopus Mars had been waiting in orbit trying to charge its batteries enough to deploy its lander. Solar panel wear and the distance from the Sun had combined to make this a long and arduous process, but at last there was enough power stored up to deploy the lander without the orbiter dying in the dark Martian night.

Mars' atmosphere is very different from Earth's and even more so Venus', with very low pressure expected making aerobraking and landing under a parachute much more challenging. Mars' smaller size and lower gravity meant that orbital velocity was less than half of Earth's so re-entry heating wouldn't be nearly so severe, but it remained to be seen if the atmosphere would be thick enough to slow the lander down enough before it crashed into the surface. 

The lander's sensors recorded as much as they could during the descent, beaming the data back to the orbiter above which then relayed the data through Algol Mars back to Earth. It soon became clear that despite the atmosphere's relative thinness, it was still slowing the lander more than initially expected and it would fall well short of the targeted landing site in Hellas Basin, instead coming down in the Martian night. The kevlar-weave parachute deployed while the probe was still supersonic and dragged it down to around 12m/s, faster than expected and potentially too fast for the probe to survive; worse still, the heatshield had been jettisoned and so couldn't be used to absorb the impact as it had on Venus.

With several minutes of light speed delay, all mission controllers on Earth could do was watch the data and hope that the lander would survive its hard landing. The altitude ticked down as the velocity stayed stubbornly high, then all telemetry cut out.

A few seconds later...

The signal returned, now relaying directly via Algol Mars as the Canopus orbiter had gone below the horizon. The probe was on the ground, intact and with all its instruments still functioning. Its batteries lasted long enough to transmit the first images of a sunrise from another planet, revealing a barren desert of rusty dust and rocks, along with the first glimpse of Earth from the surface of another planet.

The data would be reviewed and re-reviewed before being released to the world, simultaneously dashing hopes that Mars was secretly harbouring life and raising the prospects that it simply didn't harbour life at that one specific location or that the lander's relatively simple suite of instruments couldn't detect it. With the next Mars probes planned to be broadly similar to their predecessors with a few new or upgraded instruments, the question of whether Mars held alien life would remain unanswered for some time yet.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/ScbtsGy

With the USA pinning their hopes on Apollo and the Saturn V, both still in development, and the USSR's lunar ambitions seemingly stalled after the death of Sergei Korolev and perpetual underfunding, Europe enters the final stretch of the race to the Moon with a seemingly unassailable lead...