Closest Encounter With Space Junk

[CatastrophicFailure]

I once had a perfect (but unplanned) launch-to-orbit rendezvous with an old booster stage. I park nearly everything in the same 100km orbit, this save was boogered with bugs even before I gave up on it (since .21 will kill it either way). Have a nice lil ring system going on at this point.

Anywayz, had just launched a new station tender into orbit when I moved the view and there was the old stage floating half a kilometer away. Literally never saw it coming. So of course I maneuvered over to it and tried moving the flat end around with a Kerbal so I could nudge it out of orbit with the tender. Only succeeded in making it tumble hopelessly and knocking the Kerbal senseless till his suit fuel was gone and the tender had to go chasing after him.

[Spyritdragon]

My closest encounter with space junk? I had dumped my third stage booster post-TLI burn and continued my journey onwards to the Mün whereupon I fired my CSM's engine to enter orbit... only to have my third stage booster smack right into the capsule a few seconds later.

Let that be a lesson to you... Always perform a course correction burn mid-point between Kerbin and the Mün so that your booster is on a different orbital path than you are.

I just realised i'm so lucky this didn't happen to me yesterday. I was making an Apollo-style lunar lander, with a command module and a lander, only when i spent 15 minutes designing a launch stage for orbit i finally just decided it would be easier to use the launch vehicle for my Duna craft. Which was significantly heavier than this munar lander, so i got into orbit with about 800 m/s of delta-V left in the last orange tank of my launch stage. I used that to preform my Munar insertion burn. I fell just a bit short of the Mun's SOI. Had i made it, the capture burn i made would most likely have put me in the same situation as you.

Only thing is, i now have an orange tank and a mainsail flying around in a nearly-complete Munar insertion orbit, rather than slingshotting around the moon into some Kerbol orbit where i'll never see it again. It's going to keep annoying me, and i don't feel like spending 1000 m/s of delta-V on my deorbiting tug to go and find it.

[quietsamurai98]

After a failed test-launch of a SRB Probe, I was pre-launch on a manned mission.

Suddenly, a wild SRB cluster appeared!

It used Rocko-Crush!

It was super-lethal!

[Dizzle]

Was once re-entering Kerbin from Minmus and had a large chunk of debris zip by within 400 meters.

[ShimmyTheJJ]

Besides almost running into spent stages that I had detached from minutes previous... (Me not paying attention to what's in front of my craft)

I once saw jettisoned fairings from the same craft fly past each other at maybe 10 meters distance at significant speed. This happened half an orbit after they were jettisoned. I guess it would make sense that would have happened, orbital mechanics and all...

[99TheCreator]

I was reentering the atmosphere after a long mission to Duna at ridiculous speeds (I purposely made my reentry speed higher) and disengaged the last stage so it was only the capsule. While reentering that last stage actually hit my capsule and sent it spinning widly. I tried to deploy the parachute but that ripped off too, likely from my ludicrous speeds and spinning. R.I.P. Nedlan, Billybob, and Bob Kerman.

[Captain Sierra]

I've lost station solar arrays (at least half of one once) and lost entire stations to debris impacts. Then again, I have also had 1 major ship-to-ship high speed collision. I used the same orbit for building my interplanetary vessel and my space station. Let's just say one day they decided to get together. It wasn't pretty.

[AndrewBCrisp]

I think the closest approach I had was back when I first got the game.

My first attempt to put a satellite in orbit (no calculations, just slapped engines and fuel tanks together into something resembling a rocket) had the rocket go retrograde. I was on my last stage, looking morosely at the trajectory that wasn't even going to get higher than 30 km from the surface. By accident I hit the space bar.

Please note the last stage was still boosting at full thrust at the time.

So I watched the satellite separate from the booster, the distance widening to a few meters... then the booster caught up to the satellite.

When the smoke cleared, all that was left were a couple of antennae in very low orbit.

It was my only satellite loss by collision. I had future failures, but nothing that spectacular.

[Natsarugiy]

854 debris in ~100km LKO, still no close encounters.

I guess if I put all my stations in retrograde orbit now I'll basically guarantee a few close encounters. Too bad it lags so much.

[CpPolar268]

854 debris in ~100km LKO, still no close encounters.

I guess if I put all my stations in retrograde orbit now I'll basically guarantee a few close encounters. Too bad it lags so much.

Send a capsule retrograde into the "asteroid belt" of Kerbin... tell us if you got any

[MatzahMan]

When I was first learning the game, I sent my spaceships into a westerly orbit...then I realized it was an easterly orbit was standard. So I still had a few ships orbiting the opposite way of most on my satellites in ~100 km orbit that i was to lazy to go anywhere with. I was at first nervous every time the icons on the map would get close to each other, but I soon realized it wasn't much of a threat because they were passing 5-20 km from one one another...or so I thought. One day, as I was waiting for my refueling tanker to catch up to my space station, two icons on the map got close to each other, and then disappeared. At first I thought it was a bug, but after looking at debris in the area, I realized my ships had collided. Very little debris survived, two orbital velocities in opposite directions is not pretty.

[G4S3FR]

I had an impact with my KerboNational Space Station resuply ship.

Heck, if the station was a celestial body it would be experiencing Kessler Syndrome!

[Spartwo]

I did two launches one after another the orbital injection stage hadn't burned up by the time I launched.About 13km up I saw a tag getting closer and closer until it screamed past 400m away good thing the orbit wasn't perfectly equatorial.

[Varyon]

Had an old prototype submission for the Spiritwolf thread floating around in an eccentric, inclined parking orbit. Thought to myself, "Self, one day that old abandoned 700+ part behemoth fully laden with fuel is going to cause a problem." I then retorted, "Dude, have you seen the orbit it's in? I couldn't hit that if I tried." At the time, my self appeared to agree with me. I'm not a smart man.

Fast-forward about two months real time. I have a space station loaded up with Kerbals, many of whom were crew of the aforementioned abandoned spacetrain, as another sort of experiment. As the empty crew shuttle pulls away, I notice a little blue icon off in the distance. I think to myself, "Self, why is there a flag in orbit?" I know that this is impossible, and so I am puzzled for a moment. It then occurs to me that bases are labeled with a blue square. "Self," I think, "wasn't that 700+ part monstrosity labeled as a base?..." Oh... Kraken...

The shuttle has a crew capacity of 11, including the three operators. There are 8 Kerbals on the station. The station is over 300 parts, the shuttle more than 100, and that Kerb-made comet is approaching with alarming speed. Almost a kilometer per second and increasing.

The last Kerbal is halfway to safety when the beast enters physics range. He barely gets onboard when the armored spacetrain collides with my station. Both Hitchhiker modules aboard are vaporized. The shuttle jams on the RCS to get clear, but is clipped by an orange tank covered in structural panels.

5 minutes later, 11 Kerbals at KSC are huddled around a keg of chlorophyll, trying to laugh off their latest escapade. Three of them will never fly in space again.

My former parking orbit has been compromised. New parking orbit is now at 200km. The spacetrain 'engine', being armored to withstand these kinds of impacts, is mostly intact. I still get a close encounter with the debris cloud every once in awhile, but the odds if being hit again are astronomically low... right?

In my rush to get my crew to safety, I forgot to take pictures, but the colliding object is somewhere in the Spiritwolf/Hanland submission thread, by the name of the Pangolin Armored Spacetrain.

[rodion]

800m, if I recall. It had an orange tank and a mainsail still attached so it was neat to be able to look at the individual parts of my old craft, just as I left them during some old mission, without even needing to use IVA view.

[Cydonian Monk]

I have actually hit "space debris" before, back in .20.2 shortly after it was released. It was my third or fourth mission to the Mun in the save - the first had run out of fuel in a retrograde Munar orbit. The new mission established a prograde orbit... and promptly discovered the first.

I've been rather a bit more careful since. Still, the odds of that happening... again.... Boggles.

Edited October 11, 2013 by Cydonian Monk