Pyro Station. Or, how I accidentally built my first Eve space station.

[SargeRho]

The goal of the mission was to send the first Kerbal to land on a natural sattelite orbiting another Planet, in this case Gilly, the only natural sattelite of Eve. It was chosen due to its small size and Eve being closed to Kerbin than Dres and Duna.

So far so good.

The craft was launched in two parts. The transfer stage, and the Lander. The Lander also carried the crew, consisting only of Jeb. The transfer stage also contained a more comfortable quarter than the Mk1 command pod.

The lander is launched first, aboard a Tikan 5 heavy carrier rocket.

Next follows the Lander, on a Kerbury III/S rocket:

After meeting and docking in a low Kerbin orbit, the expedition begins, heading off into the purple unknown. A guidance failure caused the lander to crash into the transit stage, destroying one solar pannel on each craft, and crippling a landing leg. The damage was deemed non-critical.

The first injection burn was minimally miss-timed, so a correction burn was performed. And a third one on the way to Eve. This left the transit stage with too little fuel to reach Gilly, or to return to Kerbin for that matter. The decision was made to insert the ship into a medium orbit around Eve, to become the first space station around another planet. It looks like Jeb doesn't mind spending some time looking at this purple pearl in the sky.

Finally, the spacecraft has entered a stable orbit, inclined by 75°

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Done in career mode.

Edited October 17, 2013 by SargeRho