Botched Moho return and rescue from an escape trajectory

[ComradeGoat]

So I went to Moho and put boots on the ground! yay!

It's not all that hard really.

I used drop tanks to get there, leaving me with loads of Delta Vs, or so I thought, to return, after docking with my mothership and discarding the lander:

After burning for Kerbin and correcting the plane, I had a periapsis of about 38km with 500m/s of delta V left. Fine, I'll aerocapture, dock with my station, and ferry the brave kerbonauts down.

This is where it went a bit wrong. As can be seen, the ship is coming in very fast and a periapsis of 38 km isn't enough to get it even close to under escape velocity, let alone into a decent orbit.

In vain, I burned my remaining fuel trying desperately to stop, then used up all the mono prop, and was still hundreds of metres per second above escape velocity as I shot out of the atmosphere and back into an escape trajectory. Oops! Flight time to the Mün's orbit was merely 1 hour. If I was going to mount a rescue, it had to be fast!

Thankfully I have a nuclear tug hanging around in LKO for ferrying supplies to my Mün base, and even better, it was currently close to the point at which the Moho mission hit periapsis. I gave chase.

This is the point where I'm glad I've spent some time polishing my rendezvous skills. On an escape trajectory, with a considerable head start, I managed to catch and dock with my escaping Moho ship, and refuel it sufficiently to enter Kerbin orbit, and save the tug, before either of them reached the Mün's orbit, and I did all that without using a single manoeuvre node!

After docking with my space station in LKO, the 3 kerbonauts are back home and relaxing in the astronaut complex.

Next time, I'll aerocapture lower! Anyone else had to suddenly chase after a vehicle on a fast escape out of the system?

[Geschosskopf]

Wow, great story! Kudos on the amazing rescue, too. I've never heard of that situation even ever being discussed before, but I'm sure the old-timers could say otherwise.

[meve12]

Not really, but there was that time a Mun mission went horribly wrong....

My lander had the engines on the sides, but they were too low down and bottomed out when I landed, disabling the lander.

That's not the fun part. The fun part was, the return vehicle did not have the Delta-V to return completly(no nukes) and when Bill came out to push it, he ended up running out of jetpack fuel after his first 8 attempts.

So now I had to not only recover a return vehicle, but also rescue Bill, who couldn't even reorient himself to grab a ladder, it had to be brought to him.

Thankfully, the orbit HAD been dropped pretty far, so rendezvousing with the recover vehicle was easy enough. Bill, on the other hand, needed a great deal of precision flying.

[Vanamonde]

That is a cute little lander.

[ComradeGoat]

That is a cute little lander.

Small, light, pretty solid and packs 3000 m/s of delta V as well.