Ethics of Space Travel

[Eldar158]

I do not send my kerbals alone to trips over kerbin SOI, i send them in pairs or 3.

I always have a rescue system on my bigger airplanes/SSTO because they may stall if reenter wrong.

No 1 way trips.

also in space stations I have a return model but honestly i got my kerbals there for months (or in my mun station replace them between the station and the base)

[Highlad]

I think this pretty much describes my morals when it comes to space travel.

[NASI Director]

I think this pretty much describes my morals when it comes to space travel.

That's what I try not to do. XD

[Highlad]

No rest for the wicked! XD

I really am a terrible person. I usually treat my kerbals like probes... Saying that, I do usually provide a hitchhiker storage container for interplanetary journeys.

[little square dot]

I don't like the fact of kerbals being alone in their command module, every stranded ship will always have a hitchiker container coming up for the kerbals to live in.

Haha... same.

Sometimes it would be much easier to just turn off the ol' moral compass... like when dealing with imaginary green astronauts that really couldn't care less about... well, I guess I could just end that sentence at, "that really couldn't care."

I'm prone to the same nonsense when playing an RPG, as I simply cannot bring myself to walk around arbitrarily murdering and looting.

I always have to play the good guy... or at least a guy at the good end of the grey area of the spectrum.

[Lone K.]

Technically, I have killed 3 Kerbals so far. That was from forgetting to place a probe module on a habitat module near my space station during its docking stage. I didn't know what the heck went wrong, I thought it was a bug, so I went to the Tracking Station and reselected the module. I finally found out I forgot a probe module, so I decided to make a basic reset and destroy the module in the Tracking Station. Then I flew it back up (with a probe module attached) and docked.

Is that legal?

Anyhoo, I never EVER leave a Kerbal stranded. Once I accidentally put Jeb on EVA during a burn and left him on a high eccentric orbit, so before getting any further I turned the ship back towards him and matched velocities so he could use the RCS pack to fly back to the Mun base ship.

I also bring more fuel than I will need, because said rule above.

[Liowen]

While I would like to do more than 1 Kerbal in a pod right now my skills do not permit me to do so, although I did just land 26 on Mun and got them home safely (thankfully because the only Kerbin not on the flight was on Duna LOL). I do do everything in my power to make sure they get home or I try to mount a rescue mission if it feasible to do so, no sense in sending more Kerbals on a suicide rescue mission if the chance is too small for a rescue. I believe even Apollo 13 they said it would have been impossible to rescue them if things got any worse. I do try my best to make sure that before I start a long mission that I feel like it is a good choice, and yes I realize it is only a game but it is the principal of the thing. That and I am currently in a medical ethics class for billing and coding for insurance LOL....so yeah I am using some of that in my choices too.

[M5000]

Unfortunately, I haven't done much in the way of sending a Kerb anywhere but the Mun or Minmus, due to the fact that I haven't yet found an efficient way to transport a Kerb (or multiple) interplanetary. However, that may be about to change.

That says something, though. I usually will shoot unmanned probes off to wherever. I haven't yet designed the mission architecture for a long-term mission to another planet, though, I think Dres may be my next target, as it's fairly close and decently easy to land on. Or Duna, like normal people do.

[Material Defender]

For lag reasons I no longer send any unmanned probes or plant any flags. I pretend that those activities are still going on, but that they're just handled by the unkerbaled branch of the KSP.

I never send a Kerbal anywhere without the on-hand capability to return him home (so no bases on Eve or Tylo until I master landers to and from there). All planetary bases have shuttles capable of rendezvous with orbital stations, and all orbital stations have docked spaceships with the capacity and fuel to return the base and station crew to Kerbin SOI, where I have littered the gravity well with stations full of small shuttles, return capsules, and SSTO spaceplanes.

Rather than build massive, intricate, multistage spaceships capable of flying off to distant planets and back again, my entire space program is based around an expanding system of waystations and refueling points, allowing relatively small and simple ships to travel anywhere in the solar system.

An average trip might look something like this:

1.) Take off from KSC in the reusable Mark 98 SSTO spaceplane (15 tons) and rendezvous with LKO station at 80x80km

2.) EVA crew over to a mini shuttle for transfer to a waystation in higher orbit (these minishuttles are extremely fuel-efficient, with a deltaV per ton of around 2,000m/s)

3.) Board a small interplanetary capable ship such as my NERVA powered Skipper Mk2, weighing in at 15.9 tons with a deltaV of 7763m/s (I have some larger, but less fuel-efficient models as well, going up to 14k delta V)

4.) Fly to Jool and aerocapture, then rendezvous with a station there and board one of the many lander shuttles I have ready to ferry crew down to Jool's moons

5.) Party on a new planet in SPACE. All the infrastructure for the return trip is already ready and waiting.

To keep this system running, it takes a steady stream of fuel tankers from Kerbin, but these fuel tankers are the same that ferry the waystations, landers, and intraplanetary shuttles of my ever expanding network, so it's not as much of a bother as you might think.

[I_Killed_Jeb]

For lag reasons I no longer send any unmanned probes or plant any flags. I pretend that those activities are still going on, but that they're just handled by the unkerbaled branch of the KSP.

I never send a Kerbal anywhere without the on-hand capability to return him home (so no bases on Eve or Tylo until I master landers to and from there). All planetary bases have shuttles capable of rendezvous with orbital stations, and all orbital stations have docked spaceships with the capacity and fuel to return the base and station crew to Kerbin SOI, where I have littered the gravity well with stations full of small shuttles, return capsules, and SSTO spaceplanes.

Rather than build massive, intricate, multistage spaceships capable of flying off to distant planets and back again, my entire space program is based around an expanding system of waystations and refueling points, allowing relatively small and simple ships to travel anywhere in the solar system.

An average trip might look something like this:

1.) Take off from KSC in the reusable Mark 98 SSTO spaceplane (15 tons) and rendezvous with LKO station at 80x80km

2.) EVA crew over to a mini shuttle for transfer to a waystation in higher orbit (these minishuttles are extremely fuel-efficient, with a deltaV per ton of around 2,000m/s)

3.) Board a small interplanetary capable ship such as my NERVA powered Skipper Mk2, weighing in at 15.9 tons with a deltaV of 7763m/s (I have some larger, but less fuel-efficient models as well, going up to 14k delta V)

4.) Fly to Jool and aerocapture, then rendezvous with a station there and board one of the many lander shuttles I have ready to ferry crew down to Jool's moons

5.) Party on a new planet in SPACE. All the infrastructure for the return trip is already ready and waiting.

To keep this system running, it takes a steady stream of fuel tankers from Kerbin, but these fuel tankers are the same that ferry the waystations, landers, and intraplanetary shuttles of my ever expanding network, so it's not as much of a bother as you might think.

this is exactly the setup i'm building up right now in my career save, it seems a lot more "real" and feels like a real program

[technion]

I'm too scared to send Kerbals interplanetary because what if I run out of fuel? My orbital rendezvous skills suck.

The two things I see in this game are typically "return manned missions" and "one way probes". I'd like to suggest a "return probe mission", if for no other reason than, if you can successfully manage that, then replacing that probe with a lander module should confirm you can manage a return manned trip.

[Rhyunix]

I normally chase up all wayward space craft with a reliable craft of mine which is modified for each purpose

After all "Failure is of course not really what I want"

[Skorpychan]

Career mode is where I try and milk science without killing anyone. Or at least, as few as possible. Limitations on launchers (design issues) means I'm keeping things as small as possible. That, naturally, means single-kerbal lander cans.

Everyone sent out comes home, at some point. Nobody is STRANDED. Rescue missions can be a thing if I've screwed up, as can crew rotations for ground-based stations.

[Grover]

TL;DR

i always clean up my space junk, im yet to leave a single piece of debris in kerbin SOI (i have left things orbiting kerbol, after slinging off the mun, but even the apollo program did that )

Also, never leaving a kerbal stranded, even when ive found my kerbin return stage with not enough dv because of a buggered up descent and landing, ive sent a rescue craft to retrieve the brave kerbonaut

Then i go a little further to make sure that no stage, including the first, short lived, asparagus boosters, crashes on KSC property, its either in the ocean or on the far side of the island landing strip. After all, id hate to crush the queue of brave and stupid kerbals lining up for a ride on the big rocket

[superm18]

I try to never kill a Kerbal, but have no quarrel sending óne Kerbal to Jool alone.

You might wanna consider using one of the life support mods, Ioncross or TAC