Kerbal lost in orbit! HELP!

[GungaDin]

I accidentally stranded a Kerbal in orbit. He's been up there for hours by himself. I'm in career mode so have limited parts so is there any way of rescuing him? Even if I had a 3 seat capsule which I don't yet - can you leave one seat empty?

[Vanamonde]

Before leaving the VAB, you can click on the crew tab and choose to have more or fewer seats occupied. (You can also just have somebody get out later, if he's got a way to reach the ground safely.) Then you can fly close to the stranded guy, and have him fly to the rescue ship using his RCS backpack.

[StrandedonEarth]

Or there's the old "get out and push!" Seriously, you can go EVA and maneuver him to be in 'front' of the capsule, then push it retrograde with the suit RCS. Once you get down to about 10% RCS propellant, go back into the capsule to recharge your RCS, then rinse and repeat until you're in the soup. If the capsule has any RCS capability left you can use that first, of course.

[Omicron314]

Or, if your craft is equipped with a docking port, you can build a small craft with a fuel tank and engine, dock with your craft, and deorbit using your probe as an engine.

It (kind of) works if you don't have a docking port attached, to. You can position yourself so that you are "ahead" of the stranded capsule in orbit and slowly burn towards it. It's the same concept as "get out and push" only much, much faster.

[Dave Kerbin]

If you have a pod with more then 1 seat you can use the crew tab in the VAB to remove some of the crew leaving empty seats. Or the low tech way is to just have some of the crew EVA on the launchpad, you can recover them later since they are already 'landed'.

If you don't have a pod with more then 1 seat, but have a probe core, you can build a ship with both a capsule and a probe core, and using the crew tab remove the pilot and let the probe core fly the empty ship to your stranded kerbal.

[Sirrobert]

You can build a craft with 2 command pods. Make sure 1 of the pods is empty, and randevous with the stranded kerbal. Get in the spare pod, and land both

[LethalDose]

Also, try to minimize burning the rescuee's EVA fuel during your rendezvous: If your first rescue attempt doesn't work, you want to be sure the poor guy has enough left over for a second attempt.

And a third...

[TechnicalK3rbal]

Rendezvous, but just use a satyputnik with a 1kerbal pod underneath.

[Kasuha]

Simple Career mode rescue&descent module - you can build any kind of lifter you want below it.

Make sure you:

- open all three chutes BEFORE you decouple pods from the body

- decouple all three decouplers at once, low enough in atmosphere (~3000 m)

Then you can be sure they will keep together till they reach the ground/ocean and will all survive.