Rapid series of successes result in overconfidence. Rescue of Kerbonaut planned.

[Javin]

Jebidiah was your typical Kerbonaut. About as average as they come, really. Not overly courageous, and not overly stupid (the stupidity a result of years of inbreeding creating a race of almost genetically identical peoples, all sharing the same family name.) However, he was a Kerbonaut, one of a select few (of three, to be precise) to be the first to enter the Kerbal Space Program (KSP).

The KSP was founded in year T0. (As Kerbal is an otherwise barren planet, it's assumed that they started time from this date due to it being their crowning achievement, mostly that they managed to build a Space Program apparently prior to discovering agriculture.) And their first Kerbonaut to set foot in a rocket was to be Jebidiah. Jebidiah had little knowledge that on another planet, his name was Hebrew for "Friend of the Lord." Rather on Kerbal, the name was first uttered in a particularly impressive belch, followed by a hiccup. The sound played across the ears so well that Jebidiah's father (little is known of his mother, or of any female Kerboid for that matter) gave him the name on the spot. Jebidiah was 32 at the time.

Selected for the position because he happened to win a rousing game of duck-duck-kooz, Jebidiah was elated as he stepped foot into his first mission: In this mission, he sat in a command pod on the launching pad, and nothing else... After the appropriate countdown, he proudly climbed out of the landing pod, picked up a pebble from the asphalt launching pad, and wrote his report before climbing back into the command pod. There, he waited to have the vehicle "recovered." Which meant, bringing it back into the hangar. His first successful mission! With this information, Kerboid scientists were able to make leaps in the development of further rocketry studies, and there were promises that the next command module may even be capable of leaving the ground!

And leave the ground it did. On his second mission - this mission took place that same evening; Kerboids are nothing if not efficient - a small fuel tank and a rocket were strapped to the command pod, and a parachute added as an afterthought. To everyone's surprise, everything went as planned, and after firing a few meters into the air, and landing safely, Jebidiah was able to add another report and a pocket full of grass to his growing list of achievements.

His third mission (the following morning) truly showed the growth of the KSP. This time Jebidiah managed to end up a quarter of the planet away, and still made it home in time for supper, with a third pocket now filled with dirt and another crumpled report. These were deemed slightly less valuable than the prior local pebble and fauna reports according to the Scientists.

By his fourth venture into the command pod (still on day 2) his dreams of space were finally realized! In a loose orbit around Kerbal, he got out, and promptly let go, of the command pod.

For a long, and panic filled fifteen minutes, he struggled to get back to his ship. After attempting to run, then swim in vain, he finally had to pull out the manual to discover that he was in possession of a jet pack! His first approach broke both of his legs and sent him spinning ass over over elbows into the void, but another hour and he had himself under control. After much time had passed, he grasped on to the hatch of the command pod, and managed to pull himself back inside. It was then that he realized he'd forgotten to write a report. He stepped out of the pod and immediately let go again... This time he was a little faster about smashing his face into the engine with enough force to spin the entire ship bringing the command pod down on his head where he snagged the hatch door. Some scribbled notes later, and he was on an exciting burn into the upper atmosphere, having completely forgotten about his trauma, and elated to be "doing the fly" again. This time landing God-Knows-Where, apparently the Kerboids (still without agriculture) had managed to (without so much as a satellite or communications aboard the rocket) find him within minutes. It's assumed telepathy was involved.

In a show of Kerboid ingenuity, the KSP technology exploded exponentially from the report Jebidiah had gathered. Multi-stage rockets were a reality, and a trip to the Mun was imminent!

The first trip to the Mun was a simple fly-by, with Jebidiah writing his reports, and managing not to get thrown off of his ship. The second trip to the Mun would find him in orbit before returning home, and this brings us to the fateful day of the first Mun landing.

Jebidiah was stoked. He has flown flawless missions, and played numerous games of hang-man with himself while outside of the ship and turned them in as reports. (Nobody read them anyway.) And now, he was to be the first Kerboid to walk on the Mun!

Everything went as planned. The execution was flawless. Coming into the Mun's orbit flying low, with liberal usage of the SAS to keep the ship steady, Jebidiah finished off his last burn just as the lander touched down as if he'd been doing this for years. He may have broken three out of four legs off of the craft, but the engines were still intact! He dove out of his module, stumbling face down on the surface of the moon, and immediately grabbed what he'd come here for. His fourth... Pocket... of dirt.

By now he had some fancy sciencey gadgets attached to his pod that he was instructed to "open" upon arrival. He did so, and wrote a "report" in the form of a rousing game of hangman that took him 10 minutes to figure out, then climbed back aboard his pod, and fired the engines at full throttle! As the lander's engines sucked the last of their fuel, he popped the final stage and was left with just a pod and a small rocket identical to that of his first flight, with a full tank of gas, and nothing stopping him from getting home! He gunned the rocket and started growing his apoapsis to leave the Mun. Just as his ships arch threw him into Kerbal's orbit, he turned turned the rocket 90 degrees to adjust his heading... And nothing happened...

He tried again... Nothing... He smashed the keyboard in a panic... Nothing but the hum of the engines as the ship continued to accelerate and began to tumble. In sheer terror he started to smash the keyboard with his face, not keeping in mind that the spacebar would fire the final "phase zero." His pod detached from the rocket, and spun out of sight.

Today, it is presumed that Jebidiah is still alive, circling somewhere out of Kerbal's planetary orbit, and living his life circling the sun and playing hangman. In the investigation after the incident, it was discovered that someone had forgotten to put batteries on the ship. More specifically, that the designers were not actually aware that the ship they had built took batteries at all.

Bill and Bob Kerbal are next in line, and are currently in small-scale training maneuvers around Kerbal in preparation for a rescue attempt. It's estimated that this attempt will be carried out some time in the next 10 years.

(This is seriously everything I've done since Saturday... I'm bored at work as I write this.)

Edited January 23, 2014 by Javin