Something you might find interesting: The cold war lunar probes were VERY Kerbal.

[Tassyr]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lunar_probes Seriously, read the descriptions of what happened.

It took a combined 42 missions (US and Soviet) until something landed. Just about everything else crashed, blew up, a few missed and went into solar orbit...

... Suddenly I don't feel so bad about my misses.

[micha]

Odd.. the very first entry (Pioneer 0) has a status of "success", but the notes say that there was a launch vehicle failure and maximum altitude reached was 16km - so barely into the stratosphere... hardly a success if shooting for the moon!

Edit: Apart from that, very cool article, thanks for pointing it out.

[Brotoro]

The early "Hard Landers," like the original Ranger concept and Luna 9, were certainly very kerbal. The main body of the ship carries the lander capsule down near the surface, and then just before it crashes, it pops off a small capsule that plops onto the ground. In the case of the Ranger capsule, it was surrounded by a shell of balsa wood to help absorb the impact force. None of these early Rangers were ever successful, and the Ranger probe was shifted to being a simple impact probe, taking pictures all the way down, because it was felt that it wasn't worth the effort to make a hard landing when the "soft landing" Surveyor was coming soon.

Below: Ranger 4. The round object on top is the hard-landing package inside the balsa shell that lands after a retro rocket fires to suicide burn...hopefully slow enough for the capsule part to survive. The rest of the Ranger crashes.

Edited February 3, 2015 by Brotoro

[LordFerret]

This kind of goes back to a statement I made in another thread in these forums which discussed 'decontaminating' space probes... point made. Great article/reference.

[cpast]

Odd.. the very first entry (Pioneer 0) has a status of "success", but the notes say that there was a launch vehicle failure and maximum altitude reached was 16km - so barely into the stratosphere... hardly a success if shooting for the moon!

Just fixed it. An anonymous user changed it from "success" to "failure" a week or so ago.

[LordFerret]

Just fixed it. An anonymous user changed it from "success" to "failure" a week or so ago.

That seems to be a recurring troublesome problem with Wiki. I thought their policy was not to allow such anonymous updates without peer review?

[Sidereus]

That seems to be a recurring troublesome problem with Wiki. I thought their policy was not to allow such anonymous updates without peer review?

It depends if the article is protected or not. Unprotected articles are open to anonymous edits with no review. Protected ones are the only ones that don't allow anonymous editing.

Usually it takes persistent vandalism in order to protect an article, so most aren't protected. And because Wiki policy is to "assume good faith", edits that are merely wrong rather than obviously disruptive aren't considered vandalism unless the user has a long history of making nothing but obviously wrong edits.

[Voidryder]

First: Thanks for the article.

Second: Wiki isn't accurate?!!!