Once more around the green monster

[Randazzo]

And so the program forges ahead once more tonight, able to forward both the goal of making moolah and landing on big rocks in space. Having gotten Bop, Pol, and Laythe (by forgetting to pick up the contract before sending a mapping satellite. Might still go just for kicks though) off the board, only Tylo and Vall remain. Conveniently, there were explore contracts for both, plus a "Plant a flag on Vall" contract. Given the complexity of the Tylo mission, it will be a separate entry tomorrow. The first of two Tylo vehicles, "Magellan", launched tonight alongside the Vall vehicle, "De Champlain".

Due to Valls somewhat more fuel consuming nature to land on, all engineering shenanigans were put aside in favor of a proven design. A typical lander would be equipped with drop tanks and docked atop a large main engine core with a quad-nuke LV-N (from Modular Rocket Systems). This would be the "De Champlain", and would deliver three hapless kerbals onto Vall's surface, then bring them home again. As mentioned, "Magellan" launched in the same window. Though intentional shenanigans were avoided, there was a minor catastrophe with Magellan, but we'll cover that later.

De Champlains mission actually went quite well, yet this still proved a challenging undertaking due to the fact that De Champlain arrived only 6 days ahead of Magellan. Relatively speaking, the two craft were essentially right on top of one another in Jool's SOI. It quickly became apparent that trying to establish the two craft into encounters with different bodies would require frequent switching between the two. Still, both encounters were achieved successfully. The De Champlain lander separated once in a stable Vall orbit at 50 Km, and descended successfully. A flag was planted, Science! was gathered, and the crew returned to orbit mostly as planned. Having learned to avoid Mechjebs landing autopilot around Jool moons in the last missions, this was done manually and consumed somewhat more fuel than expected. Atypically, this did not cause a problem due to sufficient planning and including safety margins in the design. The lander had a very narrow margin of fuel remaining( >10 units of LF and corresponding O), which was dumped into the engine core tanks.

Orbit was established between Vall and Laythe at 30000 Km, which incidentally provides an indefinite exit window from Jool. It was quite a treat not to have to wait a year for a window, though the travel time was rather long. Since the engine core could not be recovered and was unlikely to be reusable for the second phase of the Tylo mission, a course was set to impact on the surface of Kerbin upon entering the encounter. All fuel was transferred into the lander module, and the module was decoupled from the engine core before correcting into an aerobraking node. The core impacted with the surface as planned, and the lander achieved stable orbit. The crew was recovered on the launchpad shortly thereafter.

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Meanwhile, back at KSC...

Jeb got a new toy...

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