Kerbal Space Program AAR, Mun Tourism

Our last mission had made good money, but we weren't earning enough. Not nearly enough. I had plans for this space program, and for those plans we would need some upgrades. Now I was going to look under every nook and cranny I could find for us to make the money we needed. Luckily, our recent upgrades to the administration building meant we could take on more contracts. We could hold up to 7 now, though only 5 were of any worth.

Three Kerbals booked flights with us to go into orbit around the Mun. One VIP pulled some connections to come up cheap, but the others were paying full price. Good money, but there was more we could do.

The scientists down in the caverns wanted some scientific information from orbit around both the Mun and Kerbin. Specifically, they wanted us to take atmospheric pressure readings from orbit. Of course, there wasn't any pressure there, but it's not like they were spending their own money. Ah well, more for us, we'd put it to good use.

Lastly, a high paying customer wanted something more symbolic. He wanted us to put a flag down on the Mun. Normally, this'd be problematic, because we didn't have near the facilities to land a rocket down on the Mun. Good for us though, our star pilot Ms. Health was itching for a vacation. And where better to vacation than on the Mun herself? Sure, she'd have to use her jetpack for the final bit, but it should have enough delta-vee for her to land safely if we did enough of the work getting her there.

She'd be alone up there for a good amount of time, but all the better. Who wouldn't want to spend a year away from all Kerbal contact? So much less crazy.

Her replacement would be the rescued pilot Hermes. We offered him a better salary, and assured him that all our rockets came with parachutes. Given his the reputation of his name for his failed mission bankrupting the private rocket company that had sent him up, he'd need a new name. Fishman the lawyer gave him one; Stamasd Kerman. I suspect he used some cheap name generation software, but ah well. It'd work out.

The two pilots Ms. Health and Stamasd suited up, along with our three tourists: Melanne, Doodfen, and Buzz. The new rocket is based off The Munner rocket, and would have more fuel, along with some extra crew capacity. A real tourist contraption.

The launch schedule would look similar to our last Munar trip. Things would only change once we were in close orbit around the Mun. Stamasd would be the pilot for the entire trip, with Ms. Health looking over his shoulder to make sure everything was going smoothly, at least until she was dropped off.

Everything went according to plan to get into orbit. Same as before, orbit around the Mun wasn't too hard. Landing though was expensive. Similar to anywhere else, if you want to land safely, you need to kill your excess speed. For nearly the same amount of delta-v that it took to get here from Kerbin's orbit, we'd be able to land. That's a lot of fuel. Now you see why we used parachutes and heat shields when landing back on Kerbin.

That single heat shield allows us to ride a hot cushion of compressed air to eliminate some 1600 m/s, leaving wind resistance and the parachute to kill the remaining 1600m/s. Here, we were balking at losing a mere 800 m/s.

The beauty of rocket mechanics means that overall rocket science didn't matter. Only the ratio of fuel to mass and your efficiency did. Ms. Health has a tiny amount of fuel on her, but that fuel would go a long way. She has about 600 m/s worth of fuel all by herself. The rocket arrives at the low point, and burns against the orbit, just enough for Ms. Health to safely land.

The rocket's still moving at 500 m/s. But that was all she'd need to land.

She leaves the rocket, and boosts off to give the rocket a wide berth. Once she was clear, Stamasd fired the engines to get back into orbit around the Mun. His journey here would be like the last orbit. But Health's trip down would be interesting.

Health's rocketpack had a lot of fuel, but not much thrust. She had to start immediately if she wanted to slow down in time. Things did not go quite as planned. By accident, she clipped the side of the crater, dazing her and preventing her from controlling her flight as planned. It would be a rough ride down.

(Sidenote: I didn't realize ahead of time just how much time would be taken up by the maneuver to get both the rocket into orbit and Ms. Health safely down. I had no idea that Kerbals could hit that hard and still survive. In the future I'll likely try to be a little higher up)

But, eventually she landed. Apparently she enjoyed the crazy ride down. Mun sledding she called it. She couldn't help but look back up at Kerbin and feel something deep inside her.

Everything well with Ms. Health, Stamasd put the rocket on a trek home. This would be simple and straightforward.

Wave goodbye for now to Ms. Health, we'd be back for her...eventually.

And a successful splash down. They had all returned safely, minus one vacationer.

This was easily our biggest haul yet. One mission for more than 300,000 spesos, along with a healthy amount of Science!. Best still, we had enough to upgrade our manufacturing area. Now we'd be able to build some real rockets. And maybe someday go back for Ms. Health.

PS. Full disclosure: I needed to add a bit of fuel to the rocket to make it work. Likely could have done it with the amount of fuel I had given great piloting and more practice, but this episode is taking long enough as is.

Kerbal Space Program AAR, The First Mun Orbit

It was time. While the new plane was fun, it wasn't very useful for our space program, and it was time to stop playing with it. We needed more science! if we were going to keep researching, and to get that we'd need to make a trip to the Mun. The scientists down in research are scary when they run out of information to digest. A bored scientist with easy access to rocket fuel? That's rather dangerous.

Design work on the new rocket would commence immediately. This one would be a doozy. The actual mission would only require around 33% more delta-V than a simple Kerbin orbit, but that small increase would require quite a bit more fuel. This would be by far the biggest rocket we'd build.

I finished working on the plans, but while construction was ongoing Fishman the legal adviser reminded me that company policy required an engineer to fix possible problems for any rocket leaving Kerbin orbit. As we didn't have an engineer willing to do work, one would have to be found. I grabbed the nearest janitor, a Wixit Kerman and gave him some basic instructions.

Memorize this list of components. They're sorted into two lists, moving and non-moving. If it's moving and shouldn't, use duct tape. If it's not moving and should, use WD-40. Our expertly trained janitor-turned-kerbonaut joined Ms. Health the pilot and Mant "123" the scientist to watch the construction as the rocket neared completion

.Functionally, the rocket worked similarly to past rockets. The lower booster stage would get it to an appropriate height, followed by the liquid fuel stage that would get it up to orbital speed, along with any additional maneuvers following that. The difference here is in size. This thing is just over double the mass of what it took to get into orbit.

Though, part of the problem comes from the lower stage being so inefficient. The basic facilities don't allow for the complexity I'd prefer. Instead, big dumb rockets are used.

I'd have preferred naming it the Munner, given how we come down with our backside presented full on the world, but Fishman insisted I name it something else. Mooner was close enough for legal purposes though.

The three brave kerbonauts strapped themselves in and prepared for launch. We'd begin our trip with an equatorial orbit around Kerbin, same as we've done before. It went off with no problems.

As you can see from the resource readout, we've used a startling amount of fuel. 38.25 tons to get to orbital height. 10.4 tons to get to orbital speed. Now it was time to push our orbit out towards the moon. We'd want to get to about 11 million meters out to get captured by the Mun's orbital pull.

If we timed it right, this orbit should get us close enough to the Mun for a fly by. As a reminder, the farthest we had been away from Kerbin before was 250,000 meters. This would be 40 times farther out. To get 70,000 meters out from Kerbin, we had used almost 50 tons of fuel. Getting out an additional 11 million? Only 1.4 tons of fuel. Rockets are weird.

4 hours later, and the crew had successfully been captured by the Mun! Congratulations.

Of course, we still had plenty of fuel left to do more. Doing a fly-by was interesting, but getting into a close orbit would be spectacular. I wouldn't have to worry about bored scientists for a long time. I gave Ms. Health the go ahead for another burn, after Mant had finished recording the scientific data we wanted from this distance.

Orbits around the Mun worked the same as on Kerbin even if it didn't look like an orbit just yet. Thrusting into our orbit would lower the other side of the orbit. In this case, that means thrusting at the low point ahead of us would bring the high point closer to the Mun. As long as we stayed within the gravitational pull, we'd stay in orbit around the Mun.

There, that should do it. We'd stay in orbit around the Mun. But we wanted to get closer, so we could really see the Mun up close. This time, we'd burn at the high point, to get our low point lower. But first we'd have to get to the high point.

On Kerbin, orbits are fast. We go at a speedy 2200 m/s. Here, we're going at a similar speed to the toy plane we flew. This was going to take awhile. Hopefully the computer games they had available would keep them occupied.

2 days later and we were approaching our high point. Another thrust into our orbit to slow us down, bringing our orbit very close to the Mun's surface. Because we're going towards the planet and gaining speed, this run should be much quicker.

Five hours later, and we're approaching the low point. Mant "123" readies the scientific instruments for her readings. Kerbin looks so very small in the background.

Mant really likes getting out of the rocket. Understandable after 2 days stuck in there

They finish taking their observations. It's time to return home. They go out for another orbit around the Mun. Making it back with as little fuel as they have will require doing each burn at the precise time.

Two days later and they're in position. Boosting into their orbit will lengthen it, letting us escape the Mun's pull, until we're again dominated by Kerbin's gravity.

They're almost home. One orbit around Kerbin until we're in position for the last burn.

Seven days into this trip, and the kerbonauts are on a trajectory towards Kerbin's atmosphere. We even have a bit of fuel left, if we had needed it. They release the engines; they won't be needing them anymore. There's nothing left to do but mun Kerbin and hope they don't overheat or slam too hard into the atmosphere.

If any kerbal was to look into the sky, they'd see the bright red new star as the craft struggles to rid itself of all 3,000 m/s of momentum it had built up on the trip down. None of the crew are worried, they know Ms. Health will take them down safely.

And so they do. Landing down near the coast in the desert, they drop a flag, commemorating the first successful flight around the Mun and back. Eight days of travel, and they look nothing but happy.

Almost 250 science! netted from that one trip. Almost as we had gained since the program had first begun. The scientists will be very happy indeed. The compound would be safe for many days to come, I'm sure.

Men in Space

First, I'd like to apologize to those that liked reading this blog for not updating in awhile.  It's strange how inertia works. I don't put out one post, and then the next post is harder to get out.  Continue missing posts and it never gets done. Here's a quick post to get back on the saddle.

The point of this post is to answer the question "Why don't we have more manned missions in space, and why does that change in my game?"  Our current space programs overwhelmingly prefer unmanned missions, with the few manned space missions revolving around the International Space Station or with new space programs eager to prove themselves.

The simple, straightforward, and wrong answer would be that manned space missions are expensive.  Don't get me wrong, missions to space are relatively expensive. The recent New Horizons probe sent past Pluto cost approximately $700 million over the 15 year development and deployment time, or $45 million per year.  A useful comparison might be the cost of a soldier sent to war is approximately $1 million a year. The research and development for getting long-term manned missions would be expensive, but not overly so for the budgets nations routinely throw around.  Instead, the more correct answer is manned missions are high risk and low reward.

Unmanned missions have three major advantages over manned missions. Easily the biggest for the engineers is that they don't have to return to Earth.  We can send probes flinging off into the void, or let them orbit endlessly around Mars with little backlash or consequence.  Machines and computers are built for handling preplanned objectives, and our knowledge of space is strong enough to plan the entire mission in advance.  Adding human error to the mix is more likely to cause problems whenever the mission's objectives are known enough to plan ahead. The biggest advantage for the space program itself and the politicians advocating for it is the lack of backlash if a mission runs into problems - if the mission fails, it is usually met with little notice, and often some amount of hope that what went wrong ends up fixing itself. (Which, to be fair, does happen often with the types of problems that crop up)

For manned missions, their strengths lie more in dealing with uncertainty. The human body is surprisingly versatile, especially when used with other tools (like screwdrivers or duct tape) and comes with a strong intelligence.  A random problem where planning or machinery failed can be fixed more easily by a human than by other methods.  The Apollo 13 mission, for example, had a problem with their CO₂ scrubber and had to jury rig a replacement.  Intelligence is also very handy when dealing with the light speed delay.  Even Mars, so very close as it is astronomically, has a 3-20 minute delay in contact with the Earth.  That's fine for sending pictures, but difficult for other activities. The recent Rosetta mission that landed on a comet had a delay of ~50 minutes, making it difficult to react in time if the need had arisen.

All of those advantages are great if we regard the machines we send out as important, but they aren't. Note the usage of "mission" when talking about achievements in space. The Rosetta mission's goal is to land a probe on comet 67P.  The probe itself is only useful to achieve that goal, and a failure is a loss of money, but it is still very possible to send another probe out if the first fails.  Humans, instead, are quite important; if a spacecraft fails and lives are lost, then people will care, and wonder why those lives are lost.  Landing a man on Mars would be quite prestigious, both for that man and the space organization that launched him, but a failure would cause even more hurt and embarrass the nation.

Furthermore, the timing on space travel can lead to odd peculiarities in regards to politics. There's a large gap of technology we'd need to bridge in order to send someone to Mars, which would take time and money to develop.  While money can be easy to come by, time is difficult. What leader wants to spend their political capitol advocating for a mission that wouldn't produce real results until 20 years in the future, likely long after they are gone?  (The mission alone would take about 2 years) It's a large undertaking, and support for those projects are slim. (If anyone ever asks, this is why I'll say good things about Bush. Proposing for a manned Mars mission will get me on anyone's side.  Though the ridicule he received for such support was to be expected, unfortunately.)  This is why I argue that manned missions are low reward. The prestige for the nation and program would be grand, but very difficult to attach to the individuals that started the project, leaving little incentive for the project to exist.

That answers the first bit of my original question (I hope), but what about the second? What makes the situation I'm creating different from the current one? Primarily, the reward would increase, but also the risk would decrease. A man and colony on Mars would be prestigious, and occur in a short timeframe.  A president could give the go-ahead and have a good chance of succeeding before his term is over. The risk, meanwhile, is mitigated by an increased presence in space. Losing the Challenger was a large deal, partially because we don't send people to space on a routine basis.  If, instead, we lost one of five ships currently in space, the public won't care.  Moreover, given that SEAC would be a multinational program, blame is easy to share, further lowering the risk.  At this point then, it seems normal that given a better risk/reward ratio, that men routinely in space far away from Earth could be a given, instead of a far-off dream.

PS. Please remember to like, comment, and share. It is surprising what those three actions mean to the content creator, given how easy and innocuous they may seem to the reader. Thank you, and I hope you enjoyed this post.