We are 74 days into our space program, We have launched four aircraft and lost one kerbal. We'll call it a 75 percent success rate. That's a solid C.
Our mission planners don't feel comfortable attempting a Mün landing until we unlock our next two tech tree nodes, so in the meantime, we'll test the lander our engineers have thrown together.
The Mün program will be known as the Igaluk program, after the
Inuit god of the moon.
The Igaluk 1 lander is ready for testing.
The test version has 2,900 dV, which the mission planners say is more than enough for a Mün landing and return. Its thrust-to-weight ratio is 1.36 on Kerbin, meaning we can launch this thing. That also means its TWR will be extremely high on the Mün, so we'll probably be landing this thing at maybe a quarter throttle. It will probably even work for a Duna landing in the future.
Our immediate challenge will be getting it into orbit, which will require our biggest launcher yet.
Jeb is at the wheel for this test launch. His mission is to test its flight in the atmosphere, up to the edge of space.
He begins a gravity turn at about 7 kilometers.
You can see the launch profile curving toward an orbital path.
Uh, Jeb? We're not going to orbit today. That thing doesn't have the dV to make it to orbit (we need about 3,700 to get to orbit if you take into account atmospheric and gravitational drag). Jeb, though, is going to space, damn it. He conducts goo experiments in low atmosphere, high atmosphere and low space, then climbs out at the 99-km apoapsis to collect the data.
That re-entry trajectory is going to be very steep though. Once again, Jeb is in for a bumpy ride.
Jeb decouples the crew capsule at the edge of the atmosphere.
He'll have less speed to bleed off, but due to the steep angle, he'll have far less space in which to do it.
The capsule rockets through the atmosphere. At about 7 kilometers above the surface of the ocean, the pod is still traveling at 1,300 m/s at a 45-degree angle. This is gonna be bad.
Jeb has no choice -- he pulls the chute. The G-meter maxes out instantly, and Jeb is shoved back in his seat. He blacks out, which is good new for him, because the G-forces turn him into green goo seconds later.
Sploosh.
Silence envelops the control room. The agency has lost another kerbonaut. When the sun rises, Bill makes his way to the flagpole in front of the astronaut complex and plants a memorial next to Langard's.
I guess we're not as space savvy as we thought we were. I think we're at about a D-minus now. Our scientists are still working on those Mün-landing technologies, so by the time those roll around, we'll want to have our re-entries nailed down pat.
In the meantime, we'll take on a few more ground testing contracts. Here's one for a lander rocket engine. Testing by Rodmin.
The same rig is testing a new radial decoupler and a sepratron (a small solid rocket designed to thrust large stages away from each other upon decouping).
The testing gives us enough science to set our researchers upon the final node of the second level in the tech tree.
We've taken a step back as a program in this episode, and we've lost a beloved kerbal. This is not the brightest day in the short history of the Geeb Space Agency.
Hopefully we'll get those re-entries down pat and head to the Mün soon.