The recent Kerbal Space Program boom has reminded me to go back to the game myself and continue the Fab Space Agency playthrough. As I’ve gotten a bit rusty since November, I have decided to postpone my plans of putting a Kerbal into orbit and instead practice some more first. A good way to do this, I thought, was to put some more satellites into orbit. And thus, the FSA Satellite Program was born.

For the first mission in this new program, I designed a new satellite with the plan of putting it into a polar orbit. I’ve named the satellite Worker Bee 1, continuing my naming scheme from the first two missions somewhat.

As I am playing in sandbox mode, the tech tree is all unlocked and in-game money doesn’t exist. So this satellite is designed purely with role-playing functionality in mind. It has two antennas, solar panels, batteries and an APU for backup power generation. This is fueled from the rather large monopropellant tank that also powers the RCS thrusters that are used for station keeping in orbit.

To re-familiarise myself with the game, and also because my first rocket maybe did altogether look too much like a large penis, I redesigned my launch vehicel completely as well. It’s still a two-stage-plus-payload system, but it now uses three solid fuel boosters and I’ve redesigned the payload fairing.

I thought I would get away without struts by redesigning the fairing, but the first launch attempt, which was very wobly, and ended in the booster separation smashing the first stage engine, abused me of that notion. You can see the struts I added to attach the first to the second stage and the boosters to the first stage in the above image.

I also throttled down the boosters to 75% power and with all of these modifications, the second launch went very smoothly. I had some minor control issues, mostly due to me not having played the game in a while, but in the end, I managed to get the rocket on a nice trajectory for a south-to-north polar orbit around Kerbin.

I coasted for a while and then burned some more with my first stage to get into a nice orbit.

I then decoupled the second stage and burned at the periapsis to circularise and enlarge my orbit to where I wanted it. I ended up with an almost perfectly circular orbit at a height of between 115 and 117 kilometres above the planet.

I blew the payload fairing successfully and then decoupled the satellite from the second stage. After this, I used the RCS thrusters to maneuver the satellite away from the second stage. I forgot to put a flight control computer on the second stage, so sadly I could not de-orbit it. I cheated and deleted it later. For the next launch, I will have to rectify this.

Finally, I extended the solar panels and extendable antenna and here we are: Worker Bee 1 is ready for service.

And I must say, I am quite happy with how the orbit turned out. After the false start, the second launch went perfectly. I hadn’t expected that, to be honest.

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