European Agency of Space Stuff

SR-1 Flight 2 was a routine mission to continue gaining telemetry for our space program. I've recorded this flight so it's available for a watch below (warning for audio loudness!): After this there was a third flight of the SR-1, designated SR-1b. In order to get maximum value out of the SR-1 before we move on to other programs, I decided to take advantage of existing production lines by effectively sticking a SR-1 rocket on top of the existing one, creating a three-stage rocket: This worked well and reached a height of 240km for almost no extra expense. Such is the value of having multiple stages taking advantage of already tooled parts, especially when the final stage has less gravity to fight due to our altitude. This makes it sound like we've solved rocketry; just slap more rockets on top of each other! But eventually we'll run against the fundamental nature of rocketry governed by the tyranny of the rocket equation, which can be summed up as: " But to get tha...

Date:  1951-03-10 With new research on the horizon it's time to start training our Kerbonauts as test pilots and scheduling in new programmes. We're going to be working to meet two different mid-term objectives: Get a rocket plane programme up and running to perform crewed test flights. These will involve Kerbals and atmospheric flight, which poses quite different problems from our uncrewed sounding rocket. These will drop (eheheh) soon. Develop more sounding rockets capable of sub-orbital flights to do longer and faster 'downrange' missions on the way to our long-term objective of getting to Earth orbit. Roadmap heading in to 1952 Both of these programmes will provide more Science; especially landing our first crewed flight! Here's a sneak peek of a possible Y-Plane prototype (Y-Plane as in, Y are we wasting time with planes in a space program): Next up though, are our next sounding rocket flight(s)... Next Post: Continuing the SR-1 Project

Launch Date : 1951-03-10 Rocket/Payload : SR-1 Mission : Achieve Kármán Line It's launch day!   Liftoff successful, second stage deploys without any issues!   We make the 119km mark without losing our fins, hurrah! (Side note: They did not survive atmospheric re-entry, but that's still better than expected). Nice view of Spain and Morocco from here. The take-away haul from this is 4 science points worth of data for research. Enough for us to start working on improved rockets and supersonic flight. It will take about 15 months for all the research to complete, so we're way ahead of the game. Many smaller objectives completed successfully: We now have over 100k funds to play with, so lets immediately start investing in R&D and Vehicle Assembly Building upgrades to speed everything up. A second SR-1 rocket is under construction to complete more science, but we also need to start planning our designs for our first supersonic jet (to test crewed flights) as well as bigger a...

Our story begins on January 1st, 1951 . We've been tasked with creating a fledgling space rocket program by the newly formed Council of Europe . The USA and USSR have managed to 'poach' many of the top German scientists and already have established own space programs (though NASA is a way off existing yet). We, on the other hand, have been dumped in the desert of Africa with a seemingly endless supply of exotic fuels and an ahead-of-its-time ability to simulate rocket flights. We start with 50,000 funds and a dream. Our first strategic objective from the European Commission for Really Cool Space Flights is to get off the ground, but I have much larger ambitions than that (which will no doubt be the death of me or, at least, some of our crews). Sounding Rockets are research rockets, designed to take measurements on the nature of rocketry and space itself. Their research is intended to be used to 'sound out' the feasibility of space travel. In RP-1, we'll start...