It's not exactly Rocket Science. It's Kerbal Rocket Science!

[PyrosNine]

http://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/

...So, I got my crew's shuttle 560km above sea level, and entered into a failing geosynchronous orbit (failing because I was actually going too far and too fast to remain in orbit, and about to escape earth's gravitational pull entirely) when I realized that in my haste to strap 16x "OOOMPH" onto my shuttle, I had foregone the most basic necessity in building a space shuttle:

The part that gets them back to earth alive.

Also known as a "parachute," The part that keeps them from returning to the earth at a velocity terminal in the fatal sense.

So, I did what any merciful mission control would do when their crew is about to be lost in the solar infinite: Pointed them back to earth...and set the engines to full throttle. The explosion could fittingly be seen from where they'd been a few minutes before.


I found this game when the Freelance Astronauts were trying it out on their stream, and since it was free, I tried it out myself. The game tries for a simplistic but still fairly accurate space shuttle launch simulator, with things like weight, mass, inertia, terminal velocity, the effects of different layers of atmosphere on a rapidly moving objects, all coded in.

From what I have seen on YouTube, it's possible to enter a stable, permanent orbit around the earth, and vacate the earth altogether, and it's also equally possible to blow your ship to smithereens.

At the website, you can also download extra parts than what's in the download from their forums, with things ranging from heatsinks for the thrusters to Star-Trek style Nacelle thrusters that have such incredible force they will rip themselves off your ship and fly far off into the vast reaches of space, but only if they fail to blow you to atoms.

So it's pretty cool.

If any of y'all decide to play it, I'll just say this: the bigger your ship is, the more important SAS stabilizer modules are. That is the key to AWESOMENESS.