Okay, this mission is originally inspired by Horus Lupercal, and his 20-tons-to-crash-on-Jupiter rocket. I think the title of the thread is very self-explainable... I'm just going to build a rocket capable to land on the TNO Varuna, weighting less than 30 tons, and get back to Earth. The rocket:
The voyage starts:
This is the upper section of my bi-staged rocket. I started burning with the Grasshopper, then flipped over and accelerated with the Ion.
Now, my method to stage:
I originally installed the grasshopper on a lower stage, and failed to reach orbit. I needed to get rid of the Grasshopper, cause, after reaching orbit, I don't need it anymore, so its just dead weight, but I couldn't add another stage, so I came up with this idea. You see the two docking ports on the chemical engine? well, I'm gonna detach them, accelerate backwards using the GHPP, and then crash them using the Ion, to break the GHPP... That's my method of staging
Get rid of what you don't need, you'll get far away...
So, the path to Varuna was VEEGA, obviously:
I must mention my original destination was Pluto, but as you can see, Pluto is not on the right position. Correcting the course to get to Pluto would have costed valuable fuel, something I don't have... Varuna, on the other hand, was right on my way, so I changed the destination...
We are here! Now for the return part...
Burn to get an encounter with Earth from Varuna directly was just too expensive in terms of fuel... So I decided to burn for Jupiter instead, and use a Jupiter gravity assistance to aim to Earth..
A Happy Landing
Mission Completed
The voyage starts:
This is the upper section of my bi-staged rocket. I started burning with the Grasshopper, then flipped over and accelerated with the Ion.
Now, my method to stage:
I originally installed the grasshopper on a lower stage, and failed to reach orbit. I needed to get rid of the Grasshopper, cause, after reaching orbit, I don't need it anymore, so its just dead weight, but I couldn't add another stage, so I came up with this idea. You see the two docking ports on the chemical engine? well, I'm gonna detach them, accelerate backwards using the GHPP, and then crash them using the Ion, to break the GHPP... That's my method of staging
Get rid of what you don't need, you'll get far away...
So, the path to Varuna was VEEGA, obviously:
I must mention my original destination was Pluto, but as you can see, Pluto is not on the right position. Correcting the course to get to Pluto would have costed valuable fuel, something I don't have... Varuna, on the other hand, was right on my way, so I changed the destination...
We are here! Now for the return part...
Burn to get an encounter with Earth from Varuna directly was just too expensive in terms of fuel... So I decided to burn for Jupiter instead, and use a Jupiter gravity assistance to aim to Earth..
A Happy Landing
Mission Completed
