Kerbal Space Program: The Great Mun Race

I have no idea how this vessel even came to fly. Before the days of fairings, optimized rockets, or even atmosphere mods I was flying by the skin of my teeth with little, to no guidance. I hadn't a clue what I was doing as many of these pictures will make very apparent.

A friend of mine named Jordan turned me on to Kerbal Space Program and quickly our conquest for space pitted us against each other to achieve a landing on the Mun. A monumental task considering neither of us knew how to even exit the atmosphere back then. Jordan would be the first to exit the atmosphere but I wasn't far behind him, though I recall him giving me a few pointers. I wasn't anymore clever then your average space enthusiast and I recall not understanding how going straight up somehow didn't equal making orbit.

Though Jordan may have been the first to reach space, heck he may have been the first to reach the Mun. But I was gaining pace and already had developed a completely untested lander. I was proceeding exactly in Kerbal Space Program style- and I would come to pay for that soon enough.

It's tough when you first start off in Kerbal because you don't have a good sense of how much fuel you'll need for any particular launch. This would come to be the biggest problem I would face. Landing the craft on the Mun wasn't good enough- the winner would have to get back home too. My first attempt ended in scattered parts across the Mun.

My second, third and forth attempts didn't get me much further. While I was gaining critical knowledge which eventually led to stranding my kerbals on the surface of the Mun, I wasn't much closer to actually bringing anyone home.

While it may have taken a number of tries. Eventually, I started to figure it out and with that knowledge came even more experimentation and more advancements in deployment on the surface of the Mun. Winning the Mun race was a big deal and as time has gone on, I've really come to believe that if you can land on the Mun- you can go anywhere within Kerbal Space Program. The only thing you need is a little bit of determination and a proper amount of fuel.

I decided to write this article today to encourage every young Kerbal Space Program astronaut to not give up. The biggest challenges may lie ahead of you, but that's not to say they're not conquerable.