KSP: Recreating Project Gemini! Space Race Speedrun

welcome back everyone to episode 2 of space race speed run the ksp series in which i attempt to recreate every significant manned program from the dawn of the space age in as few launches as possible last week we completed the goal of the mercury program with three rockets one a little joe one a redstone and one an atlas and with the mercury program successfully beaten we can move on to the next american endeavor project gemini now there's actually a gemini rocket in stock kerbal space program provided you have the making history dlc here it is the gemini capsule itself looks pretty good the forward nose is a bit janky and the service module is a perfect cylinder rather than slightly tapered but it looks close enough for me to use with minimal modification however i am less satisfied with the titan rocket itself it's a fair attempt but the aesthetics don't look quite right to my eye the first thing i want to improve upon is the stock vessel's lack of a nice shiny fuselage the titan ii launch vehicle sported two reflective stainless steel sections along its fuselage so i'm recreating the appearance of these sections by using silver fairing pieces now it's not possible to get the dimensions perfect but i'd say i got things pretty close my other issue with the stock gemini rocket was that the first stage for the stock vessel looks a little bit too short and stumpy the real titan 2 rocket looks a little bit taller now i haven't measured this or figured out the exact right scale so i could be off here but to my eye this looks slightly more correctly proportioned the 1.875 meter tanks otherwise have the correct color scheme for titan 2's paint job so i can use those for the bottom part of the first stage and finally we can cap it off with this engine here the bobcat which is directly modelled after the real lr87 engine used by the titan so we haven't got to craft any funky custom shapes like we had to when building the bizarre first stage of the atlas rocket last week when the atlas rocket was being developed engineers weren't confident that they'd be able to start a second stage rocket engine in flight so all the engines were ignited at liftoff with a central sustainer engine that would burn for the entire flight and two side-mounted engines that would boost the rocket for just over two minutes before being jettisoned but only the engines and a bit of superstructure i guess none of the propellant tanks it was quite a difficult setup to engineer in kerbal space program but thankfully this time around we could do things a bit more conventionally the titan rocket is a much more standard setup of a first stage stacked in tandem below the second stage with in-flight ignition of the second stage engine so here we are conducting our gemini launch now i stated earlier that with this series i am trying to fulfill all of the major objectives of each program in far fewer launches than nasa did because we're speed running this so this flight isn't going to be a recreation of any specific gemini flight but rather one that'll meet the objectives of several in total there were 12 gemini flights gemini one and two were uncrewed test flights so we could just skip through those since atlanta aerospace our superior technology does not require testing so moving on to gemini 3 this was a simple mission to orbit so we could do that with this flight tick that's pretty much done we'll cover the other objectives as we go along what i can address quickly is my somewhat odd looking ascent profile we're going for a very steep ascent with the first stage at first because as well as trying to recreate the overall look of gemini i'm also trying to recreate the flight profile of the rocket and the titan rocket stages can almost be thought of as being like solid rocket motors they burned at full thrust for the entire flight and were only lit once which means we're going to have to get into orbit using just this one giant burn from the launch pad no throttle cuts and no separate circularization burns for us although of course the burn is split across the two rocket stages this means that during ascent we have to balance out our acceleration and our course such that when we arrive at our apogee we'll be in the final stages of raising our periapsis i find the easiest way to do this is to go with a nice steep ascent profile and once our apoapsis is at the very edge of space we can start pointing downward toward the radial invector to ensure that more of our energy is going toward raising our periapsis rather than continuing to raise our apple abscess eventually this will cause apogee to start falling so just before it drops too far we can start nosing up and burning more towards the pro-grade vector and once we've passed apogee we can start to point upwards toward the radial out vector to continue raising our periapsis without having too great an effect on our apoapsis i know kind of a wordy explanation and difficult for me to articulate very well but given the visual medium of youtube videos you could just watch all of that happening on screen for an idea of how i managed it and i don't mean to inflate my own gazebo here but i think i did pretty well there's a little bit of fuel remaining but oh well we don't need it so we can just detach of course in real life the lower stage would eventually see its orbits decay and crash back to earth unfortunately that won't happen in kerbal space program so maybe at the end of this series i'll do a big deep space clean up where we just catch all the debris and send it hurtling back down to the ground but that's a story for another time i guess now one of the most notable things that was conducted by the gemini program was how the gemini spacecraft docked to an agena target vehicle to familiarize nasa with performing orbital rendezvous a vital capability to have ahead of any moon landing mission however i thought i'd spice things up and instead of going for a gemini aegena dock yawn we'd instead go for a gemini gemini dock which fulfills the mission objectives of gemini 6 a and 7 which involved the rendezvous of two gemini vehicles after the original plan to rendezvous with an aegina vehicle was scrubbed after the ajina failed to launch we're going a bit above and beyond here though rather than have the two vehicles just get really close we're going to dock the two together obliterating the frankly pathetic effort from nasa i've also made a couple of other changes to this particular gemini rocket that you may have spotted because i wanted this vehicle to meet the objectives of both gemini 5 which demonstrated to the use of fuel cells for electrical power and i also added a science experiment to the exterior of the capsule so that we can fulfill the objectives of gemini 12. prove that an astronaut can do useful work while on eva without life-threatening exhaustion gemini 12's eva was performed by buzz aldrin who took some photographs and retrieved a micro meteorite collector so our kerbal is going to perform science in the form of reading and taking data from our temperature experiment now i know i mentioned for our first said that i was going to try and recreate the actual flight profile of the titan 2 booster and just have one giant burn split across two stages of course to get to low earth orbit or in this case low curb in orbit of course but uh for the second flight i'm like you know what i've already showcased my ability to get to orbit in one big bird and quite frankly i don't want this video to drag so we're just going to do a very standard kerbal space program gravity turn and descend where we just do a gravity turn and then cut the engines and then do a circularization burn in low curb it orbits at the end of the day this series is not only about me showcasing you know very famous historic space flights but also allowing me to one-up those noobs at nasa and showcasing my superior abilities as a rocket scientist so here at loudoun aerospace we developed an engine for the titan 2 booster that can be reignited infinite number of times that's the excuse i'm going with uh no compromises here that's just uh that's just it that's uh that's my tale so yeah i think i just kind of gave up through that during that sentence didn't i uh i don't really know how i want to talk about now because this is just a fairly standard kerbal thing it's nothing really specific to the gemini missions other than of course we're using a gemini vehicle uh we're just doing a fairly standard kerbal space program docking procedure now i guess if i was going to do this realistically we would minimize the number of burns we would do because in real life engines can't just be reignited an infinite number of times yet like you can do in kerbal spaceberg i'm provided of course you still have fuel before any actually or whatever get comment below i know there are you know qualifiers to that statement but regardless like generally in google space program engines are 100 reliable and 100 reignitable you can do you can light them as many times as you want which i guess is kind of a justification for why they're so big and heavy it's one of the reasons why if you use the mod real solar system or any mod that kind of upscales kerbin you just can't use the stock parts at all because the actual amount of fuel the fuel tank store is barely anywhere close to what their real-life counterparts can store and the engines weigh an absolute ton but i'm willing to let the engine things slide because kerbal space building engines are so overpowered compared to real life like okay they're not very like literally very powerful but they can be reignited an unlimited number of times they're 100 reliable um there would just be a great asset to human space program if nasa decides to uh you know invest in kerbal space program engines nasa just abandon the sls just start building the mammoth and the vector the terrier the poodle etc think how much good we could achieve if humanity just had uh infinitely reignitable and 100 reliable rocket engines one can dream i guess anyway here we are docking our two gemini spacecraft together and as i was saying that we have now docked the two gemini spacecrafts together so let's go on an eva and by doing our eva we fulfilled an achievement of gemini 4 which included the first extra-vehicular activity or just eva by an american only to spend a full 22 minutes out there like ed white did this is a speed run after all and we did it untethered which isn't something nasa achieved until the space shuttle unless you count the apollo 11 moonwalk of course and bob kerman there admiring the world's first gemini gemini dock what an achievement although i guess i did say that in this video i was going to try and aim to recreate all of the key milestones of gemini and i guess it wouldn't be a completely comprehensive video if i didn't involve the aegina target vehicle in some way so let's go ahead and quickly get an agena target vehicle up there as well and uh just dock with it to showcase that we can still follow some of the plans that nasa did despite maya very aberrant deviations from the course of history now much like the gemini titan rocket there is in fact a stock rocket for the ajina target vehicle and its atlas launch vehicle but i i don't really know what's going on with it the lower stage looks absolutely nothing like an atlas rocket in fact it looks closer to the lower stage of the titan rocket so not really sure what was going on with the stock rocket luckily i still have the atlas booster that we built last episode in this little series so i just cut and paste the sub assembly across and we can just launch this with a better looking atlas vehicle the aegean vehicle looked close enough to my eye it's not perfect but it's fine really i mean we've already proven that we could go above and beyond nasa's achievements with docking gemini and gemini together so really it doesn't matter a great deal if our aegean vehicle is not spot on with nasa's much like the previous gemini mission we just did i'm not going to bother trying to do a completely accurate ascent profile for this rocket by just having one giant burn admittedly split across two stages to reach orbit i'm just gonna get to space in the easiest way possible which is just doing a standard kerbal space program gravity turn cutting our engines once our apoapsis reaches a desirable height and then just coasting all the way to apoapsis and then doing a pro-grade burn to circularize just easier and it's not really the point of this segment of the video and there we have it our first stage ascent burn is all done we can just stage away and let that atlas booster crash back down somewhere to the surface of kerbin and uh well i don't really know what else there is to add to be honest there is one thing i need to do and that is stage away that upper nose cone to expose the docking port on the agena target vehicle so that the gemini spacecraft can indeed dock with it i think once i complete making this little maneuver node we can go ahead and activate that stage i'm just being very finicky with the separation node there okay and let's just coast along to our bird and stage there we are and there is our regina target vehicle i know blink and you miss it but you'll have plenty of opportunities to see it uh over the next few minutes as we form our gemini encounter and you know what you guys have already seen me do a rendezvous before in this video uh when i docked the two gemini spacecraft together so i don't think there's any real benefit to showing you another encounter so i'm just gonna crossfade across to uh the point where we reached the gemini vehicle so there we are i skipped quite a bit ahead here to the point where our gemini is going to try and slow itself down and dock with the aegina because at the end of the day the ajina was the target vehicle not the gemini so i didn't get too close a separation so that we can do a bit of orbital maneuvering using the gemini capsule and hey i'm playing the footage back very fast you can see what's happening i'm not going to try and do my trademarked lounge lazy method of docking in which we just use auto sas for both vessels so that they just hold a lock on each other's docking ports and they line up really really nicely i'm just gonna dock using the gemini and leave the agena as a deadweight target vehicle as it would have been in the gemini program in real life and here we are performing this historic moment in loudoun aerospace's space race speedrun bit of a bit of a wobble at the end the magnets took control of the two vehicles but there we are we are docked to the agena target vehicle and in real life the agena you know if left in space would have eventually decayed and returned to the surface of earth burning up in the atmosphere actually not to the surface but this is kerbal space programming where orbital decay is not a thing so i thought i would wall up nasa once again and remove the junk from space and deorbit both the gemini and the gina at the same time of course i will separate the two when we enter the atmosphere as demonstrated there and then we can just stage the service module away from the gemini and that was perfect separation there uh don't worry about it guys it's fine i'm not quite sure why the service module glitched out like that when i staged at the end of the day i didn't design that part of the rocket this is part of the stock gemini rocket that comes with kerbal space bombing you would have thought they'd have checked their staging of all things but i guess perhaps they didn't or perhaps just something glitched out i don't know luckily we can try that again with our second gemini module which is still in low curb in orbit because its mission has not yet been completed so once this capsule has splashed down we can go ahead and return to that one and continue on with our gemini phase of the space race speed run and that is splashdown thank you so much for flying low on aerospace with us today jebediah kerman and bill kerman let's return to their colleagues in space we're now going to remain in space for 15 days which will beat gemini 7's 14 days in orbit gemini 7 spent a grueling 14 days in space to determine that the capsule could support astronauts and indeed the astronauts were able to live in space for two weeks of course the other thing we need to be able to prove we can do in order to survive long-term spaceflight is prove that we can generate electricity using a fuel cell so that's what we're going to do as well in this part of the mission so i'm just going to activate this fuel cell here and watch it recharge our batteries i i've never actually used a fuse a fuel cell in kerbal spacer before so i wasn't trying you're supposed to use it you might press out on the uh the fuel cell unless there's another way of doing it and then i i ran down our batteries again by quickly spamming the sas wheels just to deplete the batteries and showcase that we can once again recharge the batteries after they've already been recharged am i going to do that in just a second there there we are so we have proven that you can recharge batteries using a fuel cell and with that that was the final big objective i wanted to meet in this video and i think it's fair to say that we've pretty much hit every major milestone and achievement that the gemini program made if you if you think i've missed any then do of course let me know but i think that's a pretty comprehensive uh win for low and aerospace in our quest to speed run gemini the only thing we need to do now is deorbit ourselves and i guess we could have another go at decoupling that service module but overall i think that's a very successful attempt at a gemini speedrun the first gemini flight was in april 1964 and the last was in november 1966 so i think it's fair to say that i've crushed this record in our lounge aerospace speedrun this isn't the last gemini video i want to make though as there were a lot of plans for extended use of the gemini spacecraft after the program had met all of its objectives plans were proposed for an advanced gemini vehicle a big gemini vehicle that would serve a range of missions including a lunar landing so that's an interesting topic i think to visit another time but that time is not now now is the time we thank my patrons whose names are now scrolling past you on your screens if you'd like to join their magnificent ranks then do check out my patreon page in the description or via the card on screen also on screen there are videos to other things uh one of them could just be the previous video in this series in case you missed it where we did the mercury missions the other one is just a video i think you'll like hopefully you like it also i hope you enjoyed this video let me know what you think that's it i've run out of time so bye

Channel: Matt Lowne

Views: 239,715

Keywords: ksp, kerbal space program, kerbal, space, program, jebediah, kerman, matt, lowne, matt lowne, nerd, british, funny, epic, commentary, abridged, amazing, gameplay, project gemini, making history, ksp making history gemini, ksp project gemini, atlas agena, ksp atlas agena, atlas agena ksp, space race speedrun, space race, atlas, agena, agena target vehicle, beta centuri, stock vessel, titan ii, ksp titan ii, ksp titan gemini, titan gemini, titan, ksp titan, rocket, recreation, ksp recreation

Id: 3TOReVL8F7s

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021