KSP: Recreating the ENTIRE Apollo Program and its Rockets!

welcome back everyone to the still ad-libbed titled space race speed run a kerbal space program series in which i attempt to speed run every major crude space program from history and today is a special episode as it's the third and final installment of phase one of this series the first three manned american programs so far we've speed run the mercury program in a mere three launches using these rockets you can see before you and then once we got that out of the way we then smashed the gemini program with just three launches again using the two titan two boosters and of course the atlas agena rocket but now it's time ladies and gentlemen for the big one the one you've all been waiting for project apollo now for those unfamiliar with this series so far what i'm gonna attempt is end nasa's whole career complete project apollo and meet every major milestone it's set in as few launches as possible now we'll begin where we began when we began running the beginnings of when nasa began their first manned program project mercury the first phase of project murky was to test and validate the capsule's launch escape system which of course is a vital component of the spacecraft in order to ensure our astronauts don't meet an explosive demise and the apollo program had a similar test platform to validate its launch escape system now i know real rocket scientists and intellectuals would just use an entire saturn 5 and spam the stage button after launch to test this but apparently in the real world there's a thing called budgets and common sense so i guess instead of that we'll recreate the rocket that nasa used to test the apollo launch escape system the little joe ii a small rocket comprised of six solid rocket engines that would launch a boilerplate or dummy capsule into the skies before the launch escape system would fire and hopefully pull the spacecraft to safety now not only in this series am i trying to meet every milestone set by every major program but i'm also trying to subtly one-up each milestone set by the program and in this case i am so confident in the technology of loudoun aerospace that i don't think we need to have a dummy capsule on the little joe too i think we can have three of our astronauts sit in the command pod as we conduct this critical test to validate the capsule safety and here we are on the launch pad and i've now switched to live commentary so i don't know how this is going to go i hope it's going to go okay but let's see how we go so jebediah bill and bob are ready in the capsule in three two one let's go and test our launch escape system uh for the first time with crew on board so really there's a lot at stake here so a little jotu seems to be going okay i'd say this is a pretty good rocket as far as airborne machines go flying machines go whatever it doesn't matter all we really need to do is get on a trajectory will take us to land in the sea uh i guess i guess now would be a good time to deploy so let's hit the abort action group in three two one to know about you but i think that was an absolutely be a beautiful detachment from the uh the lower stages there so let's just uh detach that launch escape tower and deploy the parachutes and oh is it is it is it it's cleared it's fine that's how well i designed this craft and now i can just time warp down to splashdown but i would say all things considered that's a pretty successful test of the launch escape system and not only did we not use a pathetic boilerplate spacecraft but we tested it with a crude module and all crew survived miraculously thank goodness our space program would probably been shut down if they hadn't but they did so it's fine and we can touch down in the water in three two one there it is my live commentary is uh leaves a bit to be desired but i think i hit all the important points let's now move back to time lapse matt and we can talk about our next launch now for the next launch i was a little bit undecided about which rocket to go with i mean obviously in apollo we want to use the saturn 5 and i've just shown you i wanted to use the little joe too but in the interim there's two other rockets that featured quite prominently in the apollo program and that is the saturn one and the saturn 1b now the difference between these two rockets is fairly minimal there's not much difference between the saturn one and the saturn one b other than really the saturn one b being the upgrade over the saturn one i know there's a lot of nuanced differences that i could go into but functionally and crucially aesthetically there is very little difference between the two rockets so i decided to just skip the saturn one and move straight to the saturn 1b because after all i in this series i'm trying to one-up nasa and nasa why did you go with a saturn one there's so many upgrades you could have gone with as you demonstrated by building the saturn 1b so i'm just going to go straight to the saturn 1b we got it right the first time here at loudoun aerospace space race speedrun now the saturn 1b was um probably the most intimidating rocket to try and recreate in kerbal space program and i'm not going to pretend that i've done a perfect recreation of the rocket but i'd say i did a pretty good job the reason i say it was a very intimidating rocket to design it was certainly the most tricky to emulate out of the three apollo rockets i'm creating in this video is because the lower stage or the first stage i should say was actually made of lots of separate tanks they were separate redstone tanks i believe and you get this it's got a really unique look to it that's incidentally very difficult to recreate in kerbal space program so in the end i kind of achieved the look by using the mach 1 diameter fuel tanks to kind of create the general aesthetic of the saturn 1b and as for the actual payload of the saturn 1b i was a little bit torn about what to do because there were so many saturn 1b launches that really i wasn't quite sure but in the end i decided to go with apollo 5 which is the uncrewed orbital test of the lunar module aka the lunar lander now the lunar lander used for apollo 5 was uh it wasn't really the full thing it didn't have landing legs for example it was a very stripped-down article it was a pure test of the basic systems of the vehicle so i thought let's one-up nasa again and instead of just using like a half finished lunar lander i'll just use the lunar lander that i plan to take with us when we do our actual apollo 11 uh 12 14 15 16 and 17 recreation so we've got to quickly cut away from the saturn 1b build and quickly construct the lunar lander and uh i kind of janked it together using the structural paneling pieces i don't think it's a perfect shape but then the actual lunar lander shape is quite difficult to replicate in kerbal space program at least in stock there are some amazing mods but i feel like this is a good enough approximation of the shape that we need i'm going to paint all of these panels gold except two on the diagonals because not all of the pa the paneling on the lunar lander was gold i think i think a couple of panels were like painted black well not painted black you know what i mean colored they weren't colored gold basically uh looking at it now it does look a bit it does look a bit rough around the edges but you know what it's fine i don't know and don't worry i'm not actually going to add eight landing legs to it i'm just using eight so i can use the symmetry of the octagon shape of the lander's body and then we can just remove four of the legs from the symmetry and delete them as required and with the landing legs added that's pretty much the lander done fairly simple construct i did consider recreating the apollo moon rover and storing that on one of the corner parts of the lander but i couldn't get it to fit the actual apollo rover wheels that come with the making history dlc they don't really fit into an appropriately sized lander at least if you want to emulate the actual storage and deployment mode of the real apollo rover like you can get you can make one fit but it's a real tight squeeze and i ended up coming up with a better solution which i won't spoil for you but i think you're gonna like it anyway with the completion of the construction of the lunar lander our build for the saturn 1b at least in its apollo 5 configuration is complete so there it is on the launch pad not a it looks fairly close to the genuine article and then we can blast off using our eight engines i'm using the vector engines because there's no i don't think at least that there is an in-game equivalent to the engines of the saturn v saturn v saturn 1b uh but what i have done is i've disabled the gimbal of the central four and only enabled the gimbal of the peripheral four because that's what that was what the real saturn five i said five again that's what the real saturn 1b uh did it had and it only had gimbal on the four outer engines i mean despite having gimbal it also had eight fins so we should have a fairly uh stable rocket ironically this rocket really really wanted to list side to side on ascent and speaking of the ascent i'm going for a fairly steep profile because while our thrust rate ratio at the first stage is excellent the thrust weight ratio of the upper stage leaves a lot to be desired so i wanted to try and build of as much altitude as possible using the first stage that we'd have loads of time to pick up the necessary horizontal speed to achieve orbit with our much much slower upper stage and i guess i could have made it faster by draining some of its fuel because it has way too much delta v really for what it needs to have but uh yeah i don't know it adds to the lift capability of my saturn 1b so it can be used for other missions and i think there's probably something ironic in me using these space shuttle engines to power my replica of the saturn 1b given the space shuttle pretty much replaced the saturn one b as nasa's workhorse vehicle uh obviously the saturn v was their flagship but san juan b was their hauler that would put crew in space and do the mission space shuttle kind of replaced the saturn 1b so kind of a twisted act to power the saturn 1b using its cause of death as its means of propulsion and here i'm not being that faithful to the real mission i'm actually deorbiting the uh the lower stage it doesn't get left stuck in orbit but in doing so we've kind of met an objective set by apollo 4 which is to test the uh the ability to re-light the j-2 engine uh after it had already been lit once now admittedly apollo 4 was a saturn v not a thousand assassin 1b but it's all it's all irrelevant really i've proven that this engine can be relit and i've proven that we can throttle and uh light the lander engine and all the systems seem to work the landing legs deploy the ladder deploys and we can eva from the hatch that's right i have once again dabbed on nasa and i've not only tested that the lander works but i've also tested and validated the fact that it can sustain uh a kerbal and you know they can survive in space on board the lander which of course does leave the question of how we're going to get jebediah back to the surface of curb but it's jebediah kerman all right he's going to be fine first of all though we do need to test the ascent engine there which once again it works beautifully and we can throttle it and it works really really well and now we need to get jeb back home so obviously the lunar lander doesn't have parachutes because why would it but what we can do is we can just have jeb stay in the cabin to survive the uh the worst of the re-entry heat and then we can just bail him out and we can use his personal parachute to get down to the surface but during this part of the flight we can test the uh the lunar lander engine and we can confirm that it does work when exposed to uh the extreme heat of re-entry which is not something that we would need but it's good to know i started freaking out a bit there because i couldn't get jebediah to eva because i didn't realize that if you've got physics time warp on you can't eva i don't know how it's taken me so long to realize that that's a thing but there you go i learned something in this mission so really this being a test flight apollo it taught me something so in a way we can call that another success for my uh saturn 1b replica come on jeff splash down any time today there we go beautiful and now that we have tested the launch escape system we've tested the lunar lander i think we're pretty much ready to build the rocket that you all came here for the mighty saturn v so that we can actually perform a landing on the mun and here we are here i am building it here so the first thing i'm doing is building the little capsule and building a shroud for the launch escape system the nose cone on top of the capsule isn't great it's very it's not as sleek as the real thing but i wanted to have the three parachutes on top of the capsule on landing like the real apollo capsule and when you try and put the parachute inside that nose cut adapter which i'm like 99 sure that adapter piece was designed to do uh the parachutes won't deploy even if you like remove the shroud it's a glitch it's a known glitch with that part i don't know if squad have fixed it it's literally been like two years since i've tested this but i didn't want to take any chances so the uh the shroud there that the docking port is attached to is uh gonna be empty and the parachutes are just underneath it and they're sort of separated by a decoupler so that's kind of why the the nose of the apollo command module is a bit weird looking and then it's time to build the rest of the rocket not before i add fuel to the uh because it's to the command module that would be a very critical part of the rocket's design i think we can all agree anyway let's get to building the rest of the rockets there's the third stage there with its single j2 engine that's going to get us from low kermit orbit to the man then we're building the second stage with its five j-2 engines there they all are there and of course got to build the massive first stage with its five f1 engines and a few ice dot teased across like adding batteries and fuel cells and stuff but other than that the rocket is done i know it's not perfect there's always gonna be people that are just better at recreating things than me but i think for all intents and purposes i'd say this is a pretty good approximation of the saturn v and here we are ready to launch three two one i feel like i had to stop talking there to really bask in the might of that incredibly powerful first stage of the rocket there and we can start speeding up the footage a bit as we make our way to space so uh the bolt i mean the saturn v in kerbal space programmers in it's way too powerful for it what it needs to do uh in fact the actual stock vessel that just comes with the game the saturn 5 in the stock doesn't doesn't have a second stage it's just two stages to orbit rather than three because it's very very easy to get to kerb in orbit and it's very difficult by comparison to get to earth orbit so my saturn 5 does a lot better with its stages than the real saturn v so we're actually very very high up in the atmosphere when it comes to deploying the first stage and then this second stage is pretty much just going to get us all the way to orbit i'm not going to complete our orbit with this stage for the sake of accuracy but we could quite easily i think we could probably get all the way to the mum using the dell to be in this stage if i didn't detach it early and waste all that fuel for the sake of realism so they are nasa again you know you're saturn five couldn't it could only just get to the man get to the month get to the moon mine can probably go like to eve or venus maybe i don't know i haven't i haven't crunched the numbers but what i'm saying nasa is that like i'm just better at rocket science than you and that's really the take-home i want to really hammer into everyone right now is that spacex needs to hire me i would really like to be the guy that does all the talking on the starlink launches and all the other launches do some commentary i think that'd be a pretty sweet gig so spacex uh if this does not prove that i am 100 fluent in the nuances of rocket science and rocket design and quite frankly i don't know what will i always enjoy making comments like this because then i can read the comment section and see all the people who uh don't realize i'm being tongue-in-cheek right now they get really angry in the comments just to be clear guys i am very well aware that kerbal space spirit room is not a one-to-one simulation of actual rocket science don't worry um but yeah spacex i i can i can do the uh i can do the whiskey tasting in the uh in the high bay bar that'll be a good job for me anyway you might be wondering why my orbit is so high and that's because the parking orbit in the real apollo mission was 190 kilometers so i decided to just do that because i had the delta v i know in terms of scaling this is not the correct scale now we are much higher above kerbin compared to how high apollo was above earth but uh you know i just felt like i had to somehow justify my excess delta v anyway on to the next phase of the mission i've already plotted the maneuver node so it's too late for me to talk about plotting the maneuver node but you can see i've kind of put myself on a free return trajectory so at this point if my engine was to fail the spacecraft would just coast around the man and then it would just return to kerbin and re-enter and everything would be fine so i did a free return uh trajectory now it comes to plucking the lander from that saturn v upper stage so we are just gonna grab onto it in three two one beautiful docking and then we can uh right click the middle docking border this is really weird staging i probably should have just had it where the uh commander module was directly attached to the top of the lander rather than have both bits of the craft be attached to the third to the third stage uh but i just like making things complicated for myself i guess and speaking of making things complicated for myself i i put myself on a collision course i think to the month when i pulled the luna lambda away from the saturn 5 upper stage i ended up changing our orbit a bit too much and i had to do a last minute radial outburn in order to stop us from smashing into the muna surface and as speaking of the muna surface it is approaching us now so we can perform our retrograde burn to get into a parking orbit this is not going to be our final orbit the real apollo mission did one burn uh at where i just did a burma then i did a secondary burn at perigee to lower itself down to its final orbit which we've now done so there's not much else left to do other than transfer our two brave carbonauts uh into the lander can to perform kerbal kinds first ever landing on the surface of the man so we've got jebediah there piloting the vessel and bob kerman who is our scientist he's gonna grab some surface samples uh do a bit of science stuff whatever it is that scientists do and uh and and a good time will be had by all so just did a quick deorbit burn time warped down to when i got close to the surface probably a little bit too late i did was a bit trigger happy with the time warp button there so i did a quick radial out burn just to stop ourselves from smashing into the side of that crater and then once we were clear i then coasted down a little bit more conservatively but now our surface velocity is pretty low so it's announced we're now safe to perform our touchdown i'm gonna try and touch down below five meters per second which ah beautiful textbook landing and there we are jebediah and bob kerman have landed on the surface of the month and in doing so we have met apollo 11 12 13 14 15 16 and 17's primary objective and of course we've won up to nasa there because apollo 13 didn't meet this objective they had to there was an explosion you guys have all seen the film right and no of the historic famous event of apollo 13. uh we didn't we didn't have that problem so it was fine and there we are we can plant our nasa flag now i mentioned earlier that apollo 15 16 and 17 all brought rovers with them which of course we've not done so people are gonna be like aha matt you said you were trying to one-up nasa but you have not because nasa brought a car to the surface of the mum but remember i said earlier that i came up with a solution that i thought that you guys would like and and here it is i i sent a a loud aerospace big boy roving bass uh to the surface of the man to meet our brave kerbernauts uh and to i i think this is probably a superior rover to the pathetic one that nasa sent uh it was rubbish it was it was like a folding rover didn't really have anything going for it like it didn't have it didn't have a as a swimming pool in it which this one does this one's got a bar in it it's got loads of space it's got there's a cabin it's got balconies got loads of solar panels radio equipment uh there's a there's a cinema inside it there's even a little crazy golf course 18 holes a really good rover so i think this is much better than nasa's uh bob kerman is going to just take it for a quick joyride around the surface of the mun jebediah can watch i suppose now my plan was to quick uh i didn't want to spend too long on the rover segment because watching people drive around was incredible space program but at least for me i i don't find it the most entertaining so i've spent the footage way up and we just a quick whip around to the edge of this crater and then we can return to jebediah kerman however at that point ladies and gentlemen things went a little bit apollo 13. this mission was not completely without some failure but hey i'm just going to say that i'm recreating a failure i'm i've engineered in a mission failure to emulate apollo 13. so uh this is actually part of the plan but my plan was to ghost ride the whip past jebediah kerman and then bob could leap off the rover and jet pack down to the lander but then he just sort of smacked his head on the top of that lab module and then was completely unresponsive like i was at this point i was like smashing the keyboard pressing every button trying to get some sort of response from bob but it wasn't working so i just then switched back to the rover and make it come to a stop which is far more boring but uh it was the only thing i could do if i wanted to save bob and i would quite like to bring my two carbonauts back to the surface of kerbin to tell their tail to uh to tool ah here there so we we got him free it was fine we could just jet pack him down to i think he left his surface sample and eva report inside the rover come to think of it but i guess he was scared he was worried he to the moment these things happen well i'm sure at some point on loudoun aerospace we will return to the mun i i i'm guessing but anyway time will tell and right now there are much more pressing matters at hand for example right now we've got to get back to the orbiting command module so the first thing i've done is shut down that lower terrier engine we can stage and the uh the craft will separate and that spark engine will immediately fire and the upper stage was incredibly easy to build because that cabin there that obviously is meant to be a replica of the apollo luna lander it already has all the fuel electric smaller propellant rcs thrusters the only thing i needed to add was a spark engine and it worked really really well it has just shy of a thousand meters per second of delta v which is way more than enough the knee for the mum so that is a pretty safe configuration if you're wanting to recreate an apollo lander yourself and maybe you play on console and can't download craft files from the description which i don't even know i'm going to include a craft because i've i haven't i don't think i don't think i've been including graph files in this series so far i can't even remember now it's been i don't really i didn't remember what i have for breakfast today to be honest so i i don't know what i've been doing but i've been talking about the build and you guys have seen the build so maybe i won't i don't even i shouldn't be talking about this because i might just include one in the description wow this is exciting what's it gonna be you should look at the description and then you can write a comment and tell me even though by then i will know for sure really guys i'm just stalling for time well until we get to the actual the docking itself which i guess is well underway so now i can i can just talk about that i'm going to perform the docking with the command module which is uh faithful to the real apollo missions i'm not going to do the air quotes loud lazy method of docking in which we get both craft to contribute towards the docking i'm just gonna dock using the command module i'm gonna just leave the lander can as a dead weight so we have to do all of the docking using the apollo command and service module and kind of tricky we don't actually have that much monopropellant i probably should have stuffed some extra monopropellant tanks into that service module but i didn't so we've only got the monopoly that comes with the uh i guess the apollo style i really should learn the names of parts in kerbal space problem given that like i play this game semi-professionally i still just call it the apollo style command pod is it the mark 3 cargo the mark 3 mark 3 crew cabin is that what they call it crew cabin is that's how basic my others i'm pretty sure the game calls all the crude modules crew cabins except the passenger ones where it's a mixture of just h hitchhiker storage or cr anyway irrelevant isn't it again but look at that we've docked through that through that mess of a commentary as we can get jebediah and bob back into the apollo command module and then we can start plotting a course back home not before we detach the lunar lander which of course will now be left to crash into the surface of the man it won't it would stay in orbit forever but in real life it crashed into the surface of the moon and now we can uh plot a maneuver to get back to kerbin the only thing really i was trying to focus on was making sure we land in the ocean which really there was no fancy calculations involved with this i just went for any old periapsis in curbing's atmosphere and hoped for the best and i lucked out we landed in the ocean just barely so this counter doesn't splash down but there isn't really a secret method that i know of to guarantee or splash down in the ocean it's just a case of uh going for it making a quick save and if it doesn't work make a quick load um i just really struggled to get an ocean landing in gemini and mercury are really ironically in those videos and i say ironically because i was only coming from low carb in orbit but the first time i tried doing the apollo landing in which we came all the way from the man i got an ocean landing immediately so i guess that's just that's just life isn't it that's just life in a nutshell what a deep topic speaking of deep the ocean is deep and we are landing in the that was terrible i'm not you know what guys i've just been i'm this has been a long video and i it's like i'm very tired it's like a half past nine in the evening for me my room is boiling hot because we've had a heat wave in the uk and i've got no air conditioning and i can't have my fan running because then you'll get picked by the microphone and really it's just i'm really i'm i'm there i've reached my limit i'm just struggling on to get the video finished but i guess luckily as luck would have it the end is in sight literally there is the water we have splashed down and thus we have absolutely smashed the apollo program in a mere three launches we validated the launch escape system with our little joe too we tested the lunar module using the saturn 1b and of course then we just did the entire mun landing no dress rehearsals or anything like that we just went ahead and did it because that's what we do here at laon aerospace we are the speed run masters nasa hang your head in shame anyway for the next episode i'm going to rewind the clocks and look at the soviet manned programs i'll say no more than that at the moment on screen though there are some names scrolling on the left they're my patreon supporters who really make all of this content possible so big props to you guys thank you so much for donating if you want to join their ranks you can do so by clicking the patreon card on screen you can also help contribute to the channel by joining which is a but there's a button that says join underneath the video you get a little badge next to your name so you can show off to everyone i guess there's also a link on screen there's more than one link on screen actually i don't want to use the plural of links and wow now i've run out of time

Channel: Matt Lowne

Views: 1,305,367

Keywords: ksp, kerbal space program, kerbal, space, program, jebediah, kerman, matt, lowne, matt lowne, nerd, british, funny, epic, commentary, abridged, amazing, gameplay, ksp apollo, matt lowne apollo, matt lowne saturn v, satern 5, saturn v, ksp saturn v, ksp saturn, ksp saturn 1, ksp saturn 1b, saturn 1b launch, ksp recreation, saturn 1b ksp, rocket garden, lunar lander, ksp lunar lander, making history

Id: 0qHi9FHgv30

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021