Finding Greg a Spot with a View to Spend Eternity

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Hello everyone and welcome back to Journey to Everywhere, a Kerbal Space Program series where we are sending our Kerbals to every single body in the solar system in Kerbal Space Program.

[00:00:11]And we are starting off today here with Bob who is stuck on Duna because I messed up the staging on his rocket. So, his landing module didn't detach from the main module and he couldn't land properly. Although to be honest, he wasn't getting home either way.

[00:00:24]But in today's video, we're going to be sending Bob some company not here on the planet, but on the planet moon Ike.

[00:00:31]We're going to give him someone to look out and see in the night sky whenever he's going to bed in his command module.

[00:00:38]Okay, so here we are in the tracking station and this is the state of things at the moment. So, we've got five ongoing missions, although it's it's really three because these dudes have just got out of their craft. So, we've got Gregsted who is currently stuck on the surface of the moon. Sorry about that, buddy. We've got the Beetle Beetle 1 which is in orbit of the moon. This was a little probe I sent out. It's got to do some science. It's done its job now, so it's used all of its science components. Now it's just stuck in orbit. And we've got Bob who is over here on the surface of Duna in the eye of a storm by the look of it. But before we send another Kerbal off to Duna to land on Ike, we want to gather a little bit more science and we also want to build out our solar system. We need to put some relay probes in because at the moment if I send probes, I can't send a probe to Minmus because we lose contact with it. You see these green lines here are showing that a probe is in contact with Kerbin, but if it gets too far away, we lose contact and we can't control the thing.

[00:01:35]So, we need to put a few relay probes in orbit of Kerbin just so we can bounce our signals off of them and send them back home so we can keep in control of any unmanned probes that we send further out into the solar system. But if we jump into our science tree here, we'll see at the moment we don't have the relay unlocked. We need this precision engineering which is 160 science and at At moment we've only got 54 science. So, before we can build any relays to put out into orbit, we're going to have to gather about 100 more science from somewhere.

[00:02:04]And our answer to that doesn't lie in space. Um we have a lot more science to gather here on Kerbin. So, I built this tiny little rocket that we're just going to fly off to a different biome here in Kerbin and do all of this uh science testing. We're going to use the science junior. We're going to check the temperature. We're going to check the atmosphere pressure, take a surface report, and all of that stuff. So, um yeah, let's just fly off, but not into space.

[00:02:30]Um okay, it turns out we need slightly bigger thrusters. These are not capable of lifting us off the floor.

[00:02:38]Okay, let's try that again. We've got a slightly bigger engine on the rocket this time.

[00:02:43]There we go. That's better.

[00:02:47]Right. So, I think we're just going to head Which way is this? West or east?

[00:02:51]East or west? I don't know.

[00:02:52]We're going to head this way.

[00:02:54]Yeah, much better way of doing this would be to build a plane, but we don't have any parts for aerodynamics. So, we don't even have the wings, I don't think. So, um yeah, we're doing it with a with a rocket. We're flying through the atmosphere. Definitely not an efficient way of doing it, but we should be fine.

[00:03:10]Okay, if we get a crew report from up here, I wonder if that will give us any science or not. Crew report. 3.5 science. Very nice.

[00:03:18]And we actually get 17.5 science for doing the science junior experiment here. So, I think I'm going to do this mission a couple of times. We're just going to take all of the uh the data while we're in midair, and then next time we'll take it from the floor.

[00:03:30]I was hoping we'd land on the landing legs, to be honest with you, but it seems like we're coming down on the command module.

[00:03:36]Um hang tight, Jeb. This might be a slightly bumpy landing unless I can spin you.

[00:03:42]There we go. We have spun the right way up now. Now, we've just got to wait for a year while this thing comes to the ground. There we go. Touch back down nice and safely. Let's recover the vessel and going to much science we get from that. Okay, 36.8. We're up to 91 science, so we're over halfway to what we need. I'm going to do that mission a few more times and I'll check back in with you guys when I've got the 160 science we need. I think this is my first time ever visiting Kerbin's North Pole. Uh yeah, we took this took this ship right up to the North Pole. I I've never been here before. It's kind of barren. I wonder if we'll get much science from this. Let's get a crew report. Oh, yeah, 1.5 science. Totally worth it. Okay, so about five missions later and we've now got 209 science.

[00:04:23]We've explored a lot of Kerbin, which you can see from the archives here.

[00:04:27]We've got nine crew reports, five EVA reports. All of this stuff has been done. Uh if we compare that to Duna, we've just got the two surface reports, none from Ike. Yeah, none from any of these. So, uh we can now go ahead and unlock the Where is it? The relay.

[00:04:42]There it is. Okay, the relay antenna.

[00:04:44]So, now we can send probes further out into the solar system. And I've got 49 science remaining, so I guess I might as well give ourselves some aviation. See if we want to explore more of Kerbin, we can do that with planes rather than just flying our rocket through the atmosphere. Anyway, let's get on to building a relay probe. Okay, so we've got our first relay probe built here and it's sat on top of a giant rocket at the moment. We've got the little relay antenna here. It's got some batteries and solar panels. Uh not much else. We don't really need anything else. Uh but it is sat on top of these giant solids and I haven't unlocked struts yet, so I can't even strut these things together.

[00:05:18]And just for the record, I think this thing's going to explode on the launchpad. Um every time I've used these giant thrusters so far, my rocket has exploded. But, let's give it a go and if not, we can switch to uh some smaller solids.

[00:05:31]Okay, here goes nothing.

[00:05:41]So, they definitely wobbled a little bit, but I I think we're fine.

[00:05:51]>> Okay, apart from the fact that we're spinning, that went pretty well. All right, let's get away from those and let's start our orbital burn.

[00:05:58]Uh I'd like to have turned a lot sooner, but those things I had absolutely no control with, so uh it's going to be a pretty steep burn into orbit.

[00:06:17]And there we have our first relay probe in orbit around Kerbin. This is sat at about 6 million meters. Um so we shouldn't get any trouble with Mun encounters, and they should provide us a little bit more range when we're traveling out with unmanned probes.

[00:06:32]Hopefully we can get to Minmus now. I am going to send a second relay out uh between Minmus Minmus and the [music] Mun, so I'm I'm going to get onto that right now.

[00:06:40]And there we have our second relay probe in orbit around Kerbin. This one is much higher. This one's at 26 million uh meters. We've also got a huge asteroid heading straight towards Kerbin, but we're going to ignore that. So this one's between Minmus and the Mun, and now we should be able to send unmanned probes anywhere in the Kerbin sphere Kerbin sphere, so we should be able to send unmanned probes to Minmus and gather some more science that way.

[00:07:06]Let's just keep an eye on this huge asteroid as we time warp. Okay, yeah, it's flying away from Kerbin. We're fine. No extinction today.

[00:07:14]Okay, now that we got all of those relays in place, we've got a lot more infrastructure here in the solar system.

[00:07:19]We are ready to send a Kerbal off to accompany Bob in the Jool system.

[00:07:24]So this is the Big Dog Mark 3, and this should be going to Ike, the moon of Jool. I think we've got enough delta V here. I haven't done any calculations.

[00:07:34]Um but I'm going to time warp to a Jool launch window, and then we will send I think we're going to send a Gregory.

[00:07:39]We're not going to send one of the main guys. Uh we're going to send not Jebediah.

[00:07:45]Gregory Kerman, I reckon.

[00:07:48]Okay, the Big Dog 3 is on the launchpad.

[00:07:51]We are in a Jool launch window. Uh now we've just got to hope that Gregory [music] can find his way to Ike.

[00:07:57]Uh I think we should be I think we should have enough fuel to make it there. Let's just Let's just find out.

[00:08:07]Uh-oh.

[00:08:09]Well, that happened again.

[00:08:12]Back to the drawing board, I guess.

[00:08:15]I do not know why these thrusters work sometimes and don't work other times.

[00:08:20]Maybe there's too many of them. Let's uh Let's bring the symmetry down one. Is that down one?

[00:08:27]Uh actually, let's bring it up one. Why not? Let's make more of them. Is that right? Or were there already eight of them? I think there were already eight of them.

[00:08:45]Much better. Okay, this time it's not wobbling like crazy. Off we go to Ike.

[00:08:54]I've just realized I forgot a liquid fuel engine. We're going to go back to the launch.

[00:09:01]Okay, third time's the charm. Here we go. This time we're going to Ike.

[00:09:22]Okay, we have made it into an orbit around Kerbin. Now we need to chart a course for Jool.

[00:09:29]Okay, there's Jool. Let's set it as a target. We should be in the perfect launch window for it. So, if we set ourselves on a escape trajectory from Kerbin. We'll add a burn around here.

[00:09:41]Uh no, that's not right. A burn around here.

[00:09:44]And then hopefully we come fairly close to Jool.

[00:09:50]Okay, I've managed to get us a Jool encounter. I'm pretty sure this isn't the most efficient way of doing it. I had to play around with the maneuver a little bit. We're burning for almost 2 minutes. Uh we haven't got enough fuel in this stage, but we have got another stage after. But it will get us on course to get to Jool, and I think we should be fine for uh for landing on Ike with what we've got.

[00:10:23]This burn is a little bit scary because it's made our trajectory suborbital at the moment, but but it should be fine.

[00:10:30]We'll be in an escape trajectory soon enough.

[00:10:55]Well, something went terribly wrong. Uh the rocket has exploded, so we're going to revert to launch and try that again. Okay, so we have now reverted the flight and uh we have saved Gregory from exploding in the upper atmosphere. Um yeah, just by turning back time, I guess. But we have now got ourselves onto a pretty good trajectory with a Jool encounter. Uh with a Jool encounter at four I think it's 4 million. There we go, 4 million meters.

[00:11:21]Uh but we are now completely out of fuel in this stage, so we can say goodbye to that and send this vessel off towards Ike.

[00:11:30]Okay, we have begun our Jool encounter, and this time I actually made sure the Kerbal I sent was a pilot so we can set our maneuver nodes on the uh on the map here and it looks like we're coming in from a polar kind of polar orbit uh into a polar orbit so I don't know if we're going to be able to get an encounter straight away with Ike. We might have to uh set ourselves into orbit around Jool first and then try and mess around to get an encounter.

[00:12:00]So we just bring our periapsis in nice and close.

[00:12:04]Shouldn't take too much fuel.

[00:12:06]We do not want to hit the planet though so let's not get too close.

[00:12:12]Okay, here we are at periapsis just going to burn retrograde to get ourselves into an orbit around Jool.

[00:12:21]Okay, we are in orbit around Jool and we can see our target right there. I have actually managed to add a maneuver which gets us an encounter and it only takes 1 second of burning so that is pretty useful. We're going to zoom up to that now and and do our burn.

[00:12:38]Right, so in 10 seconds we want to do a 1 second burn and we're going to be coming into meet Ike at quite a strange angle uh when this encounter happens but we'll have to deal with that when it comes to it. Okay, let's burn.

[00:12:51]And stop.

[00:12:53]Okay, there is our Ike encounter. I wonder if we can get it a little bit closer before we get there.

[00:13:03]All right, I'm just burning now to get our encounter a bit closer. I'm not really sure I don't think I've ever been to Ike before to be honest. I think it's pretty similar in terms of size to the Mun so it should be easy enough to land on. That's Is that too close for an encounter?

[00:13:18]All right, well uh we'll keep it at 18 18,000.

[00:13:22]Okay, there it is. This is actually a very close encounter. Uh I'm a bit worried we're going to hit something.

[00:13:28]Hold tight, Gregory.

[00:13:36]The sun has been completely eclipsed by Ike. We are burning retrograde to get ourselves into orbit. Uh there we go. We made orbit.

[00:13:46]Can even see the shadow that Ike casts on Jool. That is really cool. And Bob is over there somewhere. That's nice to know.

[00:13:55]Okay, let's deploy the landing gear and start our descent down to Ike.

[00:14:09]So, the main thing we just want to make sure we're not landing in the dark because landing in the dark is terrifying.

[00:14:15]Going to aim for it around here. We want to make sure we've got enough fuel.

[00:14:19]Okay, that's definitely in the light.

[00:14:22]Down we go.

[00:14:33]Keeping an eye out for our shadow. I haven't spotted it just yet.

[00:14:44]There it is. All right. Let's increase the thrust a little bit cuz we're still coming in quite fast. Still coming in quite fast.

[00:14:50]Slow down. Okay, perfect.

[00:14:54]And a nice and gentle touchdown. It seems like we're going a bit horizontally.

[00:15:11]Okay, just hang tight, Gregory.

[00:15:13]Oh, no.

[00:15:14]You're fine.

[00:15:16]We can right yourself. Yep.

[00:15:19]Perfect landing.

[00:15:20]Here we are on Ike.

[00:15:25]Okay, so the gravity is pretty weak here it seems. I just righted the ship with the SAS, so that's good.

[00:15:31]Semi, you take a crew report. Can I send it back? I can send it back, so that's got us 40 science just like that.

[00:15:39]And Gregory can get out and place a flag on the surface of Ike.

[00:15:46]Okay, so we have made it to Ike. We can grab ourselves a surface surface sample, that should get us a lot of science. We can also do an EVA report out here. We get 60 science for that, and then the EV and then the surface sample we get 60 science for that as well, very nice.

[00:16:01]Because as you might have guessed, uh Gregory here is not going to be going home anytime soon. He doesn't have anywhere near enough fuel in his ship to make it back. So, that's the second Greg Kerman that's stuck on a moon in our solar system here, which is kind of weird and kind of funny.

[00:16:18]So, let's just transmit all of this data back to Kerbin, so we can get ourselves a lot of science.

[00:16:24]Okay, I've just realized something quite annoying about Ike. It turns out it's tidally locked. Uh so, no matter how long we wait, Greg will never have a view a view of Jool as far as I can tell. I mean, I've been time warping for a while and look, he just he never gets to be pointing in towards the planet. So, um we do have a bit of fuel left. I'm thinking maybe we can try and fly to the other side of the moon where uh where we get a view of Jool.

[00:16:53]The problem is it's never going to be in light. We're going to have to try and land in the dark.

[00:16:58]Uh if I try and land on the pole, that's probably the best shot we've got. So, we're going to head north with we've got about half fuel left, so I think we should be fine. Let's just give it a go.

[00:17:07]Come on, Gregory, you can do this.

[00:17:12]Okay.

[00:17:13]There's a northward burn.

[00:17:15]Let's give it a few more seconds.

[00:17:18]How's that looking? I think we're going to need to go a little bit further.

[00:17:29]Okay, I accidentally made it back into orbit. We can see Jool now, so yeah, I think we're going to have to try and land in the dark, which is terrifying.

[00:17:37]But, we can do it. If we try and land right on the pole, we should be able to see Jool and we should have a tiny bit of light to help us with landing.

[00:17:45]Let's go for it. Okay, we do not need to land in the dark. I've just time warped to a a time where the light side of Jool the light side of Ike is in range of Jool. So, let's go ahead and try and land here. We should have enough fuel for a second landing.

[00:17:59]It's going to be quite close, though.

[00:18:04]Right, for the second time today, we are looking for our shadow on the surface of Ike and we are coming in for a landing.

[00:18:34]There we go. Now, we can actually see the planet, which we traveled all this way to come and find.

[00:18:39]So, it's not quite tidally locked cuz as you can see, it's bobbing up and down on the horizon as we time warp, but yeah, I don't think we ever would have seen the planet from where we landed originally. So, this is a much better spot for Gregory to look out and see Bob somewhere on that red planet.

[00:18:54]And we're even in a different biome here on Ike. So, we can send back some data and get a bit more science from that.

[00:19:01]So, I did make sure to add a relay antenna to this probe to this spaceship because we've got Bob on Jool and he actually can't send data from his craft, but I'm wondering if now that we've got a relay here in the Jool system, he might be able to send some data back to Kerbin and we might be able to get even more science out of this mission.

[00:19:20]So, here's Bob on Jool and there's Ike over in the distance over there. If we go and get him back in his capsule, I wonder if he can access that antenna to send stuff back home. Come on, Bob, in you get. No, don't climb that.

[00:19:33]There we go. All right, in you get. Can you send? Let's have a look. I'll review the stored data. Can I send that back? I can. Okay, so our relay antenna is working over on Ike, wherever it is. I can't There it is. So, we're sending data to Ike and then that's sending data back to Kerbin. That's really cool.

[00:19:50]Okay, we've got a lot of science out of this mission now. So, there we have it.

[00:19:54]We have now visited our fourth celestial body here in KSP. We've done Jool, we've done Ike, we've done the Mun, and we've done Minmus. And I guess we've done Kerbin, too. And next time out, we'll be heading to a new system. We'll be heading to the Eve system and we'll be going to Eve for the first time. But, that will have to wait for the next video because that is all I've got time for in today's video. If you did enjoy this video, please do feel free to leave a like and maybe even consider subscribing. Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in another video very soon. Good bye.