But certainly not easy.  Took a bit of practice (and perhaps a minor bounce off the station…)

But in the end, the Kerbals prevailed.

Once docked, a fuel transfer was initiated to verify the process.  After that, it was party time.  The Kerbal who’d been manning the space station decided he needed to get out after going a bit stir crazy.  Time to ride the rocket for a spell.

This, of course, left the space station unmanned, so one of our newly arrived Kerbonauts transferred himself over to the space station to take the helm.

So, it’s doable.  Who’s next?

The first step was designing the vehicle.  I went with a one-man capsule, a small engine, and lots of extra fuel (to give me plenty of room for mistakes on my first landing mission.

I made sure to add landing struts, a ladder to allow Jebediah a quick EVA, and, of course, a parachute for the command pod.  The launch vehicle itself was designed in two stages, four large engines and fuel tanks to get the craft past 10 km, and another single large tank and engine to easily push into orbit, leaving the lander vehicle itself fully fueled in orbit.

The launch was very straightforward.  I controlled the engines carefully under 10 km to keep the velocity below 200 m/s and avoid overheating.  At 12 km I performed an orbital tilt to 45 degrees, got speed up, and then coasted to the highest point in the path, at which point I turned again on an orbital maneuver.

Separation was clean.

This left me with the landing craft fully fueled in a stable Earth orbit, ready to begin maneuvers to head to the Mun.

As I approached the moon I adjusted my orbit to bring me down near “the bright side,” and set my orientation to maintain a retrograde orbit.

After a few minutes of sweating with a light hand on the thrusters while maintain a retrograde orbit, I finally had the lander down on the ground (and even remembered to extend the landing struts!)

The external tanks were just barely empty (I hadn’t separated them during the descent as I thought perhaps the extra fuel might be nice for the Mun launch.  However, upon reaching the surface, they were just barely drained.  Easy quiet separation.  Now for the EVA.  I extended the ladders and Jebediah had himself a short stroll on the Mun before climbing back in for the trip home.

From there, a simple launch to get back into Mun orbit, then an orbital transfer back to Earth, which brought Jebediah down nice and safe and ready for his next mission!

Key Learning — having all that extra fuel was nice, but next time I could do things MUCH more efficiently at the landing stage, allowing me to launch a much lighter landing vehicle.  Next challenge – Landing on Minmus and returning safely!

I first wrote about some basic ideas around the program last week in Kerbals in Space? Gamifying the Physics of Space Exploration.  Since then, with the help and guidance of a variety of folks ranging from our school’s IT experts all the way to Kerbal Space Program enthusiasts from around the world, I think we have a pilot program (pun intended) ready to launch (pun still intended).  As we blast into this new foray, my larger goal is to explore whether something as simple as the Kerbal Space Program or other “gamified” simulation has the potential for implementation earlier in the K-12 curriculum.  If it works with seniors, could it be used with juniors?  With freshman?  With junior high students?  With 5th and 6th graders?  All with the ultimate goal of launching students into the challenge and excitement available in STEM disciplines.

We need to grab the attention of our up and coming society at an early age, and allow them to observe the need for math, science, writing, communication, and technology, and how these skills open doorways for them to engage in such fun and challenging activities.  There are tons of good programs out there promoting interest in STEM, from robotics programs to alternative fuel teams to green teams… I’m hoping the excitement of space, presented in such a fun way, allows students to reach some key conclusions on their own.  First, just playing the sim is fun.  For a while.  Then you realize no matter what you do you tend to crash into things and can’t make it to any moons or planets.  It’s time to pull out paper, pencil, calculator, and jump on the Kerbal WIKI to do some research and learn about dynamics, energy, transfer orbits, staging, etc.  In this way, the students themselves are driving their own learning with a purpose, a pull system, so to speak, as opposed to pushing information out to them and then asking them to apply what they’ve learned.

It’ll be a fun experiment.  I’ve completed the Kerbal Space Program Education Project definition page.  We’ll see how it goes from here, and if anyone wants to join us on this exploration, we’d love to have you along!

It’s taken awhile, but I’ve finally cleaned up all the sheets, arranged them into a workbook format, solved every single problem, added answer sheets, and sent them off for publication.  The result — yesterday, The Ultimate Regents Physics Question and Answer Book was released.

I’m planning on leaving the individual worksheets available for download on the APlusPhysics site — the book is merely provided as a convenience for those who’d rather have a hard copy, bound compendium of all the worksheets, with the answers included.  Because these sheets are also popular as homework assignments, quizzes, etc., I don’t plan on posting the answer sheets publicly… that’s just making things a little too easy for students hoping to avoid productive work.  The list price on the book is $11.99, which (typically) Amazon discounts within a few weeks of publication.  I think that’s a reasonable price for a resource that took me many, many hours to compile, with the goal of hopefully recouping the costs required to publish the book within a year or so if all goes well.

Having said that, last night I received a troubling e-mail.  Before even one copy had sold, I received a request asking if I would donate copies of the workbook to cover an entire physics course at a school.  Now, I understand there’s no harm in asking, so I politely responded that the cost for any donated/promotional copies come directly out of the pocket of a high school teacher (me), and that the entire content was already available for download and printing direct from the APlusPhysics website.  The follow-up, however, left me troubled.  The response stated that the copies were for an inner city school and therefore computers and Internet access to download and print the files wasn’t reasonable.

Maybe I’m being naive, but I have trouble believing that there are school districts (and individual schools) that are SO poor that there isn’t a single computer with an Internet connection anywhere in the school.  Or let’s say that there aren’t ANY computers in the school — how can not one teacher have access to a computer and Internet to obtain the files on their own time?  And in what world is it reasonable that I should pick up the costs to print and ship a volume of copies to a school where they can’t find a way to download and print freely available files (which I also pay to host)?

Rant ended.  I’m more than happy to give away a ton of my work (and time) for free, but there are some costs associated with making these resources available.  The software to create the site, the hosting fees, publication costs, licensing costs, etc.  Almost all of the content in the books is already freely available on the site for educational use, and I LOVE when folks make use of these resources.  But, the reality is that all of these things have some cost, and if I want to continue to build a terrific physics resource for our students, a few of the items on the site have to generate enough income to cover the costs of the site.

Now, with that out of the way, I’m excited to be diving into the next project at full speed — review / guide books for the new AP-1 and AP-2 courses.  Background work / development has been going on for over a year, and, if all goes as planned, the first draft should be underway within a couple weeks!!!!!

Right now I’m still working out the details of the project.  In general, though, I think it’d be fun to have the kids work through the simulation with a set of challenges as part of a “space race.”  Each group of 3 students will form their own space exploration team.  With safety of all Kerbals as their prime directive, they will be asked to complete a series of tasks, documenting and analyzing their work along with each design and launch, and sharing their findings with the other teams through the use of blogging.  In this manner, we’ll begin to combine technical writing, project management, and even risk management with an addictive game centered around physics principles!

• I’m thinking their challenges may look something like:
• Launch an unmanned rocket
• Launch a manned rocket safety
• Safely put a Kerbal in orbit (and bring him home)
• Safely land a Kerbal on the Mun (and bring him home)
• Safely land a Kerbal on a distant planet (and bring him home)
• etc.

In just playing with the sim for a few minutes tonight, I managed to put a Kerbal in orbit, but them promptly left him there as I played around with an extra-vehicular activity walk… and then couldn’t bring him back in as my command pod was out of fuel.  Should be a hoot to see how the kids do, and if anyone else has played with the sim, wants to join us in our “experiment,” etc., we’d love to work with others!