Operation Save Jeb

So, long story short, my first orbital flight attempt saw Jebediah getting trapped without engines in a relatively inclined and eccentric orbit around Kerbin, with periapsis around 120km and apoapsis around 320km.

My first idea was to exit the capsule and use the jetpack to give it enough delta-v to drop the periapsis below 70km, but unfortunately I had installed a mystery goo canister on the side of the capsule and it was blocking the hatch. The idea is sound, though, and my friend used it successfully to get his stranded kerbonaut back down.

As the blocked hatch also prevented a rendezvous mission to transfer Jeb to another craft, there was no alternative but to launch a mission to push his periapsis down. I play career mode so I had to play for a while to get the parts and skills to launch a rescue mission. Early on I invented a craft with a kind of basket made of landing struts which could used to capture Jeb's capsule and give it a push.

The rescue took several attempts with varied failures, and I ended up using MechJeb a lot to speed up the flight. The whole mess of aligning orbital planes, making the rendezvous transfer as near as possible and then matching velocities would have taken me considerably longer and probably resulted in quite many failed flights without the automation MechJeb allows.

The failures I did suffer were due to things like wrong staging ("oops, there goes the last engine"), forgetting to open the solar panels ("why did it stop responding to controls?"). The first iteration of the capture basked to make the rendezvous was too sparse and the capsule escaped between the struts when I accelerated.

The Rescue Pusher went through a number of designs. The final craft is simply the small Octo probe with eight upside down landing struts attached to its sides. It's sitting on top of a battery, a reaction wheel block, fuel tanks and an engine. RCS nozzles, RCS fuel tanks, two 1x6 solar panels and the MechJeb module are attached to the sides of the fuel tank. The amount of fuel turned out more than I needed, so the larger of the two tanks could have been replaced by another smaller one. Two lower stages launched it into circular 120km orbit, from which the actual craft made the rendezvous.

After a couple of tries the approach was not too difficult. The idea is to approach the capsule from the prograde direction, keeping the Rescue Pusher pointed in the retrograde direction, while adjusting it sideways with the RCS to ensure the the capsule gets in the basket.

In the end, getting the capsule into the basked was surprisingly easy. Unfortunately the encounter happened on the dark side of Kerbin, so I could not get great pictures. I did take one fancy shot against the galactic plane.

After the capsule was in the basket, all that was left to do was to apply the main engine of the Rescue Pusher. I burned until the Pusher's periapsis got down to under 50km. As it happened, when the capsule separated after I shut down the engine, the capsule ended up with a periapsis of 25km and the Pusher somewhat higher.

Then there was nothing to do but timewarp until the capsule entered the atmosphere. I was slightly worried about the parachute, but everything worked fine.

Jebediah splashed down into the circular crater sea which you see in the distance above.

After Jebediah landed, I went back to the Pusher and burned all of its remaining fuel (I had overdone the delta-v and had way more left than was necessary) to get it down as fast as possible. It crashed down somewhere in the mountainous continent west of the Space Centre.