KerbalX

Details

• Type: VAB
• Class: satellite
• Part Count: 18
• Mods: 2
• KSP: 1.11.0

Mods

• Bluedog DB
• Squad (stock)

Australia first entered the field of rocketry in 1947 when the British constructed the Woomera Rocket Range. The British, as one of the Allied powers, had acquired a number of captured V-1s and V-2s and planned to develop and test their own derived rockets. The rocket range was mostly used to test out suborbital warheads for the British until the world changed in 1957 with the launching of Sputnik and in Australia they tested their first sounding rocket, Long Tom, in the same year.

Australia quickly part of the British effort in the Space Race and worked closely with our allied nations such as Canada and the United States. The Woomera Rocket Range quickly became the second busiest space center next to Cape Canaveral and by 1960 the first Deep Space Facility was built just south of Woomera. It contributed to helping the American space program for several decades and was crucial to American successes in the Mercury and Gemini programs.

The Redstone ballistic missile was spun off into a family of launch vehicles that carried many important early American milestones in the Space Race. It carried Explorer 1, the first American satellite and later changed the first Mercury astronaut into space. However it quickly became obsolete both as a ballistic missile and as a launch vehicle. The Mercury program was still underway when the Redstone was officially decommissioned in 1964.

The British space program was slowly cancelled over the course of 1960s which had a negative effect on Australian efforts which led to Australia slowly developing their own but were without launch vehicles. This was solved by a joint British and American effort to provide Australia with nine recently-decommissioned Redstone missiles. They were converted into the Redstone Sparta rocket to which an Antares-2 solid rocket and an Alcyone BE-3 solid rocket which were previously used on the Scout rockets.

The initial Sparta rocket was a failure but the other eight were qualified successes to which the United States donated a tenth rocket to use to launch Australia’s first satellite into orbit. The WRESAT was successfully launched on 29 November 1967 and while being Australia’s first satellite it was considerably more advanced than the early American and Soviet payloads.

The Etoh-L is an approximation of the Sparta rocket and a modification of the Etoh rocket used in a number of other builds. The major difference is the removal of the upper fuel tank as it’s only used for the initial ascent. It is still a simple single-stage liquid-fueled rocket that should put the payload into the upper atmosphere after which the first solid stage takes over.

The Staara 31-III approximates the Antares-2 and handles the rest of the ascent, it’s currently configurated to put the payload into Medium Kerbal Orbit (MKO) although you can change the amount of solid to adjust your desired apogee.z

Lastly the ZE-3-LYC approximates the BE-3 rocket which stabilizes the payload’s orbit although depending on your apogee the perigee will be considerably lower which mirrors the eccentricity of the historical WRESAT payload.

Built in the VAB in KSP version 1.11.0.