Equestrian Aerospace

After months of planning, Equestrian Aerospace was finally done with planning for a mission to another planet. They planned to go to the planet Planetshine discovered, which was later named Duna by the Equestrian Astronomy Society.

The planet was estimated to have an SMA of 20726155264m, an orbit that's a bit eccentricity and a different inclination to that of Equestria's. It also had ice caps that looked like they were completely white and looked like it covered a huge chunk of land, meaning that it could have water before it dried up.

The ponies at Equestrian Aerospace had to plan the mission like nothing else before as one slight miscalculation even by 0.1 m/s would be a huge disaster. Duna also had an atmosphere, which meant parachutes worked and it also meant that they had to pack parachutes, which added mass which meant less delta-V for course corrections and burns.

Planetshine and the other astronauts were getting bored, they were all in Ponyville, their homes. They lived relatively close to each other, and they usually would rendezvous to discuss things about space and their mission to Duna.

In one of their rendezvous, quite close to the mission date of the Duna mission, the administration informed them that every astronaut would be going to Duna. This made everypony extremely happy, especially Derpy and Lyra, who both haven’t set hooves on other celestial bodies.

Firstly, they had to get the other six astronauts back from the space station, which had been their home for the past few months, doing research and other things like that, so Equestrian Aerospace had to send an SSTO that used remote guidance to bring them back, as they have been researching SSTOs lately, and have perfected one special design that was able to bring cargo and have space for 16 passengers.