'2 hours to go, I'm so bored!' Planetshine complained. All the other ponies were not as bored as her. She was extremely excited for the Duna mission, but the others were not as excited, as they didn't discover it, it was Planetshine that discovered it, not to mention Dr. Whooves.

The Duna transfer window was nearly there, with a phase angle of about 45 degrees ahead of Equestria. All the astronauts waited for a long time, just because a transfer window wouldn't appear after that amount of time, with a phase angle of about 45 degrees.

Once that long and boring wait finally ended, they were called to the launchpad, which had a huge rocket that contained 4 side boosters and 8 Mastadon engines in the middle. The other stage was a nuclear stage, which didn't have a very high TWR, but was efficient, very efficient, at 800 ISP instead of the usual 300-400 ISP of the other engines. That stage itself had more than 5000m/s delta-V, which was more than enough to do a mission to Duna, as calculated by Wernher himself.

The ponies boarded the rocket, Planetshine Lyra in the Mk1-3 command pod and the others in the hitchhiker storage container, another great invention from Planetshine's junkyard. The hitchhiker storage container acted as a cryogenic stasis chamber, for use with long-haul missions, ones that would take more than 1 month or so.

All that was encased in a fairing, which also contained a rover. The rover was supposed to be a mobile base that was self-sustaining, with capacity for 6 ponies. It also contained drills and an ISRU, meaning it could refuel itself so that the fuel cells would last for basically forever, but there were solar panels and an RTG just for emergencies.

When the wait for launch was over, Planetshine started the engines, and the countdown started. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and we have liftoff! The launch clamps unclamped the massive rocket and since it had 4 side boosters which had Mammoth engines clusters, which had 4000kN of thrust in them, it shot into the air pretty quickly. The TWR of the rocket was about 1.96, making it one of the highest TWR rockets made by Equestrian Aerospace.

Planetshine started the gravity turn nearly instantly, as the rocket was very aerodynamic mostly because of the fairing. The 4 boosters were configured in a new staging method, using something called asparagus staging. Asparagus staging was a new experimental type of staging, which was like onion staging but more complicated. Two boosters would feed the other two boosters and those two would feed the middle stage, meaning that when two of the boosters decoupled, the other two would be full of fuel, and then when those two decoupled, the middle stage would be full.

When Planetshine started the gravity turn, she just pointed the rocket prograde, relaxing until two of the side boosters were drained of fuel. Then, she decoupled them, firing up the Separatrons, the boosters falling away to the ground. Planetshine then shut down the engines once the apoapsis reached above the Karman line, and let the rocket coast all the way up, decoupling the other two side boosters.

The 5 booster cluster proved to itself that it was extremely efficient in ascending from Equestria, placing the apoapsis above the atmosphere using only the fuel in the side boosters. The next thing for Planetshine to do was to deploy the fairing and start the circularisation burn at its apoapsis.

Once she did all that, mission control planned a manoeuver that would get her all the way to Duna. The burn would take one huge burn to complete, and it would use up a chunk of fuel. The ponies after the transfer was done, would go into their stasis chambers, which were tested dozens of times just in case something went wrong. There also had to be one pony that was not in stasis, as that pony would keep watch of the ship, just in case something bad happened.

The ponies started eating their meals, and then Lyra started the ejection burn, which took about a minute to complete but would get them on a rough encounter with Duna, not a precise one. The plan was to do a course correction close to Duna so that the periapsis would be placed pretty far under the atmosphere, as it was theorised that Duna had an extremely thin atmosphere compared to Equestria.

Finishing the ejection burn, everypony except Dr. Whooves went down to the hitchhiker storage container, and went into their cryogenic pods, ready to be put into stasis for the next few months during their transfer to Duna. Dr. Whooves relaxed in the command pod, doing some experiments and other things like that.

Author's Note

Duna will be the last part of this story, time for the sequel after finishing this part, which is going to have 3 chapters.