Planetshine's Space Odyssey Book 1

After a long long time of just driving around, using our map to navigate back to the rocket, which is more of a lander now. We finally got there, boarding it one by one. Once we were boarded, and there was a Duna to Equestria transfer window, I started up the nuclear engines.

The nuclear engines then started to spew radiation on the surface, barely getting over 1 TWR. The rocket slowly went up, slowly, but still going up. 'I have no idea about the radiation that the NERVAs are giving out,' Dr. Whooves said to me, worried about the engines.

'Nothing bad, it's actually not very bad, those engines don't spew out that much radiation,' I replied to him, feeling very confident.

The rocket flew up slowly, and being pretty aerodynamic, Lyra started to do a quick gravity turn. The other ponies wanted Lyra to do the piloting, as I would do an extremely low pass and do the most dangerous stunts. The rocket finally got into orbit after a long time. When it was in orbit, the delta-V reading was over 2000 m/s, enough for an Ike encounter and landing.

Me, being the pony that I am, wanted to do a landing on Ike too. There was enough delta-V to get there, get there, land, and get back to Equestria. I took over Lyra's spot and started to do a burn to Ike. 'What are you doing Planetshine?' Lyra asked me.

'Ike,' I replied, 'There's enough delta-V in this to get to Ike and back to Equestria.'

Lyra was a bit surprised that I knew all that. The burn took not too long but did take a while because of the bad TWR. Once we were on a trajectory to Ike, everypony started to relax. I got out some food out and started eating it. Some other ponies also started eating food, just like me but looking more civilised.

After the huge wait, we were finally there, at the periapsis of the hyperbolic orbit, I started the capture burn. I then chose a good landing spot, and this time, it was a crater that had a pretty low elevation. Doing the deorbiting burn, we were on a trajectory to the surface of it.

I put on my spacesuit when it was still flying, and when it was near the ground, I started to do the landing burn. The radiation spewed out the nozzles, providing about 1.9 TWR, slowing down pretty nicely. With that burn, I started it as late as possible, deploying the landing legs. The rocket, which was now a lander, touched down at 2 m/s.

I busted out the door as soon as we landed, the others still putting on their suits. I then grabbed my flag and planted it on the surface. The surface was a little different than the one on the moon. While looking pretty much the same as the moon, it was much harder. I had to shove it in the ground, one of the chipped ground hitting me very hard. 'Far out cunt,' I thought in my head at that time.

The others then came out, looking at the landscape of the moon. After a little while, we had to go, as the Duna to Equestria transfer window would end in 2 days. I throttled up the NERVAs, getting it on an escape trajectory to a Duna orbit. The rocket was in an elliptical orbit of Duna, and when I was at the periapsis, I started up the engines to do an ejection burn to Equestria.

The ejection burn also made us have an Ike encounter, meaning that we could see the moon again. The moon acted as a thing to do a gravity assist off of, making it so that we saved only about 10m/s. The 10m/s didn't matter much, as after the burn, the rocket had about 400m/s delta-V left, enough for lots of mid course corrections.