The Kerbal Legacy
Whenever I get the chance at lunchtime in the office, I stop any virtual machines running on my laptop, close down the email, and go looking for a folder on the root of my laptop hard-drive called “KSP”. It stands for “Kerbal Space Program”, and is by far the biggest time suck I have ever encountered.
It's worth pointing out that I am a huge space nerd, and always have been. I was one of the school children that got to visit the Space Shuttle when it toured the UK in the early 1980s – I can remember the school trip to an air force base, and eating our sandwiches, waiting for it to arrive. I remember my best friend being allowed to take his parent's camera for the day (we were about 8 years old), under strict instructions that he could only take a certain number of photos.
So what is “Kerbal Space Program” ? It's a video game, but really not a video game – more a simulation dressed up in video game graphics. Within the game you get to design and built aircraft, rockets, and spacecraft from an infinite collection of bits. Once assembled, you crew your creation with little cartoon dudes, and take full control over the firing of boosters, the blowing of bolts, maneuvering with thrusters, and so on. The catch – and it's an enormous catch – is that in the video game world of Kerbal Space Program, physics is accurately modelled.
As you leave the launch pad, your rocket passes through air – which starts out thick at low altitude, and grows thinner as you climb into the sky (if you make it that far). Accelerate too fast and you might break or overheat all manner of components – suddenly the NASA call of “Go for throttle up” makes sense.
Once free from a planet's atmosphere, Newtonian mechanics take over, and all the terms you might have heard in movies and textbooks become second nature – Perigee, Apogee, Orbital insertion, Rendezvous, and so on. Buzz Aldrin became known as “Dr Rendezvous” during Apollo, because he did the majority of the work on rationalising the maneuvers required to bring two spacecraft back together while in-orbit – it's surprisingly difficult.
Every element of the rocket requires power – the capsule, the vectored engine nozzles, the retro rockets, the radios – so you have to provide batteries, and solar panels. I have come from the dark side of the moon with a dead spacecraft more than once.
Kerbal Space Program is an enormous educational exercise that can be absorbed on a number of levels. Children will delight in the fiery explosions as a rocket tumbles out of control – I know, because mine do. They will also delight in building another rocket, and having another go. With a little help, you might one day help them land on another world, and get to watch their faces as their little Kerbal dude climbs from the capsule and plants a flag. You'll also get to share in the fear as the heat shields burn cherry red when you re-enter the atmosphere on the way home – wondering if your little dudes will make it or not.
It should come as no surprise that I planted the idea of Kerbal Space Program in a local teacher's mind. She will be coming to visit soon. No doubt within days of that meeting, I will find myself in a school hall with the lights dimmed, and a moon rocket projected onto the wall, watched by several hundred shining eyes in the silence.