Orbital Decay

Flights of Madness
I should have listened when my mother told me not to take this job. Unfortunately, I owed President Leonard a favor from years ago so when he called it in I could hardly refuse. It seems however, if I’m not randomly killed by debris from one of the many spectacular failures, my expertise may be what is needed to turn this mess around. This will take some time, I suspect.

Of course, how did I end up in the position of having been chosen for supreme authority over this assemblage of inexperience and ineptitude? Very simply, it seems anyone resembling competent and experienced was killed in a thoroughly tragic and ironic fiery failure during the opening stages of the celebration of the first multistage launch. An as-yet unknown tech failed to properly calibrate the stabilization gyros, which on launch sent the new Kerbal X directly into their observation bunker.

This was bad enough, but the mistake was compounded when Cleetus K. D. Kerman, one of our various Kerbalnauts (I hate that word. Only one of those idiots in marketing could have come up with something so annoying…) was given directorship immediately thereafter and he promoted his own favorite techs and scientists with no actual design experience and told them to ‘put more engines on it.’

Within two weeks, a stockpile of parts had dwindled, approximately fifty percent of the Kerbalnaut cadre had been wiped out and local communities were filing suit against the KSP requesting the program be moved to another continent where it could do less damage. Computer models, it seems, were not an approved method under Cleetus, who explained the high casualty rate as “occupational hazards” and “no big deal.”

Fortunately, in spite of their primitive ‘trial and error’ rocket launches, the team had managed to make several successful launches and orbits by the time Leonard bowed to pressure from congress (and a horde of angry local residents with torches and pitch forks. And I think they’d brought some boiling tar as well.) and stripped Cleetus of the position.

They still moved the program to the middle of nowhere, since the residents had taken to flinging rocket debris at the capitol building.

And now I’m in charge of this mess. I’ve stopped the manned launches until we’ve got some rocket designs that won’t fall apart in a stiff breeze or explode randomly on the pad, but there’s a long, long way to go before I’d feel safe with anything the ‘engineers’ they’ve hired come up with.

I still don’t know what I did to deserve this.