Welcome everyone to my new let's play series of Kerbal Space Program!  KSP is a simulation sandbox game that puts you in control of a race of little green men that want to explore their solar system!  You can build ships, rockets, space stations, rovers, and colonies with parts that fit together like legos, then launch, fly, and land them using realistic orbital, atmospheric, and gravitational physics across a total of 15 planets and moons in the standard version of the game.

<center>http://i.imgur.com/f6ZFHc9.png</center>
<center><sup>Kerbals are a proud race.  Even the most disastrous failure is a learning opportunity, and explosions are cool!</sup></center>

So I thought to myself, "What better way to play Kerbal than to harness the power of Steem for spaceflight?" and thus this series was born.  I've put in quite a large number of hours into KSP over the years, but with the recent 1.2 update I realized I'm a bit rusty gameplay wise, so I decided to start small.  First, let's build ourselves a satellite.

<center>http://imgur.com/MpMb05A.png</center>
<center><sup>The Steemit flag provides constant inspiration to the engineers as they build</sup></center>

With the satellite all packed up and ready to go, chock full of scanning equipment, power, and an ion thruster, I'm ready to stuff it into a rocket!

<center>http://i.imgur.com/fsL3C0B.png</center>
<center><sup>A little over-engineered, but I'd rather be safe than sorry when it comes to starting out a new playthrough!</sup></center>

And now comes the fun part, getting it to space!  I considered just doing a long GIF, but KSP is more fun to watch in all its glory, so I went ahead and recorded a full video to kick off a new youtube series!  In this first video, I go over some of the basics of KSP while I get the satellite into a proper orbit.

<center><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hHltPVvXmIw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></center>
<center><sup>*Note* My apologies for the brief interruption near the end of the video, I didn't realize I was recording while in a voice chat channel!</sup></center>

**What types of space exploration should Steemit fund?  Let me know in the comments below!**



http://i.imgur.com/ff3g0bX.png

*Image Sources*
In-game images of Kerbal Space Program used with permission via EULA.
All other images by [me](http://quantumjunkie.imgur.com/).