Episode 20 of the GopherCraft Great Space Race is Mun Lander III, flown twice. Basket sends one with Bill Kerman toward the Mun, then launches a second copy with Bob Kerman as backup. Both burns come up short of a Mun encounter, and the video stops with Bob's ship lining up another try. No Mun landing yet.
A new lander
"I know at the end of the last episode I indicated that I was going to keep these guys, but I changed my mind." Basket picks a different setup: "I'm going to make this be the Mun Lander 3." The crew screen puts Bill Kerman in the Command Pod Mk1, with Hanvan Kerman and Obbo Kerman in the Mobile Processing Lab. "You guys are gonna go to the Mun."
The plan for the climb: boosters to 10,000, a gravity turn, then an apoapsis around 100,000 and a burn to round off the orbit. The launch itself is mostly cut. "You've probably already seen this launch enough."
Close, but not there
The orbit is "a little lower than I wanted," since Basket ended the burn early. On the map, a new node shows the path meeting the Mun. "Yes. That would be a Mun encounter." It is a 33 second burn about four minutes out. Partway through: "Looks like we might actually run out of these engines." Afterward: "We aren't going to quite get there with what we currently have set up."
Basket sets the Mun as the target and tries a node at the ascending node. "So now here's an encounter again." The six second burn after it is not enough. The map shows the closest approach to the Mun at 3,523 km, three days out.
A second ship
While the first lander coasts, Basket adds "a little bit of redundancy": the same rocket again, with a new crew, "just in case we can learn something from the first one." The crew screen seats Bob Kerman in the pod and Anton Kerman in the lab. It reaches orbit around Kerbin, and Basket hunts for a Mun encounter on the map until one shows up.
The burn switches to the smaller engine halfway. When it ends: "So we didn't get an encounter."
Where it ends
Basket plans one more node, two hours out, a 157.9 m/s burn of about 47 seconds. "This would be an encounter here." "We'll see if we can get a Mun encounter with the second one first." The burn has not happened when "To be continued..." comes up. Both Mun Lander III ships are still in space, with Bill, Hanvan and Obbo on the first and Bob and Anton on the second.
