[1952 June 22, Illyrien Space Center]
Today we are happy to announce the launch of our first ever artificial satellite! There will be a full news conference shortly, along with a radio and black-white television broadcast. But here are a few highlights.
It was a 3 stage T12 – Orbiter I rocket launched from our newly upgraded launch pad. The first stage lifted it to an apoapsis above the Kerman Line, the second stage raised the apoapsis to above 300km and accelerated the Orbiter to very high speed. When it was expended, an instability in the separation caused the third stage to spin, but the engine’s gimbaling was able to counter this, and the Orbiter recovered, and accelerated to orbital speeds. The final orbit was non-circluar with a high end at about 2600km
The satellite orbited for more than 5 hours, which is about almost 3 times around the Earth, before the power supply was expended. The satellite carried a full science package, and experiments where performed in a range of exotic biomes such as mountain, desert, tropic and highland.
The orbital itself, however, was not aligned to the equator, which lead to an unstabile orbit, sending the Orbiter I all over the planet. Except Kerbinia, so they will have to subscribe to the newspapers to see how we managed to launch a satellite with a useful power supply.
Illyrien Space Program 