With the latest issues on the Orbiter project, people were eyeballing the Charon Heavy project with great interest. The Charon had successfully launched up to 3 passengers into LKO, but the capacity was limited. To address this issue the Charon team had come up with the Charon Heavy.
Providing nearly 1400 kN of thrust it should be capable of delivering a 4-ton payload to LKO and remain fully reusable. On top was the new 6 Kerbal capsule which also included 3 large supply containers. This would allow the craft to play two roles. The design was basically 3 Charons bolted together. The lighter service module attached to the capsule required a bit more help to get into orbit though.
The booster took off without any problems. The main engines shut down at 35 km to let the spacecraft coast to Apoapsis. From there the engines would be relit and perform circularisation, decoupling followed by a deorbit burn.
The booster did manage to run out of monopropellant which caused it to reenter sideways. Engineers were biting their nails but at 20 km altitude, the heavy engines caused the craft to flip in the right direction, just before the first drogue chute would deploy.
The side boosters carried huge parachutes and deployable landing legs, allowing a surface landing which would avoid seawater entering the fragile engines. The whole bolted stack descended with 400 ms left in the tanks.
The last few meters the engines lighted up for a powered drop, bringing the velocity down to less than 4 m/s which was enough to make the whole stack land vertically, within 10 km of KSC.
Jeb looked concerned, though it was no longer his primary cash cow (that was the Delta spacecraft) he saw his entire line of Arrow class lifters turn obsolete with this simple act of reuse.
Meanwhile, in orbit, the Charon Heavy continued its approach to UKSS. It had a deployable docking port which would include a parachute, it would also require a breaking burn by the engines though.
Engineers were happy to see that it would dock at the small port that was also used by the regular Charon. Though passengers would have to squeeze through those ports, most of the 1.25m ports were occupied by expansions or shuttles, there were serious discussions about how to expand the station to better accommodate travelers.
Once docked Bill checked out the design. “Sparse interior,” he wrote down. “Cramped too, if we are to squeeze 6 in here. But it can work.” After performing all technical checks he went back to his cozy quarters onboard the Salyut.
About a month later the supplies were mostly consumed and the Heavy undocked from the station, retracted its nosecone and started the descent burn, targeting desert airfield.
The craft proved aerodynamically unstable and went down head first, but could take the heat. It shot past the target LZ like a bullet though. “Wooha, it’s heading straight for the pyramids!” Kerbals scrambled at HQ and started looking at flight abort procedures to rescue this monument, but that proved not to be needed because moments later the chutes started to deploy.
The craft slowed down and made way for a soft landing in the mountains. “Great,” the local KERF commander said, “that will be fun for the recovery crews,”
Just before touchdown, it reactivated its engines slowing down to a mere few meters per second and deployed the landing struts.
Finally the craft soft-landed, returning experiments and trash to Kerbin. Not perfect, and not cleared for flight yet but potentially a revolutionary approach. KSC filed several additional tests and design improvements before clearing the craft though.
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