- Delete delete, delete, delete, delete, delete.
Oh, this is kicking my butt.
(soft music)
My name is am Emil.
I work at a large aerospace and defense company
as a ground satellite systems engineer.
We have these satellites that are sending down telemetry.
And if that telemetry is alarming, we have to sort of come
in like the firefighters and try to rectify the situation
in order to prevent something really bad happening.
Today I'm playing the Kerbal Space Program
and we are making the most ridiculously
expensive rocket ever.
Let's go.
We're at the facility.
There's a lot of these guys walking around,
what are they doing?
They're not actually doing anything.
So I'm just gonna get right into it.
Oh, I can actually sort by cost.
So let's do that.
I'm not sure what this currency is like, what is this?
Okay, so this is not a real currency, which is even better.
I won't feel bad about spending money
but let's see what we've got here.
We've got fuel tanks.
The fuel is actually the most expensive thing
on any spacecraft.
The more fuel you have and the more weight you have,
the more expensive the rocket is gonna be
because you have to buy more fuel to push that weight up.
I'm gonna put a command pod.
All right. I can do whatever I want here.
No one can stop me.
Cost is our number one thing.
Payload really is anything that the spacecraft is carrying.
If you wanted to, I don't know,
carry a thousand basketballs with something to space.
You could put it in the payload.
Liquid fuel engine.
All right.
What is that?
39,000?
Hell yeah.
Give it a big little booty right there.
There you go.
Ah, this is kicking my butt.
Delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete.
They did not teach us this in aerospace engineering classes.
Y'all are gonna see me struggle.
Oh, who big?
Oh my gosh.
Ah, keep it together, Emil.
Let's have fun with this.
(indistinct singing)
Something don't look right here.
We're just trying to spend as much money as possible.
It doesn't have to be pretty.
This thing is really scary.
Like imagine if it was just coming at you, like,
looks like the tallest rocket ever.
Can't see.
It's so tall.
I can't even see it.
Oh geez.
I accidentally clicked launch.
Oh my God.
No.
I failed my professors, my company, my mother.
All right, let's get outta here.
All right.
There you go.
So let's keep working on this mess of the spacecraft here.
I think I like that shrimp one
so I'll keep using one of those.
Also like shrimp in real life so it works out.
Think that's four layers of shrimp, shrimp.
Yeah, Let's make it look kind of dumb.
Okay, cool.
Just kind of want it to look good, but dang.
There is maybe like 30 or so of these little shrimp
solid rocket boosters.
And then we have these ginormous boosters as well.
Total, we have 13 stages
which is gonna be absolutely ridiculous.
I don't think that looks too shabby.
I think I'm ready to launch.
I'm gonna call it "Emil Goes Home".
Always felt like I was out of this world, growing up.
Let's launch this baby and see what happens.
At this point I'm just living for the chaos.
Jebediah, Bill, Bob,
see you never.
Oh no.
Okay.
That was awesome.
(laughs)
Back to the drawing board.
All right.
Attempt number two.
Uh-oh she's bouncing.
All right, let's do this thing.
Full throttle.
See what happens.
(dramatic music)
Just let it happen.
Back to the drawing board.
Third time's a charm, right?
Failure is not an option.
So let's do a quick check on how much this costs.
Our goal was to make it as expensive as possible.
So it looks like this spacecraft costs 440,830 bucks.
So that is a lot of money.
Let's test this bad boy out.
Valentina.
Let's get Valentina safely to space.
We gotta do it for her.
Three, two, look, one, look how excited Valentina is.
Go.
All right.
It is actually going into the sky and not crashing.
I gotta say I'm very pleased.
Valentina's kind of, kind of scared.
Look at her face.
Okay, we are in space.
Oh geez.
Oh, geez.
Don't know if Emil's going home.
But Valenti's having a great time.
This is a success.
I'm happy with where we're at.
I'm good with this.
This is good.
That was crazy.
I've never played a game so difficult in my life.
I came in here as an aerospace engineer feeling
I was like, I was gonna knock it out of the park.
You really needed to know your stuff
like to the 10th degree.
That was like at least three to four times harder
than my normal day job.
You needed to have a lot of technical knowledge as to
the anatomy of what a space shuttle is,
what parts go together.
It was super difficult, but super rewarding.
And I'm so glad I did it.
Yeah, this is a great experience.
And I'd definitely play again.