JAKARTA - There was something interesting when the space company Boeing's Starliner capsule managed to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) recently, namely the presence of an alien character from the video game Kerbal Space Program on that flight.
That character is Jebediah Kerman, or Jeb, who was one of the original four Kerbonauts in the game and now the first to actually launch into space in the form of a plush toy.
The Jeb officially flew as a zero-g indicator for Boeing's Starliner Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2), which arrived at the ISS on Friday, May 29, a day after launch at the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The flight also marked a success after two and a half years of delays due to software issues. It was an important milestone for Boeing struggling to catch up with SpaceX.
Jeb's presence aboard the Starliner was kept a secret until the unmanned capsule successfully docked to the ISS. When the ISS crew opened the hatch to the Starliner, they found a surprise inside the spacecraft.
Jeb was found sitting pretty in the Starliner. The plush doll is 9 inches (23 cm) tall provided by Private Division, the game's publisher.
@BoeingSpace #Starliner passenger - Kerbal@nasa @NASA_Astronauts @astro_kjell @Astro_FarmerBob @AstroSamantha @astro_watkins pic.twitter.com/G8ueD7qkhh
— Serg.Korsakov (@SergKorsakov) May 21, 2022
Launching Engadget, Sunday, May 22, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin once took a small doll with him on the first human space flight. Since then it has become a tradition for most space crews to carry plush toys for easy viewing when they enter a microgravity environment.
In the game Kerbal Space Program, designing a spaceship that will take the Kerbonaut into orbit and beyond is no easy task.
Often early designs would fail and crash as they struggled to fly free from Kerbin's gravity. In a way, that's what Boeing engineers had to do after the Starliner's first test flight of 2019 failed due to a software issue, and the second was delayed after an unexpected valve issue.
Jeb will spend the next few days with the ISS crew before they put him back on the spacecraft for the return journey to Earth.
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