Skip to main content
PC Gamer PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES
Sign in
  • View Profile
  • Sign out
flag of UK
UK
flag of US
US
flag of Canada
Canada
flag of Australia
Australia
  • Games
  • Hardware
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Guides
  • Video
  • Forum
  • More
    • PC Gaming Show
    • Software
    • Movies & TV
    • Coupons
    • Magazine
    • Newsletter
    • Community guidelines
    • Affiliate links
    • Meet the team
    • About PC Gamer
PC Gamer Magazine Subscription
PC Gamer Magazine Subscription
Why subscribe?
  • Subscribe to the world's #1 PC gaming mag
  • Try a single issue or save on a subscription
  • Issues delivered straight to your door or device
From$32.49
View
Popular
  • Amazon Prime Day Deals
  • Essential Hardware
  • Microsoft
  • AI
  • PC Gaming Show
Recommended reading
Best space games on PC
Games The best space games on PC
A TIE Bomber seen from the cockpit of an X-Wing in the XWVM mod
Sim XWVM, the X-Wing mod that lets you play the Star Wars classic remade in Unity, is finally available to download
A three screen setup is seen on a desk. These screens are encased in an off-white shell designed to look retro and bring to mind classic CRT housing.
PC Cases Redditor handcrafts retrofuturistic set up that wouldn't look out of place on the set of Alien, with precisely zero 3D printing involved
Minecraft best builds - an underground based made of wood planks with farming areas
Survival & Crafting The 20 best Minecraft build ideas to inspire your next world
A red ape-man struts across the surface of an alien world.
Sim No Man's Sky just got another mondo update and I think it's a management game now?
A sprawling space factory.
Sim This Factorio-ish sim is threatening to devour hours of my time, and I haven't even gotten to the part where I make my own starships yet
A car firing a large amount of lasers in TerraTech Legion.
Roguelike Design your perfect battle car block by block, then watch a legion of alien robots blow it up because you suck at 3 point turns, in this explosive Vampire Survivors-like
  1. Games
  2. Sim
  3. Kerbal Space Program

Recreating real spacecraft in Kerbal Space Program

Features
By PCGamer published 23 January 2015

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Juno I rocket

Juno I rocket

Kerbal Space Program has an incredible editor that lets you build spaceships, launch them into orbit and then pilot them around the solar system. A lot of the fun comes from creating your own machines, but the editor is so good that you can create convincing replicas of historical space vessels. Let Luis Villazon take you through a bunch of his favourites, with tips on how to build them. First, the towering Juno 1.

The Juno I rocket was made from a liquid-fuelled Redstone ballistic missile, fitted with a washing-machine-sized drum on top. The drum contained a ring of 11 solid rocket boosters surrounding a core of three more. In Kerbal Space Program, the Procedural Parts mod allows you to make fuel tanks and boosters any size you want, so you can build 1:1 scale replicas. The Procedural Fairings mod forms the outer shell of the drum.

Page 1 of 20
Page 1 of 20
Explorer 1

Explorer 1

America’s first satellite in space was launched on the Juno I rocket, just 90 days after the Soviets orbited Sputnik 1. The rear half is actually the solid rocket motor of the fourth stage. The KSP version uses telescopic antennas but the real satellite used flexible whip antennas that were held out by centrifugal force as Explorer 1 rotated.

Page 2 of 20
Page 2 of 20
Vanguard rocket

Vanguard rocket

Vanguard was tiny compared to Juno; the payload in the nosecone was only the size of a grapefruit. For the main engine I used a WildCat-V from the KW Rocketry mod. The second stage motor is the stock Rockomax 48-7S and the top stage is a solid rocket motor, created with Procedural Parts and hidden behind a Procedural Fairing. To make the gantry, start with the launch clamp and then attach structural plates and I-beams to that. The horizontal railings are struts.

Page 3 of 20
Page 3 of 20
Sputnik 3

Sputnik 3

Sputnik 3 was a 3.5m tall, orbiting laboratory launched by the USSR in 1958. Russian spacecraft have lots of fiddly details and curved bit that are hard to represent in KSP. The grid pattern on the side (which are the doors for the cooling louvres) is made by rotating cubic octagonal struts, so that only the base is visible on the outside.

Page 4 of 20
Page 4 of 20
Atlas rocket

Atlas rocket

The SM-65B Atlas was America’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. This one uses Rockomax 24-77 engines on the sides as vernier motors, and dummy fuel lines, just for looks. The ducting with the pointed top, that runs down the bottom half is made from KW Rocketry batteries. The gantry is just a bunch of girders, fuel lines and Procedural Parts structural cylinders all stuck together.

Page 5 of 20
Page 5 of 20
Juno II rocket

Juno II rocket

The larger version of the Juno I has the same rotating second/third/fourth stage assembly, but this time it’s enclosed in a procedural fairing. The lower section is an interstage decoupler from KW Rocketry. Because this is hollow, you can use it to hide the upper section of the rocket engine.

Page 6 of 20
Page 6 of 20
Pioneer 4

Pioneer 4

Some of the early satellites are so tiny that it can break the KSP physics engine. Pioneer 4 only weighed 6.1kg and just the thrust from the small decoupler was enough to send our model out to the orbit of Jool! The Communotron-16 antennas at the bottom are meant to represent the weights attached to wires that were spooled out to allow the real Pioneer 4 to de-spin itself.

Page 7 of 20
Page 7 of 20
Explorer 6

Explorer 6

Explorer 6 took the first photo of Earth from space, albeit an incredibly blurry and incomplete one. The solar panels were on fixed paddles that sprung into place when the fairing was jettisoned, angled so that one of them would always catch some sun, whichever way the satellite faced. Ours uses the Infernal Robotics mod to unfold and rotate them into place.

Page 8 of 20
Page 8 of 20
Vostok 8K72 rocket

Vostok 8K72 rocket

This is an upgraded version of the R-7 rocket that carried Sputnik into space, with a third stage stuck on the top. Each of the five booster cores uses 4 Wildcat-V engines from KW Rocketry, clustered together with two Rockomax 24-77s as vernier engines on the outer boosters, and 4 of them on the central one. That’s 32 engines in the first stage!

Page 9 of 20
Page 9 of 20
Luna 2

Luna 2

Looking like a spikier Sputnik 1, Luna 2 was the first probe to reach the Moon. Unfortunately it reached it at 7,400mph and was vaporised on impact. The central spike and the smaller lumps and bumps are Procedural Parts cones. The top antenna is a Communotron-16 but the smaller ones are from 4 different MechJeb parts, clipped within the main probe body.

Page 10 of 20
Page 10 of 20
Luna 3

Luna 3

Russia’s next moonshot sent a probe around the far side of the Moon to take pictures. Luna 3 had its own little photo lab on board to develop the pictures, scan them and beam the images back to Earth. The little bumps on the bottom are cold nitrogen gas jets for attitude control, modelled here using linear RCS ports. The only way to get solar panels this small is using the Tweak Scale mod that lets you resize stock parts.

Page 11 of 20
Page 11 of 20
Thor-Able-2 rocket

Thor-Able-2 rocket

The Thor missile was an intermediate-range ballistic missile that was briefly stationed in the UK in the 1960s. Its career as a space launcher was much longer though and the modern Delta II rocket is descended from the Thor. The Able-2 upper stage has a procedural fairing at the top for the payload and another one at the bottom to create the conical interstage section and hide the stock engine fairing. The ‘fuel duct’ down the side is a series of procedural cylinders clipped into the side of the main fuel tank.

Page 12 of 20
Page 12 of 20
TIROS 1

TIROS 1

The first weather satellite was a simple drum covered in solar panels with a pair of television cameras on the bottom. It was spin stabilised, but magnetic drag with the Earth caused it to gradually lose its spin, so it was fitted with 5 pairs of solid rocket motors. Once a fortnight, NASA would instruct the satellite to fire a pair and it would spin back up to speed. Our version uses sepratrons for this and, surprisingly, they work quite well.

Page 13 of 20
Page 13 of 20
Thor-Ablestar rocket

Thor-Ablestar rocket

The next upgrade to the Thor-Able series was Thor-Ablestar. This had cold gas jets that allowed attitude control during the coast phase and kept the liquid fuel settled at the bottom of the tank in zero-g. This meant that the Ablestar engine could be restarted in flight for more precise control over the final orbit. Ablestar was the first rocket that could do this.

Page 14 of 20
Page 14 of 20
Discoverer 13

Discoverer 13

The fact that the first object to be recovered from orbit was called Discoverer-13, should give you an idea of how many failures the US had along the way. This was a dummy run for the first spy satellites. The return canister that would later contain the exposed film was ejected from the nose cone at the end of the mission.

Page 15 of 20
Page 15 of 20
Mariner 2

Mariner 2

The first planetary flyby was in 1962 when Mariner 2 made it to Venus. Our version uses solar panels stuck to structural panels and hinged with Infernal Robotics. The gold cylinder on the top uses one of the built-in textures from Procedural Parts. It’s meant to be a magnetometer.

Page 16 of 20
Page 16 of 20
Agena-D upper stage

Agena-D upper stage

The improved Agena-D upper stage was much bigger than the Agena-B used for Mariner 2. The pattern on the main tank is made by stacking short cylinders together, each with a different texture from Procedural Parts. The complicated engine section on the right uses stock girder segments, with KW Rocketry battery modules and spherical RCS tanks clipped into them.

Page 17 of 20
Page 17 of 20
Mariner 4

Mariner 4

Mariner 4 needed twice as many solar panels as Mariner 2 because it went to Mars, which is much further from the sun. The fixed dish antenna is actually an adaptor section from KW Rocketry. The tall mast behind it uses the telescopic pistons from Infernal Robotics. The body is an octagonal girder section with a procedural fuel tank clipped into it, and a linear RCS port on the side as the probe’s hydrazine thruster.

Page 18 of 20
Page 18 of 20
Molniya-M rocket

Molniya-M rocket

The next iteration of the R-7 rocket family used four stages instead of three. The third stage used a modified version of the engines from the booster stage and weighed 24.8t. The fourth stage weighed 6.7t, of which 700kg was a detachable ring at the rear with solid rocket ullage motors to settle the fuel in the main engine tanks prior to ignition. All of this is a lot easier to model in KSP than finding a mod that allows orange fairings!

Page 19 of 20
Page 19 of 20
Luna 9

Luna 9

A classic of Russian spacecraft design. Luna 9 bristles with antennas, battery packs, radar altimeters and other greeble. I used solar panels in their retracted state for some of the boxes and LV-1R motors for the four vernier engines. Luna 9 descended to just a few metres above the surface of the moon and then jettisoned the top section, which used airbags to bounce safely to the ground. You can use the Umbra Space Industries Airbag mod to simulate this.

Page 20 of 20
Page 20 of 20
PCGamer
PCGamer

PC Gamer is the global authority on PC games—starting in 1993 with the magazine, and then in 2010 with this website you're currently reading. We have writers across the US, Canada, UK and Australia, who you can read about here.

Read more
Best space games on PC
The best space games on PC
A TIE Bomber seen from the cockpit of an X-Wing in the XWVM mod
XWVM, the X-Wing mod that lets you play the Star Wars classic remade in Unity, is finally available to download
A three screen setup is seen on a desk. These screens are encased in an off-white shell designed to look retro and bring to mind classic CRT housing.
Redditor handcrafts retrofuturistic set up that wouldn't look out of place on the set of Alien, with precisely zero 3D printing involved
Minecraft best builds - an underground based made of wood planks with farming areas
The 20 best Minecraft build ideas to inspire your next world
A red ape-man struts across the surface of an alien world.
No Man's Sky just got another mondo update and I think it's a management game now?
A sprawling space factory.
This Factorio-ish sim is threatening to devour hours of my time, and I haven't even gotten to the part where I make my own starships yet
Latest in Sim
Gold Ship, the fan favorite heel of Umamusume: Pretty Derby.
The anime horse girl who's terrorizing gacha players in Umamusume is based on a real, chaotic racing horse who once instantly obliterated 12 billion yen in betting losses
A trio of dwarves descend into the depths in the Dwarf Fortress key art.
After 15 years of busted marksdwarves, Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams says archers will finally refill their ammo 'instead of leaping over walls and clubbing people with their crossbows'
A tractor driving across a bridge where a man is fishing
Farming Simulator 25 finally figures out what the rest of us already knew: you gotta have some fishing in your farming game
Prehistoric animals in Rimworld.
The new Rimworld expansion adds therapy pandas, tameable insect hive queens, nanotech-enhanced alligators, prehistoric beasts, giant toads, flamingos, and something called a 'bog hound'
Farming Simulator 22 tractor by cows
Academics critique Farming Simulator's portrayal of 'good farming' and praise modders for agro-ecology add-ons
Special Week winking at the camera with a peace sign in Umamusume: Pretty Derby.
Not quite girl, not quite horse: The latest gacha craze sweeping Steam is a bizarre idol management game for anime highschool horse girls
Latest in Features
Lea, from Lies of P: Overture, clutches a locket to her chest and tries to maintain her composure.
Lies of P isn't my favourite soulslike, but Overture is one of the best DLCs in the whole genre
Marvel Rivals Season 3 customisation issues: An upper-body shot of Phoenix with her arms out to the side.
If Marvel Rivals doesn't want to reward me with fancy skins for my hard work, then I hope it'll at least give me some of Season 3's new customisation features
Can you guess the PC game based only on the health bar?
A cyberpunk city with the PC Gamer logo
This brilliant dark and moody cyberpunk city builder is my kind of cosy game—and for less than $7 you might as well see if it's yours too
Phoenix screenshot
Marvel Rivals' next hero is the complete package, as Phoenix packs enough firepower to cut through any Strategist backline
Marvel Rivals Season 3 quality of life changes: An upper-body shot of Phoenix glowing as she flies forward.
Marvel Rivals' most exciting change in Season 3 is removing the need to grind the game every single day
  1. Nvidia RTX 5090 and XFX RX 9070 graphics cards
    1
    Best graphics cards in 2025: I've tested pretty much every AMD and Nvidia GPU of the past 20 years and these are today's top cards
  2. 2
    Best gaming laptop in 2025: I've put the best of this new generation head-to-head and we have a winner
  3. 3
    Best gaming chair in 2025: I've tested a ton of gaming chairs and these are the seats I'd suggest for any PC gamer
  4. 4
    Best Steam Deck accessories in Australia for 2025: Our favorite docks, powerbanks and gamepads
  5. 5
    Best graphics card for laptops in 2025: the mobile GPUs I'd want in my next gaming laptop
  1. Wonder and Motoha Arai in Persona 5: The Phantom X
    1
    Persona 5: The Phantom X review – More of the same, for better or worse
  2. 2
    NZXT N7 Z890 review
  3. 3
    NZXT N9 X870E review
  4. 4
    NZXT N9 Z890 review
  5. 5
    Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 4 review

PC Gamer is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.

  • About Us
  • Contact Future's experts
  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Cookies policy
  • Advertise with us
  • Accessibility Statement
  • Careers

© Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.

Please login or signup to comment

Please wait...