RTLS Abort - Limping Home

Beginning of my RTLS abort.
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RTLS: Return To Launch Site.
The most feared and difficult abort the shuttle is capable of doing, It's a commander's worse nightmare.
And I flew one. (Well, on a sim, anyways...)

In case of an engine failure early in the 8-minute ride to orbit, the shuttle must abort. From liftoff to 3 minutes, it's not going fast enough to do a TAL: Trans-Atlantic Landing, but it is going slow enough to return to Kennedy Space Center.

I had a center-engine failure at roughly 30 seconds into the flight. Flight continued normally until the boosters separated, but then things were a mess.

The main engines don't have enough Umph to fight gravity with a full fuel tank (The shuttle is more than 5x heavier with a full fuel tank). However, as the fuel tank empties and lightens, they're plenty strong enough. But that only matters if I survive long enough to empty the fuel tanks enough.

I had 2 major issues to fight:
I had to point home and let my engines push me home. I was already hurdling away from my landing site at mach 3. If I didn't slow down enough, I would glide in the vacuum of space too far away from home to make it back.

But, if I didn't point straight up and fight gravity enough, I would plummet into the Atlantic at Mach 4.

It's terrifying, your nose is pointing up, engines are at full power, and you're still plummeting to the Earth even though your spaceship is working as hard as it can to climb.

Well, I somehow managed to survive. I nosed-up at ~80*, slightly pitched down so I didn't drift too far from Kennedy. But what I did do is scrape the upper atmosphere, and the fuel tanks barely drained fast enough to lighten the ship, so I started coming up again at the last moment before I hit the atmosphere and lost control.

After that, my shuttle was light enough to handle gravity very well, and here I am coming home... Hopefully.

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