Minmus Transfer
When the Minmus transfer window arrived, the Orion IPS fired its modern LV-N engines, producing 180 kN of combined thrust and burning less than half the fuel conventional engines would have burned for the same impulse.
Because Minmus is almost four times as far as the Mun, the Minmus encounter was three days away. A long wait!
Unlike the Mun, Minmus' orbit is inclined with respect to Kerbin's equatorial plane. The mid-course course correction would thus need to change the spacecraft's orbital plane by 6 degrees in order to get a close encounter with Minmus.
By a fortunate accident (and not thanks to the wit of Kerbal Space Program mission planners), the final Minmus encounter course was also a free-return trajectory to Kerbin, which means that if anything prevented the Orion spacecraft from firing its engines to brake for Minmus capture, the invisible hand of gravitation would take the spacecraft automatically back into Kerbin's atmosphere.
After three days of boring wait, the kerbonauts finally spotted Minmus.
As the spacecraft approached slowly, Minmus soon went from a small disc in the night sky to a proper brave new world.
The Minmus capture burn went without incidents, despite some engineers' secret wish to utilize a free-return trajectory for the first time in spaceflight history.
The elliptical capture orbit was effortlessly turned into a low 10 km circular orbit. This type of orbital maneuvers is now second nature for Kerbal Space Program mission control and crews.
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