It's a slow burn, but it's well worth it if you're into Kerbals, NASA, or bald Scotsmen! Mr Manley's channel is rapidly becoming my favorite Youtube channel outside of Lindybeige, which is not praise I hand out lightly.

Much of it is tutorials and Let's Plays for beloved nerd games like KSP, Crusader Kings II, and Civ: Beyond Earth; there's also science stuff and spacey stuff, as well as at least one slice-of-life video in which his young daughter quotes Hackers, proving what an awesome dad he is. Back in the olden days, he used to work for Napster, too, which pretty much makes him a hero.

Here's his Web 1.0 homepage:

http://star.arm.ac.uk/~spm/welcome2.html

He seems to have had a SFW asteroid impact fetish in his formative years, which could explain why he's now working with Dr Lu and the B612 Foundation.

He's also a craft beer geek, if you're into that.

This guy seems pretty great, despite the little bit of privatization cheerleading at the end.

We're mostly just drinking buddies in real life, but I play minecraft with a guy who used to work for NASA. It was computer stuff but it's still pretty cool. I'll just build some little cage for bats or a rollercoaster that doesn't work like it should, and he comes in and fixes it. I think I'm just too ADHD for games like these..

What don't you like about grassroots space missions?

I just think it requires a lot more money than could be raised through kickstarter or something.

I've read that the telescope they're putting into orbit to hunt for asteroids will cost 0 million over the course of ten years. That's probably more than Kickstarter could handle, but they're getting a lot of large donations from other sources too, including schools, private trusts, businesses, and wealthy nerds. There's no funding forthcoming from government agencies and astronauts don't make enough to have half a million lying around after retirement, so it's either grassroots or nothing.

Besides, there's not a lot of economic gain to be had here, so if anything, this is the sort of project which you'd *want* to be crowdsourced. Most crowdsourcing these days seems to be done for commercial purposes; it's basically investment capitalism, only now the companies don't have to give out stocks and the investors aren't entitled to a share of the profits (which is sort of creepy, if you think about it). But B612 is engaged in a non-profit, public trust mission, with the rewards being science and security. That's the sort of situation where voluntary, obligation-free donations really shine!

Yeah, very good point. I find the lack of government funding for something that could prevent the annihilation of our planet a little disturbing.

They grow on you. The main focus is on the spacecraft, though; most of the time you forget there's anyone in them, at least until you run out of fuel in orbit around Laythe and realize the only window you've got to mount a rescue mission for your most experienced pilot and scientist is in less than four hours.

last time I played this you vould only launch ships and see how far you could get. That was quite a while back though

yeah, i think the early betas had very limited mission ability. With the current release, you can plan whole missions, with landers, satellites, space stations, etc... 90% of the fun is just building the most ridiculous ship you can though.

this is a good example of what a lot of patience and planning can do with the current release: http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=141630

Manley has a KSP series he's been running for I wanna say well over a year called Interstellar Quest that involves a jaw-dropping amount of planning. We're talking hundreds of missions including flying to, landing Kerbals on, and collecting various scientific data from every major body in the solar system. He runs these missions simultaneously all in a single simulation, which only adds to the impressiveness.

He does use some mods, but most of them are either "stuff we could easily have if we'd bother to properly fund NASA" or "stuff NASA does have but for whatever reason isn't included with the game".

I struggle to get non-modded-into-ridiculous-easy-mode craft to the outer planets and back. He's got mission profiles where he does intricate tours of Jool (Jupiter) and it's moons with multiple craft at once.

The game's come a long way, and the modding community is fantastic.