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Kerbal Space Program: Shared Horizons adds free ESA missions this summer

Explore the outer reaches of space with Kerbal Space Program's free Shared Horizons update, which revisits some of the European Space Agency's landmark missions.

Ozzie Mejia

May 18, 2020 2:10 PM

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With a sequel to Kerbal Space Program on the horizon, one wouldn't expect to see new content come to the original space exploration simulator. But KSP players got a pleasant surprise on Monday when Private Division and developer Squad announced a special DLC drop set to come to the game just in time to kick off the summer.

Shared Horizons is a new update created in conjunction with the European Space Agency. It will celebrate some of the ESA's landmark missions, led by the rocket Ariane 5. Players will take part in the BepiColombo mission, which revisits the ESA's collaboration with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to explore Mercury. The task will be to navigate the orbit and safely land on KSP's Mercury equivalent, Moho, while also performing various tasks from the original ESA mission.

A second mission, titled Rosetta, takes a look back at the ESA's successful landing on a Jupiter-family comet. Players will look to replicate that feat, using the various KSP tools at their disposal. And on top of all of that, KSP users will get fresh-looking ESA-themed space suits for their Kerbals.

"Here at the European Space Agency, many of our engineers and scientists are very familiar with KSP," ESA Director of Science Gunther Hasinger said via press release. "Both Rosetta and BepiColombo are highly complex missions that have specific challenges; however, each prove to be very rewarding for ESA and the global scientific community. Because of this, I am very happy that these ground-breaking science missions can be experienced on Kerbin as well as on Earth."

Shared Horizons will be a free update to the base Kerbal Space Program game. It'll come to PC on July 1. The console version of KSP will receive these free missions at a later date. As for the future of KSP, Kerbal Space Program 2 is currently in the works from new developer Star Theory. We took an early peek at it back at last year's PAX West.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?