A funny thing happened last night:

I was trying out the new Career Mode they implemented in 0.22. In this mode, you must perform science experiments to earn science points to climb a tech tree to get a wider variety of rocket parts.

I'd gotten enough parts to make it to the Mun, and I managed to collect a ton of science points on the trip. You get significant bonuses for certain science experiments if you are able to return the experiment modules back to Kerbin (as opposed to just transmitting them back by radio), so I was keen to do that. I was able to fly the ship back from the Mun successfully, but just barely. I ran out of fuel with my Kerbin perigee pointed at 50k altitude.

50k is fine for a return to Kerbin, because the atmosphere starts at about 70k, so it means that I was aerobraking on each orbit and would eventually reach Kerbin. The problem was, the air at 50k is so thin that it was taking far too many orbits to get any serious amount of altitude reduction. Pass after pass, and my altitude would only decrease a small amount each time. It was taking forever.

My ship had no rocket fuel left, and no RCS thrusters because I hadn't gotten that far in the tech tree yet. So I couldn't use direct thrust to get my perigee any lower.

So I tried something that I wasn't sure if it would work: I got out and pushed.

I'm not making this up. Jeb has a jet pack which resets to 100 percent fuel each time you leave the capsule. I pointed the ship in the retrograde direction at apogee, did an EVA, jetted around the to tail end, bumped up against the engine nozzle, and just thrusted forward with the jetpack.

It did take me a few tries of going back into the capsule, checking my perigee, then going back out again. Also at one point I had pressed CTRL-ESC so that I could get back to the Windows desktop, and this left me with a stuck CTRL key in the game, and since CTRL is jetpack-thrust-down, it made Jeb shoot away from the capsule at high speed. It was a tense moment getting him back to the capsule, but I made it.

In the end, it worked. Just a few rounds of jetpack thrusting at apogee and I had reduced the altitude at perigee a few K, enough so that the aerobraking had some bite to it, and I reentered normally and landed safely with parachutes.

It only worked, though, because I was already on a reentry orbit path that was good, and all I needed was a slight tweak to the overall orbit. And small speed changes at apogee result in big altitude differences at perigee, and vice-versa. Still, it made me think of Leia chiding Han in TESB: "Would it help if I got out and pushed?" "It might!"