In Kerbal Space Program's career mode, purchasing facilities and leveling up Kerbals by sending them on missions unlocks things like EVA, Surface Sample collection, and piloting skills. So the routing of this run has to accommodate what we can do, when we can do it -- based mainly around MONEY.

Thankfully, KSP being a half-conceived, poorly engineered, and horribly designed game - FIGHT ME - means that there is no meaningful penalty to accepting contracts from mission control, using the 'Advance' money each of those contract provides to upgrade facilities, then cancelling all those contracts and taking some more.

You can even use that advance money to build ridiculously expensive ships, park them out on the front lawn; phone your investors to tell them you've gone bust; accept a whole new whack of contract advances on the heels of your own bankruptcy; then recover the hidden assets of your parked ship(s) to regain the money from the first round of advances.

In other words, Kerbal Space Program has a Money Laundering "feature."

Thanks to that, I've routed this Career-mode category without ever intentionally completing a contract. ;)

Beyond the money-game, this route is intensely similar to my Science-mode run. It removes the in-flight EVAs and run-to-biome from the first two launch missions and adds a science buy between them. Then a quick sub-orbital launch to grab the science needed to afford the first probe. And after that, it's the same ships, but with probes and electric generation to enable non-pilots and low-level Kerbals to fly semi-competently.

Experience with this run, and routing around career-mode-specific issues has helped to optimize the Science-version of this route as well. And I hope to bring this faster version of 'Science Jr., Early' back to Science-mode run, presuming it will adapt.

And, again, I leave the next World Record to you! Until this run is beaten, my hands are off.

Tech Tree Unlock (Career) in 1:08:27.850 (RTA)