Space Cooker

Centuries before the Storm, a gnomesteader by the name of Gurdel Fiddlesprong had an accident in his kitchen with a pressure cooker. While the head cook he was beholden to at the time made sure Gurdel would regret the resultant destruction for months afterwards, it gave him an idea. Gurdel had long pondered the accolades he would get if he could show he'd spent a decade living on the Moon. Until that accident though this idea was just daydream. After he had earned enough funds, and had survived in his first homestead in a fire essence infused desert, the experiments began. Ever larger and more carefully forged pressure cookers were filled with water or other liquids and gases prone to expansion and then explosion. By trial and error he worked out the ballistics of such contraptions. Another span of trail and error followed as he worked out how to control and aim these pressure cookers.
The next span of experiments involved Gurdel wearing a ring of regeneration as he sat in a chamber atop the cooker which would then launch hundreds to thousands of feet away into a prepared pool. One of these experiments occurred at night and thus caught the attention of a passing lunar dragon.
In the discussion that followed the dragon, Rascarlcolgox, offered to carry the gnome to the Moon but Gurdel demurred. He wanted to do this all though his own skill and ingenuity. Still the dragon's interest had been peaked. He explained to Gurdel dangers of the airless space above the atmosphere, as well as the relationship between mass, gravity and distance. Decades more followed where Gurdel would point out his intended target on Om Thil Nof, and Rascarlcolgox would be waiting for Gurdel to extract himself from the wreckage and take him back to the stead in the desert.
The next set of experiments were trickier. The vehicle, which was by now dubbed a space cooker by Gurdel, was launched to the Moon and contained a second space cooker which upon landing would attempt to launch itself back to Om Thil Nof.
Sadly for Gurdel he ran out of funds before he was able to get past this stage of his experimentation. Still Rascarlcolgox was aware of this potential and Gurdel had sold many copies of his notes to secure funding for experiments. The inheritor of one set of the notes, a Divoorpen alchemist by the name of Asertdosdan, had a different dream. Instead of crash landing on the Moon, then trying to get back, he send an unmanned space cooker to one of the distant gas giants, scoop up previously unavailable gases to work into his concoctions, and rely on gravity and later stages of the space cooker to then make a return trip to Om Thil Nof.
Like Gurdel, Asertdosdan required many failures before a hint of success was possible, first he had to fill in the gaps that Gurdel's leaps of logic left in the design of a successful space cooker, Then he had to watch the space cookers with a telescope to fine tune his understanding of the gravity potentials of the planets, and finally he had devise magics to ward against the intense electromagnetic fields of the gas giants and engineer two final stages of a space cooker that would not interact with those fields.
Near the end of Asertdosdan's life and his career that was being tarnished by the lack of success in securing a gaseous alchemical components, Rascarlcolgox noticed one of the space cookers drifting to seemingly no where and took it back with him to the orbit of Om Thil Nof. He waited for a launch flare to show itself and upoin seeing one finally, he took the older space cooker back to the launch site of Asertdosdan's space cookers.
While Asertdosdan was at first leery of Rascarlcolgox and his story. Asertdosdan's heir apparent, Hablanchalset was more starstruck by this character from the ancient notes deigning to talk and hopefully negotiate with their alchemical guild. When Hablanchalset took over, the plans were laid for a station to be set up to help secure the gases in far greater quantities with Rascarlcolgox's help.