It's incredible how it only took nine months to go from this first crewed mission of NASA’s Apollo program to straight up landing on the Moon. I think missions like this deserve more recognition alongside Apollo 11.
What do you think is the most underrated achievement in the history of space exploration?
The headline I'm seeing posted everywhere is basically "Starship reached orbit for the first time." But to me the most interesting part is that once it got there, the mission became a logistics problem:
• Deploy 26 satellites
• Manage the vehicle while in orbit
• Decide whether to continue or deorbit
• Execute the deorbit burn
• Survive reentry
• Splash down in the planned area
It makes me excited for a future where spacecraft are going to be judged less by how impressive launch day is and more by how reliably they can perform everything after launch.
You are offered a round trip on a spaceship. You are completely alone. The deal works like this:
On day 1, you earn $1,000. On day 2, you earn $2,000. On day 3, you earn $3,000. And so on. Every day you stay, your daily payment increases by another $1,000. The money is yours when you decide to return. You can stop whenever you want by pressing a button.
The moment you press it, the spaceship turns around and takes exactly as many days to return to Earth as you spent traveling away. You do not get paid anything during the return journey.
So if you stay for 10 days, you earn $55,000, then spend another 10 days traveling back to Earth with no additional income.
In the spaceship you're completely alone, but the ship is otherwise completely safe and self-sufficient.
You have enough food and water to last indefinitely. The food is nutritionally complete, but it's basically real astronaut food. So nothing particularly delicious. You have a private sleeping area, bathroom, and everything necessary to stay alive.
You have a tablet with 10 GB of storage. Before leaving Earth, you can fill those 10 GB with whatever you want: movies, TV shows, books, music, games, podcasts, etc. You have no internet access once you leave. You cannot communicate with anyone on Earth.
At what point do you press the button to start the journey back?
I've been working on a realistic space management/strategy game where you build and manage your own space program, and I can finally announce the release date.
The idea is to focus less on the "build a rocket and watch it launch" side of space games and more on everything that goes into actually running a space program.
You'll be managing rockets, satellites, communications networks, launches, resources, infrastructure, and finances, all with orbital mechanics playing an important role in how you plan your missions.
I've been trying to make the strategy come from having to make meaningful decisions about what to launch, when to launch it, where to put it, and how to make the most of limited resources.
I'd love to hear what you think.
Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4229480/Space_Manager/
Demo page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4498700/Space_Manager_Demo/
Imagine you're starting a new space program and have to build a fleet entirely from real spacecraft.
What are you choosing?
You'd need to think about crew transport, cargo, satellites, exploration, communications, station operations, lunar missions, etc. You can pick anything from historical spacecraft to vehicles currently under development.
Which spacecraft would be essential to your fleet?
And which real spacecraft would you choose simply because you think they're cool or interesting?
I'm particularly interested in answers beyond the usual Apollo/Space Shuttle/Starship choices. There are decades of weird prototypes, experimental vehicles, Soviet designs, commercial spacecraft, canceled projects, and specialized satellites that could make for some interesting fleets.
Bonus question: one fictional spacecraft allowed. What are you sneaking in?
First, a little context: the vision with this project is to build a space management game as realistic as possible while at the same time making sure it is entertaining enough to actually be fun. That is a challenge!
In the game, you will be able to launch from your earth spaceport, sending satellites, telescopes, vessels into orbits or to other moons or planets.
But getting to that point requires knowledge which you must learn throughout the game. First goal will be a successful LEO (Low Earth Orbit) insertion.
If we were to present the solar system in true scale we would end up with a very dull game canvas, that would require a lot of zooming and panning to navigate it. It wouldn’t really present the actual solar system in a useful way, and would essentially end up looking empty.
So one of the first challenges was to figure out how we can present our solar system in a way that makes it navigable while at the same time giving a correct impression of the distances and planet sizes - but most important of all, staying as true to real as we can..
One approach to fix this would be to scale up the radius of each planet thus making them bigger so they are visible at all zoom ranges.
However, while this technically makes sense, we would need to scale each planet significantly, which would cause the sun to consume Mercury and Venus, just to have the rest of the planets slightly visible.
Scaling individually would not make sense either since we want to show the solar system as real as we can, and that would make it difficult to see the actual size difference on planets.
Furthermore since we will be using real trajectory and orbital mechanics, scaling would cause moons to cross into other planet systems making them slip their orbits effectively killing the goal of staying true to physics.
So we need a different approach to get to a good compromise between the actual solar system and one that can work on a game canvas - and by now, there's no doubt that it's going to have to be a compromise.
We could scale and normalize the distances between planet orbits, which would bring everything closer together, but by doing that we would end up with a solar system that does not present the differences in orbit distances. For example Earth is fairly close to Mars, but Mars is very far from its other neighboring planet, Jupiter.
We have to make sure that these differences are visually shown.
So to scale down the solar system, while making sure we keep good visual distance differences, a logarithmic scaling approach could be the solution. This way we dense everything up, and keep a good visual presentation.
And with that, we now have a decent compromise that gives us a fairly correct view of the solar system while at the same time making it easy to navigate.
It does however spawn some new problems, such as visualizing space travel to outer planets.
Since orbits are log scaled, the outer most planets will appear closer while actually not being closer, so a ship travelling from Earth to Neptune will start its journey going fast (visually) and as it progresses it will appear to go slower and slower - but in reality it is maintaining the exact same speed (or close too).
How would you have approached this? Have you faced a similar challenge of scale?
The impression is made in lunar regolith, a layer of loose material produced by countless impacts over geological time. Because the Moon lacks the atmosphere and weather systems that continually reshape Earth’s surface, the fine particles can hold remarkably detailed impressions. Aldrin’s photograph consequently preserves not just an image of a footprint, but a record of the physical interaction between a human-made boot and the lunar surface.
More than half a century later, the original footprint remains on the Moon. The absence of conventional erosion means it can survive for an extraordinarily long time, although microscopic impacts from space and other changes to the lunar environment will slowly alter the impression over geological timescales.
Mosaics from the Magellan radar were mapped onto a computer-simulated globe to create this image. Magellan launched to Venus on May 4, 1989. Contact with Magellan was lost on Oct. 13, 1994, after it was commanded to plunge into the Venusian atmosphere.
Hi! I'm from a small Danish studio working on Space Manager, a game where you get to manage the technical and business side of running a space program. I think this community might especially enjoy one of the interactive parts of the game: programming the ascent of your own two-stage rocket.
We’ve made it available to play for free online, and there’s also a more complete demo available on Steam. I’d love to hear what you think about both versions and whether the rocket programming clicks, what you’d like to see improved, or just whether you had fun trying to get your rocket into orbit.
Give it a spin, and if you enjoy it, keep an eye out for the full game coming soon!
Thanks for checking it out, and good luck getting that rocket high up.