Pre-flight

Mission setup

Pick a real mission or a concept, adjust its inputs, and the flight planner solves the whole trajectory — ascent, burns, flybys, landing and return — before you fly it in 3D.

Flight dynamics

Solving trajectory…

Controls

DragOrbit the camera around the target (ground observer: pan the view) Wheel / pinchZoom in and out (ground observer: change focal length) Right-drag / Shift-dragRoll the view around its axis (orbit and chase cameras) Double-click labelMake that body or craft the camera target SpacePlay / pause ← →Jump to previous / next event [ ]Slower / faster time warp (turns auto warp off) FAuto follow: the camera stays on the spacecraft and picks the framing for each phase (pad, ascent, burns, entry, parachutes, landing, coast toward the next destination). Drag or zoom to adjust it; the next phase resets it 1 – 6Camera: auto follow, orbit, chase, look-at, ground observer, top-down PathsThick orange = engines firing (powered flight). Thin blue = coasting: engines off, the craft moves on momentum alone while gravity bends its path (inertial flight). Dots mark each burn — filled once fired, a ring while still ahead. The status pill under the clock says which is happening right now, and the orange blocks on the timeline show every burn MapThe Solar System map (bottom left) shows where the spacecraft is, seen from ecliptic north. Auto switches between the inner Solar System, the Earth–Moon system and the Mars system; on Space Shuttle flights it shows the ground track on a world map, with night shaded. Click a planet or craft on the map to aim the camera at it ShuttleSpace Shuttle flights (Earth orbit) follow the whole flight: the roll program and the boosters, main engine cutoff and the falling tank, OMS burns, rendezvous and docking with the station or a robot-arm deploy, the deorbit burn, entry at 40° angle of attack with banked turns and roll reversals, the heading alignment cone, the steep glideslope, flare, touchdown and rollout on the runway. The ground observer (5) stands beside the runway for the landing CountdownEvery mission opens with the final 10-second launch countdown in real time. Liquid engines light on the pad before liftoff (Saturn V at T−8.9 s, SLS at T−6.36 s, Atlas V at T−2.7 s …) while hold-down clamps keep the rocket in place; solid boosters light at T−0. “Skip countdown” jumps straight to liftoff CCapture a storyboard shot HClean frame (hide the interface) MSound on / off. The speaker button (top right) also sets the volume, the ambient music and “Silent in vacuum”: real space carries no sound, so with it ticked, engines firing outside an atmosphere make none. Everything you hear is synthesised live in the browser

How the numbers are made

Every mission is solved before playback by a flight-dynamics engine written for this page: real launch-vehicle data with a gravity-turn ascent through the US-1976 atmosphere, finite burns with the rocket equation, Earth–Moon–Sun n-body coasting, patched conics and Lambert solutions between planets, B-plane targeting for flybys, and lifting entries with heating and parachutes. Space Shuttle flights add J2 (Earth oblateness) to every orbit, phasing burns timed to the historical docking, guided winged entries with bank steering and roll reversals, and the approach around the heading alignment cone onto the runway. Planet positions use JPL approximate ephemerides; the Moon uses a truncated ELP/Meeus series; body orientations follow the IAU WGCCRE models.

Credits

Earth: NASA Earth Observatory (Blue Marble Next Generation by Reto Stöckli, GEBCO_08 relief, Black Marble 2016 night lights); clouds from Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0). Moon: NASA SVS CGI Moon Kit (LRO LROC and LOLA). Mars: Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0), relief from MGS MOLA (NASA PDS). Venus, Jupiter, Saturn maps: NASA 3D Resources (public domain). Atmospheres after Bruneton & Neyret (2008) and Hillaire (2020). 3D models: the Apollo lunar module, Mars 2020 Perseverance and the International Space Station (by the IGOAL lab at Johnson Space Center) from NASA 3D Resources (public domain); Space Shuttle Discovery, the Smithsonian’s 3D scan (CC0); the Saturn V, based on “Saturn V” by BoldlyBuilding (CC BY 4.0), cut into its stages and stretched to their published lengths; the Space Shuttle’s external tank and boosters, based on “Space Shuttle Atlantis” by paburoviii (CC BY 4.0), scaled to their published sizes and repainted. Launch pads: drawn from published dimensions (NASA and Kennedy Space Center, the Historic American Engineering Record, ULA, SpaceX and CASC material) and photographs. Star catalogue: d3-celestial by Olaf Frohn (BSD-3), from the Hipparcos/Yale bright-star data. Rendering: three.js r160 (MIT). Mission data: NASA mission reports and press kits (including the Space Shuttle press kits and Shuttle Crew Operations Manual), CNSA and ISRO releases; concept profiles from published SpaceX and Inspiration Mars material.

Solving trajectory…

Storyboard contact sheet

Controls

How the numbers are made

Credits