PHYSICS · GRAVITY · THE COSMOS
Every time you drag your ship back and release it in Gravitydrift, you are doing something that engineers at NASA, ESA, and JAXA do for a living. You are solving an orbital mechanics problem. The game models real Newtonian gravity — the same equations that govern how planets orbit the Sun, how the Moon pulls our tides, and how spacecraft navigate the solar system.
Understanding the physics does not just make you a better player, though it will. It opens a window onto one of the most beautiful and counterintuitive domains of science. Orbital mechanics is full of surprises: going faster can put you in a higher, slower orbit. Dropping toward a planet speeds you up. Tiny angle adjustments made early in a journey lead to vastly different destinations millions of kilometres later.
This page is a guided tour through the real science behind the game. You do not need a physics degree to follow it. We will build up from first principles, using plain language and real examples. By the end, you will understand why the slingshot maneuver works, what a neutron star actually is, and why the universe behaves the way it does.
Gravity is the force of attraction between any two objects that have mass. Everything with mass pulls on everything else — your phone pulls on the Earth, and the Earth pulls back on your phone. The reason you do not notice everything attracting everything is that gravity is, by the standards of nature's forces, extremely weak. It only becomes dominant at the scale of planets, stars, and galaxies, where the sheer quantity of mass compensates for gravity's feebleness.
The story of how we came to understand gravity begins with Isaac Newton in the 17th century. The famous apple story — Newton sitting under a tree when an apple falls, prompting him to wonder why — is probably embellished, but the underlying question he asked was real: why does the Moon orbit the Earth rather than flying off in a straight line, and is the force that governs the Moon the same force that pulls apples to the ground?
The answer was yes. And in articulating that answer, Newton produced one of the most powerful equations in the history of science.
Newton's law of universal gravitation states that every point mass in the universe attracts every other point mass with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. In mathematical form:
F = G × (m₁ × m₂) / r²
Let's unpack each term:
The inverse square law — the r² in the denominator — has profound consequences. If you double the distance between two objects, the gravitational force between them drops to one quarter of what it was. Triple the distance, and it drops to one ninth. The force falls away rapidly as distance increases, but it never reaches exactly zero. In principle, every star in the Milky Way exerts a tiny gravitational pull on every other star, across distances of thousands of light years.
In Gravitydrift, this law governs every frame of every flight. Your ship is constantly being pulled by every planet on screen, and the combined effect of all those pulls — each diminishing with the square of the distance — determines the curve of your trajectory.
If gravity is always pulling objects toward each other, why does the Moon not simply fall into the Earth? And why does the Earth not fall into the Sun? The answer is inertia — the tendency of moving objects to keep moving in a straight line unless a force acts on them.
The Moon is moving sideways relative to the Earth at about 1 kilometre per second. Without gravity, it would fly off into space in a straight line. Without its sideways velocity, it would fall straight toward Earth. The orbital motion is the perfect balance between these two tendencies: the Moon is always falling toward the Earth, but always moving sideways fast enough that it keeps missing.
An orbit is, in the deepest sense, a state of continuous free fall. Astronauts on the International Space Station feel weightless not because there is no gravity — at their altitude, Earth's gravity is still about 90% of its surface strength — but because they are in free fall, and everything around them is falling at exactly the same rate.
This idea unlocks the intuition you need for Gravitydrift. Your ship, once launched, is in free fall. Every planet is bending its free-fall trajectory. A planet directly ahead will pull your ship straight into it. A planet slightly to the side will curve your path. The art of the game is learning how to use that curve.
A perfectly circular orbit requires exactly the right speed at exactly the right altitude. In practice, most real orbits are elliptical — oval-shaped paths where the orbiting body swings closer to and further from the central mass in each cycle. The closest point in an orbit is the periapsis (or perigee for Earth orbits, perihelion for solar orbits); the furthest point is the apoapsis (apogee, aphelion).
At periapsis, the orbiting body moves fastest — gravity has been accelerating it as it fell inward. At apoapsis, it moves slowest — it has climbed against gravity and traded kinetic energy for gravitational potential energy. This exchange between kinetic and potential energy is the heartbeat of every orbit.
Before Newton derived gravity from first principles, the German mathematician Johannes Kepler had already discovered three empirical laws describing how planets move, based on decades of meticulous observational data compiled by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Kepler published his laws between 1609 and 1619 — decades before Newton explained why they were true.
Every planet moves in an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci. This was a revolutionary statement: before Kepler, astronomers assumed orbits were circles, because circles were considered the perfect geometric form. The real orbits of planets stubbornly refused to match perfectly circular predictions until Kepler admitted the shapes were ellipses.
Earth's orbit is very nearly circular — its ellipse is barely elongated. Mars has a more noticeably elliptical orbit, and Mercury's is the most eccentric of the inner planets. Some comets travel in extremely elongated ellipses, swinging close to the Sun before retreating to the outer reaches of the solar system for centuries.
A line connecting a planet to the Sun sweeps out equal areas of space in equal amounts of time. What this means in practice: planets move faster when they are closer to the Sun, and slower when they are further away. Earth moves at about 30.3 km/s at perihelion (early January) and 29.3 km/s at aphelion (early July) — a difference of about 1 km/s over the course of a year.
This law is directly observable in Gravitydrift. When your ship makes a close approach to a planet — flying through its inner gravity well — it accelerates dramatically. When it swings wide, it slows. This is not a game mechanic; it is Kepler's second law in action.
The square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit. In simpler terms: the further a planet is from the Sun, the longer its year, and the relationship between distance and year-length follows a precise mathematical pattern. T² ∝ a³.
This law lets astronomers predict the orbital period of any planet — or any satellite — just from knowing how far it orbits from its central mass. The Moon's orbital period of 27.3 days is fully predictable from its average distance of 384,400 km from Earth. The GPS satellites orbiting at about 20,200 km altitude complete their orbits in 11 hours and 58 minutes — exactly as Kepler's third law predicts.
The gravity assist — also called the gravitational slingshot or swing-by maneuver — is the technique that gives Gravitydrift its name. It is one of the most clever and important ideas in the history of space exploration, and it is also the core mechanic of the game.
The concept: a spacecraft can gain or lose speed by flying past a planet. If done correctly, the spacecraft emerges from the encounter moving faster relative to the Sun than when it arrived — without burning any fuel. This is not a violation of energy conservation. The spacecraft steals a tiny amount of kinetic energy from the planet's orbital motion around the Sun. The planet loses an imperceptibly small amount of speed, and the spacecraft gains a large boost.
Imagine a tennis ball thrown at a moving train. The ball hits the front of the train, bounces, and comes back faster than it left. From the train's perspective, the ball arrives and departs at the same speed (elastic collision). From a stationary observer's perspective, the ball has added the train's speed to its own. This is the intuitive core of a gravity assist.
A spacecraft approaching a planet falls into its gravitational well, accelerating. It curves around the planet and climbs back out. If the approach is from behind the planet in its orbit — the spacecraft approaches the planet's "rear" — the spacecraft steals orbital energy and departs faster than it arrived (relative to the Sun). If it approaches from the front, it can slow down, which is useful for falling inward toward the inner solar system.
The amount of energy transferred depends on the mass of the planet, the speed of the encounter, and the geometry of the flyby. Jupiter, being by far the most massive planet in the solar system, provides the most spectacular gravity assists.
The greatest demonstration of the gravity assist in history was NASA's Voyager program. In the mid-1970s, a rare planetary alignment made it possible to visit all four outer planets on a single trajectory — a "Grand Tour" that would not be available again for 175 years. Mission planners at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed a flight path that would use each planet's gravity to slingshot the spacecraft to the next.
Voyager 1 launched in September 1977 and used Jupiter's gravity to fling itself toward Saturn. Voyager 2 took a longer path, using Jupiter to reach Saturn, then Saturn to reach Uranus, and Uranus to reach Neptune. Without these gravity assists, reaching Neptune would have required either an impossibly large rocket or a travel time measured in decades rather than years.
Both Voyager spacecraft have now left the solar system entirely. Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object in existence, currently more than 23 billion kilometres from the Sun — over 150 times the Earth-Sun distance. It is still communicating with Earth, its radio signal taking over 22 hours to reach us at the speed of light.
NASA and ESA's Cassini spacecraft, launched in 1997 to study Saturn, used a sequence of four gravity assists to reach its destination: two flybys of Venus, one of Earth, and one of Jupiter. This complex trajectory gave Cassini the velocity it needed to reach Saturn in just under seven years, arriving in 2004. Without the gravity assists, reaching Saturn would have required far more propellant than could be practically launched.
Cassini spent 13 years in orbit around Saturn, returning extraordinary science. It was deliberately crashed into Saturn in 2017 to prevent any risk of contaminating Saturn's moons — particularly Enceladus, which has a subsurface ocean that could potentially harbour life.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018 to study the Sun's corona, uses a different strategy: repeated gravity assists from Venus to gradually reduce its orbit, bringing it progressively closer to the Sun. This is a negative gravity assist — using Venus to shed orbital energy rather than gain it. By 2025, Parker had made dozens of close solar passes, flying through the Sun's outer atmosphere at speeds exceeding 690,000 km/h — the fastest human-made object in history.
Gravitydrift features nine planet types, each with a different gravitational strength. These types map onto real classes of celestial bodies, ranging from small rocky worlds to the most extreme objects in the known universe.
Terrestrial planets are rocky worlds with solid surfaces — like Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. They tend to be relatively small, with masses ranging from about 6 × 10²³ kg (Mars) to 6 × 10²⁴ kg (Earth). Their gravitational fields are well-defined but modest compared to gas giants and stellar bodies. In the game, the white and grey planets represent the lightest end of the gravitational spectrum — useful for gentle redirects but not dramatic slingshot maneuvers.
Blue planets in the game represent Earth-like worlds in a habitable zone — planets with liquid water, atmospheres, and magnetic fields. Earth's gravity is the baseline that humans are physically calibrated to: 9.81 m/s² at the surface. The blue planet in Gravitydrift provides moderate, reliable gravitational assists. It is the type most beginning players learn to use first.
Gas giants are enormous planets composed primarily of hydrogen and helium — like Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system. Jupiter alone contains more mass than all other planets combined, and its gravitational influence dominates the outer solar system. Gas giants have no solid surface; they transition gradually from atmosphere to denser fluid layers deep in their interiors. Their enormous mass makes them the workhorses of the gravity assist maneuver both in reality and in Gravitydrift.
A red giant is an aging star that has exhausted the hydrogen fuel in its core and expanded dramatically as its outer layers cooled and bloated. Our Sun will become a red giant in about 5 billion years, expanding to swallow Mercury and Venus and possibly Earth. Red giants are far more massive than any planet, with gravitational fields that dominate large volumes of space. In Gravitydrift, red planets represent this class — very strong gravity requiring careful approach angles.
Main sequence stars are active, hydrogen-fusing stars in the prime of their lives — like our Sun, which has been on the main sequence for about 4.6 billion years and will remain there for another 5 billion. Stars generate energy through nuclear fusion in their cores, where temperatures reach tens of millions of degrees and the pressure is extreme enough to fuse hydrogen into helium. The radiation pressure from this process pushes outward against gravity, maintaining a careful equilibrium. In the game, the red star type represents this class — intense, massive, with powerful gravitational influence across a large area.
When a massive star — typically between 8 and 20 times the mass of the Sun — exhausts its nuclear fuel, its core collapses catastrophically in a fraction of a second. The result is a supernova explosion that briefly outshines an entire galaxy, and a remnant core called a neutron star. Neutron stars typically contain 1.4 to 2 solar masses of material compressed into a sphere only about 10 kilometres in radius — roughly the size of a city.
The density of a neutron star is almost incomprehensible. A teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh about 10 billion tonnes on Earth. The gravitational field at the surface is 200 billion times stronger than Earth's surface gravity. Neutron stars rotate rapidly, some completing hundreds of rotations per second. When their magnetic field is aligned to beam radiation toward Earth, we detect them as pulsars — lighthouses of the cosmos, blinking with extraordinary regularity.
In Gravitydrift, the neutron star appears tiny on screen — accurately reflecting its small physical size — but its gravitational field is enormous. Players who underestimate the gravity of a neutron star do not survive to make the same mistake twice.
A black hole forms when a massive star's collapsed core exceeds a critical mass — the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, around 2-3 solar masses — and gravity overcomes all other forces, compressing matter into a singularity of infinite density. The defining feature of a black hole is the event horizon: the boundary within which the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. Nothing that crosses the event horizon can return, not even light.
The radius of the event horizon is called the Schwarzschild radius. For an object with the mass of the Sun, the Schwarzschild radius is about 3 kilometres. For a stellar black hole with 10 solar masses, it is about 30 kilometres. For the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way (Sagittarius A*, with about 4 million solar masses), the Schwarzschild radius is about 12 million kilometres — still smaller than the orbit of Mercury.
A curious prediction of general relativity is Hawking radiation: over astronomical timescales, black holes are not completely black. Quantum effects at the event horizon cause them to slowly emit thermal radiation and lose mass. For stellar black holes, the evaporation timescale is far longer than the current age of the universe and practically unobservable. But in principle, every black hole is slowly evaporating.
If you were unfortunate enough to approach a stellar black hole, the difference in gravitational force between your head and your feet would stretch you into a long strand of matter — a process physicists delightfully call spaghettification. In Gravitydrift, the black hole is the ultimate gravitational challenge: tiny to hit, but with a pull that will capture any ship that ventures too close.
Orbital mechanics is full of counterintuitive results that confound newcomers and delight engineers. Here are some of the most important concepts.
If you want to move a spacecraft from a lower orbit to a higher orbit, you might think the answer is to point at the higher orbit and thrust directly toward it. In fact, you should thrust forward — in the direction you are already moving. This increases your speed, stretching your orbit into a higher ellipse. You coast to the highest point of this ellipse, then thrust forward again to circularize the orbit at the new altitude. This two-burn technique is called a Hohmann transfer orbit, and it is the most fuel-efficient way to change orbital altitude.
Every space mission is planned around a budget of delta-v (change in velocity). Delta-v determines what maneuvers are possible with the available fuel. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation relates the amount of fuel burned to the velocity change achieved: the relationship is logarithmic, meaning the last few percent of delta-v cost disproportionately large amounts of fuel. This is why gravity assists are so valuable — they provide velocity changes for free.
Two spacecraft in the same orbit, separated by a small distance, can never catch each other by simply thrusting toward the other. Thrusting forward puts you in a higher orbit where you move more slowly (Kepler's second law). The target spacecraft stays in the lower, faster orbit. To approach it, you must thrust backward to drop into a lower orbit, speed up, and time your approach for a rendezvous. This counterintuitive behaviour is the source of endless frustration for orbital mechanics students — and a good reason to respect anyone who has successfully docked a spacecraft.
Mariner 10 was the first spacecraft to use a gravity assist intentionally. Launched in November 1973, it flew past Venus in February 1974, using the planet's gravity to deflect its trajectory and lose enough orbital energy to drop into an orbit that repeatedly intersected Mercury's path. Without the Venus gravity assist, reaching Mercury would have required far more fuel than the spacecraft carried. Mariner 10 made three Mercury flybys in 1974 and 1975, returning the first close-up images of the innermost planet.
As described above, the Voyager program represented the gravity assist's greatest triumph. The rare planetary alignment of the late 1970s — with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in positions that allowed a sequential gravity-assisted tour — would not recur for 175 years. NASA's decision to use this window produced two of the most scientifically productive spacecraft ever launched. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft ever to have visited Uranus and Neptune.
The Galileo mission to Jupiter faced a problem: the spacecraft was not powerful enough to reach Jupiter directly. The solution was an extraordinary trajectory that included a flyby of Venus, two flybys of Earth, and observation of the asteroid belt — all before arriving at Jupiter in 1995. This six-year journey became famous partly because Galileo observed the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impact with Jupiter in 1994, en route. At Jupiter, Galileo spent eight years studying the planet and its moons, discovering strong evidence for a liquid water ocean beneath the ice of Europa.
ESA's Rosetta mission performed the most complex trajectory in spacecraft history to rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta used one Mars flyby and three Earth flybys over a ten-year journey to build up the velocity needed to match the comet's orbit. In 2014, it became the first spacecraft to orbit a comet, and it deployed the Philae lander onto the comet's surface — the first controlled landing on a comet. The mission revolutionised our understanding of comets and the early solar system.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft was launched directly toward Pluto with a Jupiter gravity assist in February 2007 that gave it an additional 4 km/s of speed and cut over three years off its journey time. It arrived at Pluto in July 2015, providing humanity's first close look at the dwarf planet and revealing a surprisingly geologically active world with mountains of water ice, nitrogen glaciers, and a hazy atmosphere. New Horizons continued past Pluto to study Arrokoth, a small Kuiper Belt object, in 2019 — the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft.
Human intuition is calibrated for distances of metres, kilometres, perhaps thousands of kilometres. The distances of space exceed our intuition so dramatically that even the numbers become hard to hold in mind. Here are some reference points.
The vastness of the universe is not just a curiosity — it is why understanding gravity is so important. Over these scales, gravity is the force that structures everything. It is why gas clouds collapse into stars, why stars cluster into galaxies, why galaxies organize into filaments and walls separated by vast voids. The universe is gravity's sculpture.
Newton's theory of gravity is extraordinarily powerful, but it has limits. It cannot explain the precise orbit of Mercury, which precesses slightly more than Newton's equations predict. It provides no mechanism for how gravity acts across empty space. And it says nothing about how gravity behaves at extremely high speeds or in extremely strong fields. Einstein's general theory of relativity, published in 1915, resolved these issues and fundamentally changed our understanding of gravity.
In general relativity, gravity is not a force in the Newtonian sense. Instead, mass and energy curve the fabric of spacetime — the four-dimensional combination of the three dimensions of space and the dimension of time. Objects moving through this curved spacetime follow paths called geodesics — the straightest possible paths through curved space. What looks like a gravitational force pulling objects together is actually the geometry of spacetime guiding them.
One of general relativity's most startling predictions is that time passes more slowly in stronger gravitational fields. The closer you are to a massive object, the slower your clock runs relative to a clock in weaker gravity. This is not a small or theoretical effect for modern technology. The GPS satellites orbiting Earth at altitude are in weaker gravity than ground-based clocks, so their clocks tick faster by about 45 microseconds per day due to reduced gravity — while simultaneously ticking slower by about 7 microseconds per day due to their velocity (a special relativity effect). The net effect of about 38 microseconds per day must be compensated in the GPS system's software. Without this correction, GPS positions would drift by about 10 km per day.
Mass curves spacetime, and light follows the curvature of spacetime. This means massive objects bend light that passes nearby — an effect called gravitational lensing. The first experimental confirmation of general relativity came in 1919, when Arthur Eddington observed that the Sun's gravity bent the light from background stars during a solar eclipse, by exactly the amount Einstein predicted. Today, astronomers use gravitational lensing from galaxy clusters as a natural telescope to observe objects billions of light years away that would otherwise be too faint to detect.
One of general relativity's most exotic predictions is that accelerating masses should produce ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. In 2015, one century after Einstein published his theory, the LIGO detectors in the United States detected gravitational waves for the first time — produced by two black holes merging 1.3 billion light years away. The signal caused the four-kilometre-long detector arms to change length by less than a thousandth of the width of a proton. This detection earned the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics and opened an entirely new window on the universe.
The history of space exploration is, in large part, the history of humanity learning to work with gravity rather than against it. Here are key milestones relevant to the themes of Gravitydrift.
The game mechanics of Gravitydrift map directly onto real orbital mechanics concepts in a way that builds genuine intuition rather than rote knowledge. When you play Gravitydrift, you are not just having fun — you are running physics simulations in your head and calibrating them against real results.
The drag-and-release mechanic is a direct model of impulse — the change in momentum imparted by a brief force. The way your ship's path bends around planets is exactly how real spacecraft trajectories are calculated. The difference between a close flyby and a distant pass maps precisely onto the inverse square law of gravity.
Research into science education has consistently found that interactive simulations dramatically improve retention of physics concepts compared to lectures or textbooks alone. The feedback loop of "aim, launch, observe, adjust" that drives Gravitydrift is the same feedback loop that drives scientific inquiry. Players develop a feel for orbital mechanics that can anchor more formal learning.
The game also introduces the concept of escape velocity without ever using the term. Players quickly learn that you cannot fly slowly near a massive object — the gravity will capture you. They learn that there is a minimum speed to maintain distance, and they learn to judge it visually. This is escape velocity, experienced rather than calculated.
Gravitydrift can be used as a supplementary tool in physics, astronomy, mathematics, and STEM classes. Here are some suggestions for how to integrate it effectively.
Gravitydrift connects to the following curriculum areas: Newton's Laws of Motion (particularly the first and second laws), Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, forces and their effects on motion, energy conservation (kinetic and gravitational potential), vectors and two-dimensional motion, and introductory astronomy. The Level Editor's normalised coordinate system also offers a conversation point about mathematical representations of physical space.
If you are a young person reading this page — whether you are 9 or 15 or anywhere in between — here is something important: you do not need to understand all the mathematics on this page to understand the physics. You have probably already felt it, playing the game.
When you launched your ship and watched it curve around a planet and reach the goal, you were doing what NASA engineers do. Not as a metaphor — literally the same thing, just at a smaller scale and without the consequences. Every launch is a physics experiment. Every crash is data. Every successful trajectory is a solution to a real orbital mechanics problem.
The scientists and engineers who sent Voyager past four planets, who landed Curiosity in a crater on Mars, who flew New Horizons past Pluto — they all started somewhere. Many of them started with curiosity, with games, with a feeling that the universe was interesting and that they wanted to understand it.
If this page has made you curious, here are some excellent places to go next:
Space exploration is not finished — it is barely started. The generation of people who will walk on Mars and build the first permanent off-world habitats are young people right now. The ability to think clearly about gravity and orbital mechanics will matter. Games are one way to build that thinking. We are glad you played.
We are living in one of the most exciting periods in the history of space exploration. After decades when human spaceflight was confined to low Earth orbit, multiple programs are now aiming to return people to the Moon and eventually send them to Mars.
NASA's Artemis program aims to establish a sustainable human presence on and around the Moon. The Lunar Gateway — a small space station in a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon — will serve as a staging point for lunar surface missions and eventually as a waypoint for deep-space exploration. The orbital mechanics of the Gateway's halo orbit are sophisticated, using the combined gravity of Earth and Moon to maintain a stable position with minimal fuel expenditure.
The journey from Earth to Mars takes approximately 7 to 9 months using a Hohmann-like transfer orbit, and it is only possible approximately every 26 months when Earth and Mars are in the right relative positions. Multiple space agencies and private companies are working toward crewed Mars missions. SpaceX's Starship — an enormous fully-reusable spacecraft designed to carry both crew and large cargo — is designed with the propellant quantities necessary for a round trip or for in-situ propellant production on Mars. A crewed Mars mission would be the largest orbital mechanics challenge in human history.
Even with gravity assists, reaching another star system is essentially impossible with conventional propulsion — the travel times are tens of thousands of years. The Breakthrough Starshot initiative proposes a radical alternative: use powerful ground-based lasers to accelerate gram-scale "light sail" probes to 20% of the speed of light, reaching Proxima Centauri in about 20 years. The engineering challenges are immense, but the physics is sound. Such a mission would require no on-board propulsion at all — pure momentum from photons.
Gravity will remain central to every future mission, near or far. The orbital mechanics of any spacecraft — from a lunar lander to a hypothetical interstellar probe — is a gravitational problem. Every mission is, in the end, a trajectory through a gravitational landscape. Every trajectory is a puzzle. Gravitydrift is a small model of that very large truth.
From Newton's apple to Voyager's grand tour, from the Moon landings to the first detection of gravitational waves, gravity is the thread that runs through all of humanity's exploration of the cosmos. It is the force that holds stars together and tears apart the matter that falls into black holes. It is the invisible architect of the structure of the universe.
Gravitydrift puts a small piece of this physics in your hands. Every level is a puzzle built from the same equations that govern real spacecraft. The intuition you build playing the game is the same intuition that engineers use when planning missions to distant planets.
We hope this page has added some depth to your experience of the game — and perhaps sparked a genuine curiosity about the universe. The cosmos is vast, strange, and beautiful, and we have barely begun to understand it. There has never been a better time to be curious about space.
Now go play. Launch your ship. Let gravity do the work.