…before wiping out the Vehicle Assembly Building. Then I wiped out the Research & Development center with a huge explosion… On impact we also managed to take out the Space Plane Hanger! That’s how a highly experimental space program is supposed to start, with epic failure! Sorry, “catastrophic” failure! I put something “simple” together: Now that’s a spaceship the way Robert Heinlein meant it to be! Four huge solid rocket boosters (SRBs) surrounding a huge central stack of fuel tanks, and wings! Launch it!Ĭool! “Catastrophic Failure!” We only got to 520 meters and 142 meters/second, before impacting at 2.7 Gs. I started by running the first tutorial again, which is supposed to show the fundamentals of building a rocket. The more detailed and realistic, the better! I games I love the most are not first-person shooters (except for “Doom III”), but things like Sim City and Outpost.

This is why it’s so popular with folks at NASA, JPL, science fiction authors, reporters who cover the space program, and so on.

The short version is that it’s a space flight simulator which is both fun and designed to be as realistic as possible as far as the physics and orbital mechanics go.

I had downloaded the free demo and run the tutorials enough to see that it was probably as cool as everyone was saying it was, so I bought it. I’ve heard a lot (at least, from the Twitterati that I follow) about a simulation game called “ Kerbal Space Program“.

Kerbal space program free demo easy