NEWSLETTER
When Dr. Uri Shumlack was approached by a game developer who wanted to discuss his work on interstellar propulsion for a game about space flight, he was cautious. A professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington, he was a busy person and not exactly an avid gamer. He asked some of his engineering students if they had heard of a game called Kerbal Space Program, only to find out that half the class was there. because of the game.
First playable in 2011, Kerbal Space Program is an idiosyncratic and extremely difficult video game that involves blasting little green aliens off the surface of your planet using rockets that you have to improvise from a library of parts. However, to do this, and leave the launch pad unexploded, you need to develop a pretty good understanding of the physics of space travel, calculate orbital trajectories, and determine how much fuel you need, and whether you can transport it without messing up your thrust-to-drive ratio. weight. He is beloved by space and astrophysics enthusiasts, who have posted thousands of hours of gameplay video showcasing his unusual ships and ambitious missions in this simulated solar system.
Some of those players end up in classes like Dr. Shumlack’s. Nate Simpson is the creative director of the next game, Kerbal Space Program 2, developed by Intercept Games. As he said at an event at the European Space Agency’s research and technology center in the Netherlands, this game no longer just replicates human spaceflight. effort: now it is part of it. Some of the physicists, engineers and astronauts who will be working at ESA over the next decade will have developed a passion for spaceflight trying to safely land comical little astronauts on the moon in the landers they designed.
I’m here to play Kerbal Space Program 2, which was recently released in Early Access on Steam PC Game Store. Created by a new team, it feels rather early and unstable to play, but in the coming years it hopes to offer players the chance to go even beyond the Kerbal solar system and its celestial bodies, traveling between stars.
To simulate this, the team has worked with experts from everywhere from ESA to fusion scientists working on near-future fuel technology. A member of the Intercept Games development team is a former engineer who worked with the Canadian space agency on ground missions; another came to the studio after running a series of educational podcasts on space exploration. “The reality of space travel is sometimes stranger than fiction,” says lead designer Shana Markham, who joined Intercept Games in 2019. “As a sci-fi nerd, being able to see what people really have to thinking was intriguing.”
My gaming experience is not atypical, and boils down to building a rocket, adding some cool wings to it on a whim, crashing, making minor adjustments, crashing again, removing the wings and adding more thrusters, crashing one more time, and I finally feel such a euphoria when I leave the planet’s atmosphere for the first time that I forget to set my trajectory correctly and plummet back to Earth instead of achieving a stable orbit. Just like in real-life spaceflight, a small miscalculation can ruin the entire mission, and adjusting even the tiniest detail on the fly requires a flurry of high-speed calculations (although unlike real life , here you can pause time to figure things out). ). Later, using a save file provided by the developer, I land a rover on the game’s equivalent of Mars, but within 20 seconds I flip it over and get stuck upside down.
After half a day with this game (and a couple of weeks with the original, years ago), I’ve practically become a moon landing denier, because now it seems even more unfathomable that mere humans could have gotten hold of an actual ship. space and vice versa without everything breaking down. But I’m not a rocket scientist. Speaking to those at and working here at ESA, many of whom have played the game over the years, they are amused and impressed by how accurate it is. It’s not exactly an exact physical simulation of space flight, but it’s close.
“In some cases we are very true to life,” says Markham. “For example, the fuel tanks empty as you go, and that really makes your vehicle lighter and changes its flight characteristics. But then if you look at something like how you maintain communications at home, that’s less authentic. Instead, it comes from a place that arouses curiosity… the game has to be fun! Because the game is a continuous simulation, the whole thing is an unimaginably huge technical challenge. “All the systems have to work together, all the time, from launch to flight, landing on another planet, planting a flag and going home,” says Markham.
Since 1984’s Elite, games have been trying to capture the fantasy of space travel, sometimes catching the imagination of players who have careers in real-world physics, engineering, and aeronautics. Kerbal Space Program is more interested in capturing the reality of space travel, little green astronauts notwithstanding, and in doing so has perhaps had an even greater influence on its players. “It’s really rare to see a game have this kind of impact on people’s lives, in the real world,” says Markham. ESA is working to bring the first Europeans to the moon’s surface; no doubt some of the people working on that mission will have accomplished it first in this game.
Keza MacDonald attended a press trip to the European Center for Space Research and Technology in Holland with other journalists and streamers. Travel and accommodation expenses were covered by the publisher of Kerbal Space Program 2, Private Division.
