Low Earth orbit, about 420 km up

Space trip: fly to the International Space Station and back

Ride a rocket from the launch pad to the International Space Station, then come back to Earth. In orbit you see thousands of Starlink satellites, GPS and geostationary satellites, moving on their real orbits.

Free, the first space trip too. No install, no sign-up. It runs in your browser.

The trip

• Launch: nine engines, max Q, stage separation, the Kármán line at 100 km.
• Orbit: the Earth with day and night at the real time, and its satellites. Speed time up 60 or 600 times.
• Docking: the capsule closes in slowly on the station port.
• The station: look down at the Earth from the cupola.
• Return: deorbit burn, reentry, parachutes, splashdown.

What you learn

• A satellite is always falling, but it moves sideways so fast that it keeps missing the Earth: about 7.7 km/s at 400 km.
• Fire Newton's cannon yourself: too slow and it falls, fast enough and it orbits, above about 10.9 km/s it leaves the Earth.
• The higher the orbit, the longer one turn takes (Kepler's third law). About 35,786 km up a turn takes a day: the geostationary orbit.

Satellite orbits: CelesTrak public data, downloaded every 12 hours. Positions are close to the real sky but not exact.