Your Own Spaceship

Have you ever wanted to cruise the solar system, see the rings of Saturn, ride the moons of Jupiter? There's a freeware application for Windows called Celestia that lets you do that, virtually. (It's available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/, and addons are available at http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/).  

Saturn and Mimas

Celestia lets you position yourself almost anywhere in the universe and shows you what you would see. You can put yourself in orbit around Saturn, following its moon Mimas, or Mars, or Jupiter, or Alpha Centauri, or Cygnus X1, one of the first black holes astronomers discovered.

Celestia is basically a planetarium application that frees you from the constraints of the terracentric viewpoint most such programs impose. You can position yourself anywhere and easily change the angle you're looking from, zooming in and out. You can reverse time, speed it up, slow it down, watching the moon go through its phases as it orbits the earth, or the Galilean moons zip around Jupiter like moths around a flame. You can turn on your virtual spacecraft's thrusters and zoom around the solar system at the speed of light. Celestia also displays man-made objects, such as the International Space Station. It will also find the dates of solar and lunar eclipses and display the shadow of the moon on the earth's surface so that you can tell where the eclipse can be seen from.

Though Celestia feels like a game, it's rooted in science. It has been used by NASA and the European Space Agency, and several universities and schools to teach astronomy. Its graphics aren't on par with what professional artists can produce with their high-powered graphics workstations, but hey, it's free!

This photo album shows images of Earth, Mars, Jupiter, its moon IO, and the Discovery spacecraft from 2001: A Space Odyssey (but no monolith, alas), the Atlantis space shuttle, the International Space Station, Saturn and its moon Mimas, and the galaxy M83.

But the coolest part about Celestia is that you can add your own images and objects, and a lot of people have done exactly that. Celestia Motherlode is a repository of addons that people around the world have created. Enthusiasts have created addons depicting stars, planets and spacecraft from real life and scientific conjecture, as well as numerous fictional sources such as Star Trek, Babylon 5, Niven's Known Space, Star Wars, etc.

The most detailed fictional creations are from the Orion's Arm Universe Project, a worldbuilding project where hundreds of people around the world have collaborated to create a future history in which mankind has spread out across the galaxy.

To test customization out myself, I made my own texture for the moon, inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Tick. A texture is just computerspeak for a flat JPEG image that is wrapped around 3D objects by graphics programs. Here's the resulting video:


If you want to create your own addons for Celestia there's quite a learning curve, but there are a lot of resources on the Internet that give all the details. You don't really have to know orbital mechanics to make your own creations; you just have to be able to cut and paste text files. To make your own alternate surface textures for planets and moons you'll need a graphics program (The Gimp is a good freeware one, despite the name). To make your own 3D objects, you'll need a 3D editing program (Blender is an amazingly sophisticated freeware application). Be warned: making 3D objects is big job if you don't already know how to do it.

For a long time it seemed that the dream of mankind going into space was dead. But the reach for space is finally getting rolling again: countries like China, India, Japan are joining the United States, Russia and Europe with serious space programs that are conducting real science. Companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are pioneering private launch services. Entertainment ventures like Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and the Mars One project (the one-way trip to Mars planned for the 2020s) may never come to fruition, but the dream is alive and people are taking space very seriously.

And Celestia will give you a little preview of what we'll see out there.