01What is Delta V Dynamics?

Audience: everyone. No background needed.

The name first#

"Delta V" (written Δv) is the single most important number in spaceflight. It is pronounced "delta-vee" and it means "change in velocity" — how much a spacecraft can speed up, slow down, or change direction over its whole life.

The everyday analogy: Δv is the fuel gauge of space, but measured in speed. On Earth a car's range is "400 miles on a full tank." In space there is no friction and no road, so what matters isn't distance — it's how much you can change your motion. Every maneuver (climb to a higher orbit, leave for the Moon, slow down to land) "costs" a certain amount of Δv, measured in metres per second (m/s) or kilometres per second (km/s). Run out of Δv and your mission is over, even if the spacecraft is perfectly healthy.

So the company is named after the currency of spaceflight. Everything the platform does, in the end, helps you spend that currency wisely.

The problem we're solving#

If you want to design a space mission today, you have two options, and they're both bad for most people:

• The toy. Games like Kerbal Space Program are wonderful for intuition, but the physics is simplified and you can't use the results for anything real.
• The fortress. Professional tools — Ansys STK and NASA's GMAT — are genuinely powerful, but STK is a five-figure desktop license that takes months to learn, and both run on your machine, alone, with interfaces designed in an era before the web. A student can't afford STK. A startup engineer can't collaborate in it the way they collaborate on code.

There is a huge gap in the middle: real physics, beautiful and instant, in a browser, shared like a Google Doc. That gap is Delta V Dynamics.

The tagline: Figma for spacecraft mission design. Figma took graphic design out of expensive desktop apps and put it in the browser, where teams design together in real time. We're doing that for orbital mechanics.

Who it's for#

• Students learning orbital mechanics — see the equations come alive instead of staring at a textbook.
• Aerospace & satellite-startup engineers — sketch a mission, price its Δv, check when your ground station can talk to your satellite, design a constellation — in minutes, in a tab, then share the link.
• University researchers — reproducible mission documents and a free, inspectable engine.
• YouTube / space creators — a gorgeous, accurate visual to explain a real mission to an audience.
• Defense & commercial contractors (civil space only) — fast trade studies without booting the heavy desktop tools.
• The space-curious — anyone who's ever looked up and wondered how do they actually fly these things?

Free academic tier is non-negotiable. Anyone with a .edu, .ac.uk, .ac.in (and similar) address gets the full platform for free, forever. This is written into the Constitution; no feature, price change, or business decision can ever gate it.

What makes it different (the three pillars)#

1. The physics is real — and reproducible#

All the orbital mechanics lives in one place: a physics engine written in Rust that compiles to WebAssembly (WASM). Plain-language version: we wrote the math once, in a fast and precise language, and the exact same code runs in your browser tab and on our servers.

Why that matters: it's deterministic. Give it the same inputs and it gives the same answer, bit-for-bit, every single time, on every machine. That means a result you compute can be replayed and verified by anyone — the foundation for trustworthy shared missions and (later) leaderboards no one can cheat. The engine is checked against textbook reference cases (the International Space Station's real speed and orbital period, classic transfer maneuvers) so the numbers aren't just self-consistent, they're correct.

House rule, sacred: there is never any physics in the website's JavaScript. The browser only draws. The engine computes. This boundary is why the numbers can be trusted.

2. It's beautiful#

The 3D scene is rendered with WebGPU (the modern successor to WebGL) through Three.js. The Earth has a real day/night terminator — the line between day and night is computed from the actual position of the Sun — with NASA city lights glowing on the night side, a soft atmosphere, and drifting clouds. The sky is a generated star dome with the Milky Way. Orbits are drawn as glowing comet-trails. This isn't decoration: seeing the geometry is how you understand it.

3. It's social — everything is a forkable document#

This is the moat. On Delta V, a mission, a rocket, or an exoplanet discovery isn't trapped on your hard drive — it's a document with a shareable link. Anyone can fork it (make their own copy that remembers where it came from), improve it, and publish it back to the community, exactly like code on GitHub. The platform records the lineage — who built on whose work — and credits it. Over time this builds a library of real, peer-improved mission knowledge that no single desktop tool can ever have.

The building: a home with many rooms#

The guiding metaphor for the whole product is:

Not a single room that fits all kinds of people, but a home which has a room for every kind of person, and they unite in the common hall.

Each "room" is a complete workstation for one kind of work. The "common hall" is The Loop — the community feed where everyone's work meets, gets discussed with real numbers, and gets forked. The rooms use mission-control callsigns (real NASA/test-pilot lingo) so the whole place feels like a flight center:

The next chapters give you a real tour. If you've never thought about orbits before, go to Space without the math next. If you want to start clicking, jump to Your first flight.