03Your first flight

Audience: anyone, first session. Time: ~15 minutes. You'll fly a real spacecraft, plan a Moon shot, and see Earth's day/night line — all in a browser tab.

Tip: read Space without the math first if any term here is new. Or just dive in — links to the glossary are sprinkled throughout.

0. Open the Flight Deck#

Go to /deck. This is the Flight Deck — the cockpit of the whole platform. The first time you arrive you'll get a short onboarding overlay that asks for your crew position (Cadet, FIDO, GUIDO, or PAO — see below). Pick one and it tailors which panel opens first. You can always change it later.

Crew positions are just friendly role labels borrowed from real mission control: FIDO (Flight Dynamics — trajectories), GUIDO (Guidance), PAO (Public Affairs — the storyteller/creator), or Cadet (just learning). Don't overthink it — pick "Cadet" if unsure.

What you're looking at:

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  TOP BAR:  view switch · fidelity badge · save/share · you   │
├──────┬──────────────────────────────────────────┬──────────┤
│ RAIL │                                           │ TELEMETRY│
│      │                                           │  (live   │
│ tabs │            THE 3D SCENE                    │ numbers) │
│ ↕    │         (Earth + your orbit)              │          │
│      │                                           │          │
├──────┴──────────────────────────────────────────┴──────────┤
│  TIMELINE BAR:  ▶ play · speed · T+ mission clock            │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

• Left rail — vertical icons. Each opens a workstation panel. Top to bottom: Orbit, Maneuver, Target, Finite burn, Track a satellite, Vehicle, Access, Coverage, Fidelity.
• Center — the 3D Earth and your orbit. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.
• Right — the Telemetry panel: your live altitude, speed, and orbit facts.
• Bottom — the Timeline: press Space or ▶ to play time forward.

(Full button-by-button details are in the Flight Deck reference. This page just gets you flying.)

1. Put yourself in orbit (the Orbit panel)#

Click the Orbit tab (top of the rail). You'll see Orbit presets — one-click real-world orbits:

• LEO — Low Earth Orbit (where the ISS and most satellites live, ~400 km up).
• SSO — Sun-Synchronous (the orbit imaging satellites use to always see the ground in the same lighting).
• GTO — Geostationary Transfer Orbit (a stretched ellipse used to reach the high TV-satellite belt).
• Molniya — a famous stretched Russian orbit that lingers over the far north.
• GEO — Geostationary (35,786 km up, where a satellite hangs over one spot on Earth).

Click LEO. The 3D scene snaps to a low circular orbit. Look at the right-hand Telemetry: altitude ~400 km, speed ~7.7 km/s. That speed is the "falling sideways fast enough to miss the Earth" from the primer — now it's real numbers in front of you. The Orbit panel also shows your Apogee, Perigee, Period, Inclination, and Eccentricity — the orbit's "address."

Now press Space (or the ▶ in the timeline). Time starts flowing; watch your spacecraft trace the glowing orbit around Earth. Tap the speed control to fast- forward. Press Space again to pause.

2. See the planet honestly (the 3D scene)#

Drag the Earth around. Notice:

• A day/night line (the terminator) cutting across the globe — it's computed from the real position of the Sun, not faked.
• City lights glowing on the night side (real NASA imagery).
• A soft blue atmosphere glow on the limb, and faint clouds.
• A Moon marker out in the distance, at its true position for the current date.

This is WebGPU doing real-time rendering. It's not just pretty — seeing the geometry is how the concepts stop being abstract.

3. Plan a trip to the Moon (the Maneuver panel)#

Click the Maneuver tab. This answers "I'm here — how do I get there, and what does it cost?"

Pick a destination (try the Moon / TLI, or GEO). The panel plans a Hohmann transfer and shows you a Δv budget:

• Burn 1 — the first push (for the Moon, this is the famous trans-lunar injection, ~3,100 m/s).
• Burn 2 — circularize / arrive.
• Total Δv — the full price of the trip.
• Coast time — how long you drift between burns.
• Propellant — how much fuel fraction that costs (at a reference engine efficiency).

In the 3D scene you'll now see the transfer ellipse drawn from your orbit out to the target, with burn markers where the engine fires. You just planned a real mission maneuver. 🎉

This is the moment most people "get it": space travel isn't about distance, it's about Δv budget. The Moon isn't "far" so much as it "costs ~3,100 m/s."

4. Watch a solver converge (the Target panel)#

Click the Target tab. This is a taste of the professional power tool — a differential corrector, the same kind of solver NASA's GMAT uses.

Pick a target, e.g. raise apoapsis to 1,422 km, and press Solve. Watch the panel animate the solver thinking: it tries a burn, sees how close it got, adjusts, tries again — a little chart shows the "achieved value" climbing toward your target line over a handful of iterations until it converges. It then reports the exact burn (Δv) that hits your target.

This is what mission designers do all day: "I want this outcome — find me the burn that achieves it." Now you've watched it happen live. (Try the Intercept mode too: aim for a point in space and watch the miss-distance plunge toward zero, with an orange transfer arc and a green aim-pin drawn in the scene.)

5. Fly a real satellite from today's catalog (the Track panel)#

Click Track a satellite. Pick a preset (the ISS is a great first choice) or paste a TLE (a "Two-Line Element set" — the standard text format for a satellite's current orbit, published daily). Delta V fetches today's real data from CelesTrak and flies the actual satellite.

You'll get its real orbit facts and a ground-track world map — the wavy line showing the path the satellite traces over the Earth's surface. Press play and watch it move. This is the live sky, in your tab.

Honest label you'll see: this is a quick-look (two-body/J2) propagation that's accurate near the data's timestamp and drifts over days. For precision over long spans you'd use the server-side engine (the future "Precision Desk").

6. Check the fidelity (the Fidelity panel)#

Click Fidelity. This is the honesty dashboard — the heart of Delta V's promise. You can toggle physics effects on and off and watch the orbit drift:

• J2 — Earth isn't a perfect sphere; it bulges at the equator. Turn J2 on and the orbit plane slowly swivels. (This is exactly how Sun-synchronous orbits are engineered — a beautiful "aha.")
• Drag — the thin upper atmosphere slowly drags low satellites down.
• Sun / Moon — their gravity tugs your orbit over time.

The fidelity badge in the top bar tells you which "level" you're at (L0 two-body, L1 +J2, L2/L3 prototype). There's also a "Compute L2+ (Orekit, server)" button that runs the heavyweight, professional-grade server engine and overlays its authoritative trajectory (green) against the instant browser one, showing you exactly how much they differ.

Read Fidelity & honesty to understand these levels fully — it's the most important page for anyone doing serious work.

7. Save and share#

Hit Save / Share in the top bar. Your mission becomes a document with a link. Anyone you send it to opens the exact same scene. They can fork it — make their own version that remembers it came from yours — and publish their improvement to The Loop. That's the whole GitHub-for-missions idea, live.

Where to go next#

• Want every button explained? → Flight Deck reference
• Want to build a rocket? → The rooms: VAB & Napkin Works
• Want to find a planet? → Deep Field guide
• Confused by a term? → Glossary