Race to Space

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  Asteroid avoidance

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  Launch

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  End Screen

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  Main Screen

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  Docking Station

Inspiration

Our inspiration was from watching the NASA launches, and we observed that although these take-offs occur relatively quickly. There are millions of dollars, as well as millions of work-hours and newly invented technologies used in developing spacecraft, and an important characteristic of picking astronauts are fine motor skills used in docking and takeoff/landing of spacecraft.

What it does

Our product is a space game that simulates the takeoff, control, and docking of a spacecraft, with realistic qualities that real engineers need to deal with, such as proper alignment in docking and avoidance of near-Earth debris such as space junk.

How we built it

We started with a simple HTML/JS application capable of displaying pictures of the four different entities in our game. We then added game logic and created a physics engine to calculate these computationally. After this, we added more stages, information pages surrounding the main page, and an "online multiplayer" mode hosted through a server on Amazon Web Services.

Challenges we ran into

Some features required large amounts of data to be transmitted over the network, which frequently caused the application to crash/lag. Fixing such slow parts of the application required a careful review of all the "necessary" parts of our app vs the unneeded parts.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

The online multiplayer mode of our application required a significant amount of timekeeping to execute correctly, so it's a wonder that it executes as reliably as it did after only 3 to 4 hours of work.

What we learned

As we designed this project, we learned a lot about designing multi-user applications that must be synchronized to prevent concurrent modification of data. We also learned how to simulate the physics of colliding bodies and object inheritance/polymorphism in Javascript.

What's next for Race to Space

We plan to further expand on the stages of our spacecraft launch. For example, we plan to elaborate and design new games for how to teach each part of the spacecraft launch, representing the launch as a series of stages as opposed to a single section at the beginning of the game. Additionally, the game should have more constraints of the docking mechanic which are relevant in real life, such as avoiding moving too fast or too slow when docking.

Built With

• javascript