SpaceX rocket landing game challenges you to destroy the spacecraft

If you wandered what’s so hard about landing a rocket on a barge in the ocean, you can try your hand at recovering the rocket with a game called Falcon 9 Lander. That’s why SpaceX hasn’t quite pulled it off just yet, and why this Falcon 9 lander flash game will frustrate you to no end. Both Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft’s final objective is to deliver humans into space. But don’t get too excited if you stick the landing, because the rockets keep coming. A landing attempt in April ended with the Falcon 9 at an odd angle and the rocket exploding. It’s simply cost prohibitive to spend millions on a rocket that is launched and discarded after one use.

Whereas the sport is extraordinarily irritating, fortunately, customers aren’t out hundreds of thousands of dollars every time they crash the rocket.

The game is a modified version of a Lunar Lander game made by a user named dixiklo using Scratch, a software created through the MIT Media Lab.

To play the sport, customers exclusively have the arrow keys, with up triggering the thruster and the facet arrows serving to you direct the rocket towards the drone ship on which the rocket lands. “Most of the physics is just a crude imitation of real life, but it works for what it’s supposed to do”, he told me. Moreover, the difficulty of the task depends on the fuel available, since it is not unlimited. The game isn’t completely programmed against you. SpaceX has been trying to figure out a way to recover the first stage of its rockets by landing them on a platform floating in the middle of the ocean.

Here is the footage that may have inspired this new fun game.