Recent Changes

SPACE is growing fast. This page collects what has been added or changed from the very first commit on 23 June 2026, up to today. Since the official launch on 26 June 2026, most items go live the same day they land.

2026-08-04 Tuesday

• New You can fly into a galaxy — until now, reaching Andromeda got you an empty room. Nebulae and clusters let you go inside them as you approach. Galaxies did not — from far away one was a single photograph, and the moment you crossed within three times its radius that photograph vanished and nothing took its place. You could fly 2.5 million light-years to Andromeda and arrive in empty space. Galaxies now have an interior: spiral arms and dust lanes, red star-forming regions, and the central bulge wrap around your ship. See the screenshots →
  • Measurements decide the shape. Spiral, edge-on disk, dusty elliptical or Magellanic — along with inclination and position angle on the sky — all come from the catalogue. The stellar velocity dispersion around the central black hole sets how much of the galaxy is bulge.
  • Even the size isn't hand-typed. Diameter is derived from apparent size and distance — Andromeda spans 3.0° at 2.5 million light-years, so about 130,000 light-years across.
  • Each galaxy has its own thing. Centaurus A has its jet, M51 its companion and the tidal bridge joining them, M82 the bipolar superwind blowing out of its core, and the Large Magellanic Cloud the Tarantula Nebula.
  • What the catalogue does not record — individual star positions, the number of spiral arms and how tightly they wind — is generated procedurally. What was measured and what was invented are kept apart, not blended.
  How to get there. Most famous galaxies are reached by selecting their central black hole as the destination (Andromeda, M51, the Sombrero, Centaurus A). Places where the galaxy itself is the destination — the LMC, Triangulum, the Pinwheel — work exactly the same way. Destination list →
• Fixed Arriving at a galactic centre showed you the same galaxy twice. Beyond the star field that had just unfolded around you, that galaxy's photograph was still hanging in the sky. The routine that hides a body's own photo on arrival didn't recognise the "via its central black hole" route.

2026-08-03 Monday

• Fixed 40% of first voyages from the ISS to the Moon were silently stranded. The autopilot aims straight at its destination. But the ISS laps the Earth every 90 minutes, so if you departed while the Moon happened to be on the far side of the planet, that line of aim went straight through Earth. The ship dropped into the atmosphere, and the automatic re-entry abort that rescued it into a safe orbit also erased the maneuver you had scheduled — the autopilot simply disappeared with no explanation on screen, and a newcomer had no way to tell why nothing was happening. Running all 48 departure phases for real showed 19 of them (40%) stranding right there. The straight aim is now taken only when it clears the atmosphere; when it doesn't, the flight falls back to the climb-out path introduced in July for departures to distant planets. When an abort does erase a maneuver, the toast now adds "autopilot disengaged". Targets below the atmosphere, such as an ISS rendezvous, are unchanged.
• New 🛟 Ships are now saved from the surface of airless worlds too. Earth orbit already had the automatic re-entry abort, but nowhere without an atmosphere had anything. Start at Barnard's Star or Sirius, undock, hold the throttle open and walk away, and the ship drove straight into the surface — sweeping burn durations from 1 to 120 seconds across the four start sites, Barnard's Star lost the ship in all seven runs and Sirius in five of seven. Now a warning appears as the surface closes in, and if nothing brakes, the onboard guard restores a safe circular orbit. All 28 combinations survive. The test is not "did you light the engine" but "did you brake" — because the cause of this accident is itself an act of burning, accelerating along the ship's motion relative to the star. One more badge, revealed only the moment a collision is averted, brings the total to 74.
• Fixed The console's "🎯 Rendezvous" button did nothing when pressed. Only in the glass console, the default control set, was that button sending the server the wrong command. Rendezvous is a separate command for chasing a moving target (another ship or station), but it was being sent as if it were just another autopilot mode — so the server quietly refused it with "no target body", and not even the refusal was shown. The cockpit panel and the console page had been sending the right command all along.
• Fixed A perfectly normal departure raised a "re-entry warning" 13 seconds in. On the most common first voyage of all, ISS to the Moon, the autopilot was flying a safe departure arc and a red warning appeared anyway. The stamp that suppresses the warning was applied on only one of the departure paths — and the one it missed was the one most journeys take.
• Fixed Atmospheric drag was being computed about 15% too strong. When measuring altitude, the ship was read at the start of the integration step and the Earth at the end of it. Earth moves roughly 29.8 km per second, so that mismatch became altitude error outright (21.8 km on the first step, up to 29.4 km across the sweep). Drag came out inflated, and it pushed past a density threshold the ship had never really crossed — producing a false "orbit is decaying" warning as well.
• New Losing the connection now shows on screen. Until now, a dropped link changed nothing at all — the instruments held their last numbers, and the notice lived only in a panel that is normally hidden. Worse, connections more often just go quiet than announce that they closed. A banner now appears at the top of the screen, and if nothing arrives from space for 20 seconds the link is treated as lost.
• New Badges gained higher grades — a reason to go after the same thing again. Thirteen entries got a top tier: 20 gravity assists, 100 flight plans, 20 manual landings, 8 comets, 10,000 AU (the inner Oort cloud), all four black holes, 20 wormhole transits, a logbook spanning 10 years of proper time, and more. Every ceiling was set only after checking it can actually be reached — 8 comets is half of the 15 that really exist in game, and 4 black holes is the entire catalogue. A grade nobody can ever earn isn't a record, it's a lie. A higher grade still grants no abilities. 🎖 Badges guide →

2026-08-02 Sunday

• New Badges — after you undock, space now tells you what there is to do. Until now this game handed you nothing at all once you let go of the station. For people who set their own goals that was freedom; for a newcomer it was an empty screen. There are now 73 badges — 59 visible from the start, and 14 more that only reveal themselves the moment you meet their condition. From first undock, first burn and first orbit through gravity assists, standing on the Moon, feeling time dilation and crossing to another star, they attach only to what you actually did.
  • Right after undocking, an eight-step guide appears one card at a time near the top of the screen. Stall on a step and it offers a single hint; stall longer and it folds itself away. You can skip a step or turn it off entirely, and switch it back on in settings.
  • Once the guide is done, 🎯 standing orders suggest a few things worth trying from where you are. Dismiss any suggestion you don't like and it won't come back.
  • Your progress lives in the tablet under 📓Log → "Badges", beside the logbook.
  • The full list — and other voyagers' records — is at /badges. Sharing can be turned off at any time, and the link disappears at once when it is. No location or account data is ever shown.
  What remains. Badges grant no abilities — nothing gets faster, nothing unlocks. There is no leaderboard, and nothing counts how many days in a row you showed up. What remains is a record and a name. 🎖 Badges & Onboarding guide →
• Fixed Holding a phone in landscape, the coach card covered the flight console. The eight-step guide card that arrived the same day completely hid the glass console's destination buttons and its collapse button whenever the screen was short — a phone held sideways. In portrait they never overlapped, which is why nobody had seen it. On short screens the card now steps aside to the top left.
• Fixed Starting at Alpha Centauri, you lost your orbit the moment you undocked. That start site's station sat 400 km above the planet's surface — the same height as Earth's ISS. But on 21 July this system's planet was replaced with the real observed one, turning it from a rocky world into a gas giant — and those 400 km were suddenly inside the atmosphere rather than above the clouds. The station itself kept riding its orbit, but a ship that undocked hit the atmosphere's pressure drag and lost more than half of its 25 km/s orbital speed in one second, drifting away from the station for good. Station height is now measured from the top of the atmosphere, not the surface, so departing Alpha Centauri feels exactly like departing Earth. The Earth, Barnard's Star and Sirius start sites are completely unchanged.
• Fixed The astrophoto posted to the fediverse twice a day missed a slot. The subject list contained objects that cannot be photographed at all: deep-field galaxies like GN-z11 really are a single unresolved dot, so there is no image to render — but the list admitted them on their "galaxy" classification alone. When that midnight slot landed on one, every capture attempt failed and no post went out. Those objects are no longer photo subjects (you can still visit them in game), and a failed capture now falls back to a different object instead of losing the slot. The missed midnight photo was posted right away.

2026-07-31 Friday

• Fixed Exoplanets look different from each other — until now, 122 of them were the same Jupiter. The code picking a procedural planet's surface colours looked up its palette by the body's name instead of its kind. Only solar-system bodies (Jupiter, Saturn…) matched, so every other giant fell through to Jupiter's palette. Even blue ice giants came out brown — and since only the atmospheric limb used the real colour, you got a brown body with a blue rim. Each planet's own colour now drives its surface, and band count, band width and storm vortices vary per planet. Solar-system bodies look exactly as before.
• Added Physics now decides how a planet looks — lava worlds, ocean worlds, sub-Neptunes. Appearance used to come from radius alone. Now the equilibrium temperature set by the distance to the host star decides too. Rocky planets hugging their star (Rigel b at 2,232 K) become worlds with lava glowing through fissures; temperate rocky worlds with an atmosphere get continents, oceans and cloud bands; cold ice worlds get ice fractures and frost instead of craters.
• Fixed Worlds like Tau Ceti e and Gliese 581 d no longer look like the Moon. At 1.6–2.5 Earth radii these are sub-Neptunes wrapped in a thick hydrogen envelope, yet they were drawn as cratered moons — and you could land on them. They now render as hazy, faintly banded worlds, and since they have no solid surface you plunge into the clouds instead of landing (same as a gas giant — fly it by hand and you can climb back out).
• Added Exoplanet giants can have rings. Rings existed only for Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. Some exoplanet giants now wear rings in their equatorial plane with a tilted spin axis, casting ring shadows on the planet.
• Fixed Atmospheres are decided by real physics. Whether a planet had an atmosphere used to be essentially a coin flip, which left one exoplanet in three airless for no reason. The game now works out both whether gravity can hold an atmosphere and whether the stellar wind has stripped it away — the very reason the Moon and Mercury are airless. Hot, close-in worlds lose theirs; cold, massive ones keep thick ones.
• Fixed Saturn's small moons are told apart. All 128 irregular moons, 2–5 km across, were drawn as the same grey-brown ball. Bodies that small cannot pull themselves round, so they are now potato-shaped and each one different.

2026-07-25 Saturday

• New The sky became three-dimensional — leave the Sun and the constellations deform. Until now the stars were a picture painted on a sphere, so whichever system you reached, the constellations looked exactly as they do from Earth. Some 2,800 stars now carry their measured parallax distance, and the sky is re-projected from wherever your ship is. Arrive at Alpha Centauri and Sirius has moved 27 degrees and dimmed to 0.81×. Go all the way to Sagittarius A* (26,000 light-years) and every naked-eye star we know gathers into one small patch of sky, in the Sun's direction. Inside the solar system the sky looks exactly as before.
• New 190 stars genuinely change brightness. Only variables with a measured period and amplitude were included — a star whose period was never measured stays constant in game too. Algol dims 3.2× every 2.87 days as its partner eclipses it (42 eclipsing binaries do this), and Betelgeuse brightens and fades over 2,335 days. Wind time forward and you can watch them.
• Improved Star colours got finer. Spectral types used to collapse into seven buckets, so B0 and B9 looked identical. The decimal subclass is now used as well, giving 75 distinct tints — the longer you look at a star field, the more you see it.
• Improved Distant objects grow as you approach. Nebulae, clusters and galaxies are now sized and placed by their real distance from your ship. Previously you could cruise hundreds of light-years toward the Pleiades and it never moved or grew.
• New A new destination — Gaia BH3, the black hole that doesn't shine. At 32.7 solar masses it is the heaviest stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy and the nearest of its class (1,924 light-years). It has no accretion disk: its companion is too far away to feed it, so it glows at no wavelength — not even X-rays. You know it is there only from the starlight bent into arcs behind it. Beside it, the old metal-poor giant that gave it away circles on an 11.6-year orbit.
• New The great comet of 2024, Tsuchinshan–ATLAS (C/2023 A3). The naked-eye comet of last autumn, on its measured orbit — a weakly hyperbolic path that takes it out of the solar system for good.
• New Betelgeuse has a companion. The companion apparently caught by direct imaging in 2025 (a candidate, not a confirmation) now orbits at 8.6 AU. It is the object thought to cause Betelgeuse's 2,335-day brightness cycle — the same variation described above.
• Fixed Epsilon Indi Ab's orbit corrected. It carried an older measurement (11.55 AU) instead of the orbit JWST's direct imaging revealed (28.4 AU). The nearest super-Jupiter now orbits at its real distance.

2026-07-21 Tuesday

• New Alpha Centauri gains a real candidate planet. The candidate gas giant α Cen Ab, imaged by JWST in 2024 in the habitable zone of the nearest sun-like star, now orbits with its measured elements (2.1 AU, a markedly eccentric e≈0.4). The fact that follow-ups haven't re-detected it yet — its 'candidate' status — is stated right in the destination notes. Fly there and see for yourself, under a sky with a second sun (α Cen B).
• New Saturn gains 128 moons, for a total of 274. The irregular moons the IAU Minor Planet Center confirmed in one batch in March 2025 are in, with their real measured orbits. Most orbit backwards (retrograde) in the Norse group — debris clouds from ancient collisions. The destination tree's "Saturn's moons" now counts 132, and every one can be landed on — including a 1 km-radius rock, the smallest body in the game.
• New Our galaxy's central black hole never rests. JWST's 48-hour continuous stare at Sagittarius A* revealed non-stop variability — faint seconds-to-minutes flickers plus a few big flares every day — and the accretion-disk render now carries it. It runs deterministically on real time, so every visitor sees the same flare at the same moment. Linger a while and wait for an eruption.
• New A new deep-sky destination: Apep. Four nested amber dust spirals sculpted by the colliding winds of two Wolf-Rayet stars — a structure JWST resolved this year beyond the ground-based 'pinwheel' picture, and one of the rarest objects in the galaxy. Find it in the sky, aim, and cruise there yourself (~7,800 light-years).

2026-07-18 Saturday

• Overhaul Nebulae now look like real astrophotography. The way emission nebulae are drawn has been rewritten. The soft gradient with thin coloured lines scribbled across it — fake filaments — is gone, replaced by a fractal cloud of turbulent gas: red H-α through the bulk, teal O-III in the bright ionized core, and dark dust lanes weaving between — the layers you see in Hubble and JWST images. Every nebula painting on the sky is affected: Orion, Carina, Eagle, Lagoon, Horsehead, the Crab, and more.
• Overhaul Flying inside a nebula was reworked too. The volumetric gas that unfolds when you fly into a nebula's chart is now drawn with fibrous gas tufts instead of round fog, wearing the same ionization colours (teal core, red bulk, dark dust). Newborn stars sit embedded in it as sharp points with diffraction spikes.
• Fix Nebula gas failing to appear when you arrived. Arriving quickly could leave you inside a nebula with no gas cloud showing; it now always unfolds correctly.
• Added Five more beautiful deep-sky places in the guide gallery. Places Worth Visiting gains the Veil Nebula (a supernova remnant), the North America and Cat's Eye nebulae, and Bode's Galaxy (M81) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) — all captured live in-game, each with a link that takes you right there.
• Housekeeping The nebula photos on the landing page and gallery (the Pillars of Creation and others) were re-shot with the new look.
• Improved The whole scene is brighter. Following feedback that the ship and planets looked too dark, global exposure and lighting were raised — dark Mars and Moon surfaces and your ship on a deep-space cruise all read more clearly, while white-out near bright stars is still tamed by adaptive exposure.
• Fixed The predicted-path line is hidden behind planets. The red/blue trajectory line used to draw over a planet's disk; now the segment that passes behind a planet is occluded by it, so it's obvious which part of the path is in front and which is behind.

2026-07-16 Thursday

• Overhaul Mission Replay (/replay), rebuilt on real orbital mechanics. Every replay flight now plays on trajectories that actually integrate gravity and thrust. The stutter at every keyframe is gone, and each vehicle's nose follows the physical thrust vector — the Falcon 9 boostback flip and engines-first entry and landing burns now emerge from dynamics, not hand-tuned animation. The viewer also inherits the game's post-processing (bloom), and each propellant burns true to life: kerosene orange, hydrogen pale blue, Raptor violet-blue, hypergolic blush — with sea-level mach diamonds and vacuum plume expansion. Watch now →
• New Replay detail — real markings, landing zones, the droneship, launch-site terrain. The Saturn V's USA and flag, Redstone's UNITED STATES, Falcon 9's SPACEX logotype and the SLS NASA worm are painted on; Earth, Moon and Mars now shade from real elevation data (ETOPO1, LOLA, MOLA). Launch and landing sites get dedicated high-resolution terrain patches, Falcon boosters touch down on their own circular landing zones instead of the launch pad, and the Falcon Heavy core descends to a droneship at sea. Launch skies are now daylit — blue (butterscotch on Mars) fading to black space as you climb, stars rising with altitude, a sun with real lens glare, two drifting cloud layers, and oceans textured with currents and swell.
• New Collapsible flight console (mobile). Fold the new console card with the ⌄ button — only the destination and a one-line status remain, giving the sky back to the stars. Your choice is remembered.
• Fix Black-hole news now comes with a photo. When a ship crosses an event horizon, the fediverse post now carries a lensed portrait of that very black hole.
• New A new flight console — the whole voyage on one card. If the six cockpit monitors felt daunting, the new unified glass console at the bottom of the screen is now the default: your destination (tap for the full list), the flight-plan timeline (✓/▶/○ chips showing which legs are done), time left in the current leg with a progress bar, and four instruments — remaining distance, current speed, ETA, and time dilation (your ship clock vs Earth) — all on one card, with context buttons (Depart / Enter orbit / Land / ➕ Add to plan) underneath. Press B anytime to switch back and forth with the classic 6-monitor cockpit; your choice is remembered. A full walkthrough with screenshots (reading the card, choosing destinations, the plan timeline, manual flight and switching) is at → Guide · Controls — New Flight Console.
• Improved The website's "go there" links now teleport you. Clicking a destination link on the landing page or gallery used to merely retarget your ship — the actual scenery was still a long flight away. Now you jump right in front of that world (in a stable orbit) instantly: brand-new visitors start there with a fresh ship, and pilots already mid-voyage confirm once first. The jump is never recorded in your voyage log — only distance you actually fly counts.
• New Arrive at a star cluster and you now stand among its stars. The Pleiades (M45) has long been a place you could sail to — but on arrival the cluster was still pasted far away on the backdrop. Now getting there surrounds you with its actual stars: Alcyone, Atlas, Merope and the rest of the Seven Sisters sit at their real measured sky positions (the shape you know from Earth, unfolded around you), alongside hundreds of unnamed members and the blue reflection nebulosity the cluster is drifting through. At the Virgo and Coma clusters the members aren't stars at all but hundreds of galaxies, with a giant elliptical at the core.
• Improved Saturn's rings now cast their shadow onto Saturn. The rings lay dark bands across the cloud tops, and the gap between them (the Cassini Division) stays a gap in the shadow too. Planets that spin on their side, like Uranus, cast theirs at that same tilt.
• Fixed Martian dust storms now arrive in their real season. They used to swell at any time; like the real Mars, dust now rises and veils the surface only around southern summer, when Mars is closest to the Sun. A Martian year is 687 days, so wind time forward to watch the seasons turn.
• Fixed The Crab Nebula and the stars are painted their true colours. The Crab (M1) — the wreckage of a supernova — was being coloured like the pink glow of a stellar nursery. It now reads as the orange filaments of expanding debris around a blue core. Nearby stars, which all shared one colour per class, are now painted from their measured spectral type, so the subtle differences between red dwarfs come through.

2026-07-14 Tuesday

• New More famous ships now roam the system for you to cross paths with. Vessels from classic sci-fi fly story-true routes through the Solar System — the Event Horizon haunts the space near Neptune before drifting off into the dark, the Heart of Gold (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) blinks to improbable coordinates on its Infinite Improbability Drive, the Rocinante (The Expanse) patrols the asteroid Belt from Ceres, and Discovery One (2001: A Space Odyssey) sets out for Jupiter. You may meet them on radar or in the sky as they pass close during flight (display only — not targetable or hailable).

2026-07-13 Monday

• Improved Real terrain resolves far more sharply as you close in on a planet or moon. Bodies with measured elevation data — Earth, Mars, the Moon, and more — are now re-sculpted on a much finer mesh the moment you get close (approach, orbit, landing). Crater rims, canyon walls, and basin edges stand out with a crisper silhouette and real relief. It simply makes the terrain we already ship visible — nothing new is downloaded — and gas giants (no surface) and distant views are unchanged.

2026-07-12 Sunday

• New Log in to manage more than one ship. Sign in with a passkey or recovery phrase and — without even entering the game — the new /account page shows your fleet (all the ships you own), lets you start any of them, delete (retire) one, or spin up a new ship at a start location of your choice. Credentials now bind to your account rather than a single ship, so you can register a passkey even before you own any ship. The landing page and the start-location picker gained sign-in prompts too. Logging in stays optional — just open the game and you're flying.

2026-07-11 Saturday

• Improved Your ship stays clearly visible from any angle or distance. Even after the previous day's lighting pass, the hull could still sink into the dark when the ship was seen small, side-on, or from behind — the spectator angle, especially the demo ship at /demo. We finished the job so the ship softly self-lights regardless of viewing angle: far away and edge-on in deep space, it no longer vanishes but reads as a crisp silhouette. Background stars and nebulae, and the sunlit faces, are left as they were.

2026-07-10 Friday

• Improved Your ship now reads clearly even in the dark. On a deep-space cruise, when the ship faced away from the Sun its body used to sink to near-black. We added a soft multi-directional fill that lights the hull from every angle while leaving the background stars and nebulae dark — so the ship stands out in three dimensions. Most noticeable on the demo ship at /demo.
• Improved A cleaner demo-ship info panel. The visit log now lives in a fixed-height scroll with numbered stops and always shows the latest arrival, so it never grows to cover the screen. The panel moved to the bottom-right with status and itinerary side by side to keep it short — much less intrusive on mobile.
• Stability A major hardening pass on the invisible foundations. Every background worker pool now self-recovers if a worker dies unexpectedly — the universe keeps ticking instead of freezing. Reconnects after a server restart or deploy are spread out with exponential backoff, so coming back online feels smoother. And deploys that fail verification now roll back to the previous version automatically.
• Added A demo ship now tours the system — watch it live. A server-driven demo ship keeps picking nearby solar-system bodies and flying orbit insertions on its own. Watch it in real time at /demo (external view only — no controls, no cockpit), with a small panel showing the current destination, remaining distance and time, current speed, and its visit history. It's a real ship, so you may also catch it passing by on radar while you fly.
• Added Zodiacal light and the gegenschein now grace the sky. In the real night sky, dust drifting between the planets scatters sunlight into the zodiacal light — a soft slanted pillar rising along the horizon before dawn and after dusk — plus the faint gegenschein glow exactly opposite the Sun. Both are now rendered: a soft cone of light lies along the planetary plane toward the Sun, and on arriving at another star system it follows that star as "exozodiacal light".
• Improved The Milky Way is split in two — like the real one. The real Milky Way appears cleaved from Cygnus down to Sagittarius by a foreground dust lane (the Great Rift). That meandering dark corridor is now carved into the background band, and the band's stars mix color temperatures — golden old stars toward the galactic bulge, blue-white young ones outward — reproducing a long exposure's color separation.
• Improved A subtle cinematic color grade covers the frame. The astrophotography look stays, now with a restrained split tone (highlights slightly warm, shadows slightly cool) and a gentle contrast curve. And the brightest object in any frame — the Sun — now throws diffraction spikes, so a sunrise over Earth's limb reads like a space-telescope photograph.
• Added Stars streak into lines near light speed. Once an interstellar cruise passes 0.25c, starlight stretches radially toward your direction of travel — warp streaking, movie-style, growing with speed. It switches off automatically while you're zoomed into a cockpit monitor, so readouts never smear.
• Fixed You can order a landing on another body while still landed. Requesting a Mars landing while sitting on the Moon used to be silently refused. A landed ship asked to land/orbit/swing-by at a different body now chains automatically: lift-off → autopilot flight → landing, in one command. (Re-requesting the same body, or being docked at a station, still needs an explicit launch/undock.)
• Improved The re-entry warning stays up long enough to act on. The "⚠️ Re-entry warning — trajectory into the atmosphere" toast used to vanish after 7 seconds like any other notice. It now stays for 30 seconds, and while the falling trajectory persists the warning re-fires periodically, so it effectively never disappears.
• Fixed Swing-bys are now recorded in exoplanet systems too. Threading a planet's gravity well for an assist in another star system used to leave nothing — no "swing-by begun/ended" toasts, no logbook flyby entry, no co-op swing-by flag — unlike the Solar System. Toasts also show the planet's real name now instead of internal ids like "proxima:b".
• Improved The first sky appears much faster. The background star catalogue (1.24M real stars, 6.8 MB) used to download whole before the sky completed; now the bright all-sky stars (0.35 MB) appear first and the rest streams in starting with the patch of sky you're facing. On phones, out-of-view patches unload automatically so memory stays flat.
• Improved The background sky is lighter on your device and lasts longer. Streaming the real galaxy catalogue used to rebuild the whole backdrop (with a subtle hitch and a memory leak) every time new galaxies flowed in along your sightline; it now runs on a render budget — famous objects keep their painted portraits while thousands of distant background galaxies draw as a single point cloud. The 1.24-million-star Gaia catalogue (6.8 MB) is also pinned in your browser now, so revisits download nothing.

2026-07-09 Thursday

• Improved Black holes now look like the film Interstellar. The focused black hole is redrawn with a real-time gravitational lens — each pixel's light is traced back through the hole's gravity, so the accretion disk wraps over and under the black shadow (Interstellar's iconic look) and background stars bend around it. Where the wrap used to be faked, the disk's far side is now genuinely light bent back into view. Cruise to Sagittarius A* to see it. (Low-spec devices fall back to a lighter lens automatically; it's an honest real-time approximation, not full numerical relativity — → the physics of black holes.)
• New Visit the first exomoons ever detected. More than 6,000 exoplanets have been found, but a moon orbiting one had never been confidently detected — until, in 2026, two satellites were found around CD-35 2722 B (the brown-dwarf companion of a distant red dwarf), the first confident exomoon detection (Hoy et al., Nature 2026). We've reflected that real discovery in the game: cruise to that brown-dwarf system and you can now see its two moons orbiting near a 2:1 resonance, just like Jupiter's Galilean moons. (The detection is by radial velocity, so only minimum masses are known — the radii are honestly estimated as gas giants.) See Research reflected in the game for details.
• Improved The night sky is filled with real stars all the way south. The background starfield (the real Gaia catalog) was missing the far-southern sky (declination below −60°), so looking that way showed a hard diagonal edge where the star density cut off — a "misaligned background" seam. Fixed: ~1.24 million real stars now span the whole sky and the Milky Way band runs unbroken from any direction.
• Fixed You can now sign the guestbook on exoplanets and their moons. Landing on a planet or moon of another star system (reached by interstellar cruise) left the tablet's 📖 guestbook refusing to record, saying "no nearby body." Fixed: just like Solar-System bodies, being close to one (within 12 radii) now lets you leave a visit record and stamp.
• Fixed The cockpit window's star density no longer swings wildly between zoom levels. Wheel-zooming inside the cockpit drew every star at the same fixed screen-pixel size, so a wider field of view packed far more of those same-size dots onto the screen and the sky could look like a solid carpet at max zoom-out. Stars now shrink on screen as the field of view widens, just like a real camera lens, so the sky reads at a similar density whether you're zoomed all the way in or out.
• Improved Cut background star density again. Looking toward a dense part of the Milky Way (especially on mobile) could still look like near-solid "TV static" even after today's earlier thinning pass. The real catalog is untouched — only the on-screen draw rate was cut roughly in half again, so black space is visible between stars even in the densest directions.
• Improved The background was still too bright at Sagittarius A* (the galactic-centre black hole). Even after two earlier passes, targeting a body near the galactic centre black hole could still leave the background almost solid white. It turned out the "bright star" tier — never thinned until now — was dense enough on its own in some directions to whiteout the screen. It now gets a light thinning too, with extra cuts the closer a direction is to the galactic plane (the band the Milky Way runs along), so black space stays visible between stars no matter which way you look.
• Improved Still too many stars, and detail actually looked worse. Cutting count alone left the surviving stars just as large and soft (each one glows), so they covered about the same screen area — just as a few big, flat blobs instead of many, which read as less detailed, not more. This pass shrinks each star's own size and brightness along with its count, so the area any single star covers goes down too. The result is more open black space and crisper, more resolved-looking points.
• Improved That pass overshot into "too faint." Shrinking size and brightness together opened up more black space, but the surviving stars looked dim and washed-out too. Keeping the same amount of black space and the same star count, brightness alone is back up, so each star stays small and crisp but reads clearly instead of faint.
• Improved The background still looked too bright specifically while firing the engine on autopilot. The non-firing view was already at the target level, but it got noticeably worse the moment the engine lit. The cause turned out to be the engine flame graphic itself, not the background stars — its bright white core bloomed hard enough on a real device screen to visually inflate the nearby starlight along with it. Dimmed the flame so the background doesn't blow out during a burn.

2026-07-08 Wednesday

• Fix The entry screen ("verify you're human") could get stuck. A security header (CSP) added the day before accidentally blocked the human-check widget's script, so some new visitors couldn't get past the verification card. The widget is now allowed to load properly, so sign-in flows smoothly again (players already in a session were unaffected).
• Fix Witnessing a celestial appointment no longer triggers a stray "FRB detected" alert. When you actually witness a reserved conjunction, only the "✨ Witnessed — logged to your logbook" notice should appear — but while building the sighting's directional flash, an empty "📡 FRB detected · DM undefined" alert was firing alongside it. Witnessing now shows only its own notice, while genuine radio-burst (FRB) detections during cruise still display as before.

2026-07-07 Tuesday

• New 🔭 Celestial appointments — an ephemeris calendar of upcoming planetary conjunctions. The simulation moves the Sun, Moon and planets on real orbital mechanics. Now, from your ship's actual position, it predicts the upcoming conjunctions and close approaches in your sky and lists them as a calendar in the cockpit tablet's 🔭 Sky tab — "Moon–Saturn appulse, in 4 days." Tap "Reserve" on any appointment to set a course to a body where you can watch it up close. It isn't authored content — it's the real sky, so it's endlessly fresh and, if you miss one, the next cycle comes around (it works anywhere beyond Earth — e.g. "Earth transiting the Sun as seen from Jupiter").
• New Witness an appointment and it's stamped ✨ into your logbook. If the conjunction really unfolds in your sky at the reserved time, a ✨ sighting is recorded permanently in your 📓 Logbook — your own growing collection of the sky. Forecast → voyage → witness → record: the loop closes.
• New A gentle nudge as a reserved appointment approaches. When a reserved appointment is within an hour, a browser notification quietly reminds you (even if the tab is in the background). Upcoming striking conjunctions are also pre-announced on the fediverse timeline with a link to come observe — an invitation, never a demand.
• Improved Stability & security hardening. A full server security pass raised resilience to abuse and overload — a malformed navigation reservation can no longer corrupt a ship's state, extra limits stop repeated bursts of certain requests from slowing the shared world's tick, and standard security headers (CSP and friends) now protect the pages. Gameplay is unchanged.
• Improved Real terrain now reaches all four great asteroids. On top of Ceres and Vesta, the observed shapes of Pallas and Hygiea (from VLT/SPHERE imaging) are now sculpted into their terrain — Hygiea is the smoothest surface in the solar system (re-accreted after a family collision), while Pallas is the most heavily cratered, with a large southern-hemisphere basin and a bright equatorial spot. Nothing is invented: only what has actually been observed is carved in (bodies whose shape isn't yet resolved are honestly left smooth).
• Fix Cockpit monitors no longer warp like ripples during fast cruise. Near light speed a relativistic distortion (starlight pulled toward your heading) is applied across the whole screen — but it was also barrel-bending the text when you focused a cockpit monitor to read a flat UI. Now that screen-warp is switched off while a monitor is focused (text stays crisp), while the warp on the starfield outside stays intact.
• Fix The speed readout no longer rounds up to light speed (1.0c). A ship physically cannot reach the speed of light — it caps at 0.9999c — yet the readout could round up and appear to hit "1.0c." It now never displays 1.0c below light speed, so the number you see never contradicts the physics.

2026-07-06 Monday

• Fixed a scheduled orbit insertion now actually arrives. When you queued an orbit insertion to a distant body (Pluto, Jupiter…) from the ISS and the departure aimed through Earth, the launch burn dipped into the atmosphere, the re-entry guard fired, and the maneuver was cancelled — leaving your ship parked in Earth orbit (roughly ⅓–½ of departures, depending on timing). The autopilot now climbs out of Earth's gravity well first and then heads for the target, so when it says "12 h remaining" you really are orbiting it 12 h later.
• Fixed clicking a cockpit control no longer bounces you back to the free-look view. On desktop, while focused on a monitor, a click that just missed a small button used to eject you to free-look. A near-miss on the focused panel now keeps focus — you only leave by clicking off the monitors, or with Esc.
• New a "returning" cue when you've overshot your destination. After a high-speed swing-by carries you far past a target, ordering an orbit or landing means the ship must brake its outbound speed to zero before it can come back — so the remaining distance rises for a while, which is expected. The star chart and arrival readout now show "↩ Returning" so the growing number doesn't look like a malfunction.
• Fixed the returning cue now includes a remaining time. During the "↩ Returning" phase the arrival ETA used to be blank; it now integrates the full round trip (brake the outbound speed, then close again) and shows a real figure like "↩ Returning · 12 h". The first time you enter the return leg, a one-time note also explains that the rising distance is normal braking.
• Fixed no more re-entry warning flicker on a normal departure. Leaving the ISS toward a distant body used to briefly flash a re-entry warning while you were actually climbing safely out of Earth's gravity well. That noise is gone; genuine fall-in warnings and the automatic abort still work.
• New "Arriving" — the real clock time you'll reach your destination. The simulation runs 1:1 with real time, so once you reserve a destination the nav readout shows the actual arrival time, e.g. "🎯 Arriving: tomorrow 14:20" — drop back in at that moment to watch it happen. That's your next appointment. With nothing reserved it invites you to reserve a destination, and on arrival it nudges you to book the next one — the idle-voyage rhythm: reserve, then check back now and then.
• New the logbook now tracks "braking distance". The ground you cover while decelerating under retro thrust (flip-and-burn) is recorded separately from total burn distance — a record of how much you braked along the way.
• Fixed a scheduled landing now tells "approach" apart from "descent". Queuing a landing on a distant body used to read "Powered descent · Too fast — brake!" for hours before arrival, looking like an overspeed. The long cruise in now shows "🛰 Approaching to land" (arrival ETA, distance to surface, approach speed); only once inside the descent corridor does it switch to "🛬 Powered descent" (altitude, descent rate, touchdown safety).

2026-07-05 Sunday

• Earth — your starting point — now has real terrain. The Earth you face every time you undock from the ISS now carries NOAA ETOPO1 measured elevation. Approach or land and the real continents rise into real relief — the Himalayas, the Andes, ocean trenches — in their actual places. (It's the fifth body with real terrain, after Mars, the Moon, Mercury and Venus.)
• Fixed falling out of Earth orbit by accident no longer costs you your ship. Starting in low Earth orbit and drifting into a re-entry used to burn you up — game over. Now a re-entry warning appears on a decaying trajectory (nudging you to burn prograde), and if you still touch the atmosphere the onboard guard auto-recovers a safe orbit and your flight continues. (Decayed-orbit burn-up and black-hole event horizons are unchanged.)
• Fixed ships getting buried inside the star on planets that hug their sun (tight systems like LTT 9779). The star's apparent size no longer swallows very close-in orbits.

2026-07-04 Saturday

• Arriving at a gallery destination now flies you right up to the sight. Follow a "Fly here →" link from the website gallery or research pages to another star system, and you now auto-approach the system's headline body for the same close-up the photo shows (previously you stopped at a distant wide shot).
• Fixed the mirror planet LTT 9779 b now shines silver like its gallery photo. The only known ultra-hot Neptune (albedo 0.80) used to arrive as a flat white/dark ball; it now renders as a steel-chrome sphere with a blue atmospheric rim. The arrival point was also nudged farther out so the planet no longer fills the screen.
• Four more nebulae to fly into. The Rosette, Omega (Swan), North America and Trifid (M20) nebulae are in at their real coordinates and distances. Like the other famous nebulae, cruise up to one and you fly through a giant volumetric gas cloud — from a distant glow into the star-forming region itself.
• You now cross paths with "interstellar visitors" mid-cruise. Voyaging between the stars, you occasionally encounter one of the real interstellar objects that actually passed through our Solar System — 1I/'Oumuamua, 2I/Borisov and 3I/ATLAS. The screen flashes toward the direction it came from, and a notification names it with its discovery year and interstellar speed (v∞). It's the same family of mid-cruise transient events as the FRB flashes.
• Interstellar comets glow with a red coma. Meet the three interstellar visitors (1I/2I/3I) near the Sun and they shine with a reddish coma and dust tail — reflecting their real red surfaces (3I/ATLAS especially) and instantly distinguishing them from the cyan comae of ordinary Solar-System comets.
• Interstellar cruise now drops you "among the planets." Arriving in another star system used to leave you in the far outer dark (~40 AU); you now come out inside the outermost planet's orbit — return to the Solar System and you emerge inside Pluto's orbit (~25.6 AU), with planets in view the moment you arrive. Each system adapts to its own orbital scale, while black-hole and deep-space destinations keep a safe standoff distance.
• Fixed the screen washing out milky white in star-dense skies. Toward crowded galactic-plane directions like Sirius, the view — especially on mobile — could get bleached and hazy by stacked starlight. Auto-exposure is re-tuned to hold dark regions while reining in the bright ones, so stars stay crisp even in the thick of the Milky Way.

2026-07-03 Friday

• You now catch the universe's radio flashes (FRBs) mid-cruise. During an interstellar cruise, a light-delayed radio burst occasionally arrives from a real Fast Radio Burst's sky direction — the screen flashes toward it and a notification names the FRB and its dispersion measure. From a 16.35-day periodic repeater to a Milky-Way magnetar to the most distant FRB known, all real objects (CHIME/FRB Catalog 2). → the research
• JWST's "Little Red Dots" now dot the deep sky. JWST's mysterious high-redshift compact red active galactic nuclei (Little Red Dots) are in, as clusters of red point sources toward 7 real JWST deep fields. → the research
• Fixed autopilot buttons that wouldn't respond after picking a destination. In particular, arriving at another star system and selecting one of its planets left "Orient to destination" unresponsive — that's fixed, and a deploy gate now cross-checks every destination × every action so any enabled autopilot button always works, whether the target is in the same star system or another.
• Arriving at an exoplanet system now feels like an arrival. Fixed the empty-sky problem after an interstellar cruise: the system's planets now show up immediately as bright dots with name labels at any distance, and the central star properly shines from the ~40 AU drop-off point. Pick a planet from the destination list's “system bodies (arrivable)” group and fly straight into orbit insertion or a landing.
• Exoplanet landings now take about a real-time day. Ordering a landing from the arrival point used to crawl at a safety-capped approach speed for 54 real days (effectively impossible). Landing and orbit insertion now accelerate at full thrust in the far field — like Fastest Arrival — and only cap the speed inside the destination's vicinity. The same trip is now about one day.
• Real exoplanets: 9 systems → 21. Following the “what's known is measured” principle, the actual observed planets of Ross 128, Teegarden's Star (b/c/d), Luyten's Star (GJ 273), Gliese 667 C, Wolf 1061, Gliese 1061, Lacaille 9352 (GJ 887), Lalande 21185, Gliese 832, Epsilon Indi (Ab), Pollux and YZ Ceti are now in-game with their measured orbits and sizes (NASA Exoplanet Archive). Habitable-zone worlds carry atmospheres — landings fly the re-entry corridor.
• Two suns rise over Alpha Centauri. Companion star B joined on its measured binary orbit (semi-major axis 23.5 AU, period 79.9 years) — arrive at the Three-Body Problem stage and there are two suns in the sky. The companion is a genuine gravity source, not decoration.
• Black-hole travel is now complete. Planets around stellar-mass black holes (Cygnus X-1 and friends) were placed impossibly close and silently destroyed approaching ships — fixed, so you can now orbit and land on black-hole system planets. Also fixed a numerical instability that could fling a ship away near the horizon; venture too close and the intended tidal disruption → ISS restart now fires reliably.
• Guard rails. Meaningless or destructive commands are now rejected explicitly with a reason: landing on the Sun (a descent into the photosphere = losing your ship), orbit insertion around zero-gravity rocks (Phobos/Deimos — landing still works), and firing the engine or engaging autopilots mid-interstellar-cruise.
• Stability Fixed two interstellar dead-ends overnight (an unresponsive cruise button and fictional-body anchors), and expanded the pre-deploy gates: alongside the 139-destination reachability sweep, a 71-case feature matrix now exercises burns, attitude, cruising, orbit insertion, landings and black holes across state combinations on every deploy.
• Fixed a server crash when returning to the Solar System through a wormhole. Entering Sol via a wormhole network "trunk" exit restarted the whole server, disconnecting every traveler at once. Two latent defects with the same root were fixed alongside it (large-black-hole arrival points landing inside the event horizon, and a respawn failure at extreme clock times).
• One ship's error can no longer disconnect everyone. The server broadcast loop is now isolated per ship: if one ship's state trips an error, only that screen skips a beat and the server keeps running. And when an error happens in your game screen, an anonymous error signal (error message and location only — no personal data, at most 5 per session) reaches the server, and an ops monitor notices within 5 minutes — so problems are never something only the affected player knows about.
• Stability Widened the pre-deploy sweeps that catch these mismatches before they ship — all 249 wormhole edges traversed, cruise arrivals at all 89 star systems, plus a fuzzer that explores the state space with random command combinations on every deploy. The fuzzer found the two latent defects above on its very first runs.

2026-07-02 Thursday

• The night sky is real now. We vendored 943,084 stars (down to magnitude 11) from ESA's Gaia catalogue at their true positions, brightnesses and colours — about 330× the previous 2,856. The Milky Way band now appears as genuine star density (phones get a lighter 370k set). Galaxies too: 87,468 real galaxies from the GLADE+ catalogue (over 26,000 with proper NGC-style names) stream in along your sightline as you voyage, so the actual large-scale structure of the universe — the Virgo cluster and friends — is simply there.
• Mars, the Moon, Mercury and Venus are rebuilt from real terrain data. The full NASA laser-altimeter grids (Mars MOLA, Moon LOLA) plus real photographic surfaces (Viking, LROC) came onboard, and later the same day the resolution quadrupled (8 ppd) and global Mercury (MESSENGER) and Venus (Magellan) terrain joined. The mountain you see is the mountain you land on — the InSight site matches its published elevation (−2,613 m), Venus's Maxwell Montes rises +10.4 km, and Mercury's northern lowlands, Hellas basin and the lunar maria all sit at their true heights and places. Landing physics samples the same data.
• Real spacecraft across the solar system. Beyond the four in Earth orbit, you'll now find LRO, Danuri (KPLO) and Chandrayaan-2 at the Moon, the MRO, Odyssey, MAVEN, TGO and Tianwen-1 fleet at Mars, and the historic Akatsuki, Juno and Cassini (with their active years labelled) — 15 craft on their real orbital inclinations. Approach one and a name label appears (display-only — no collision, no comms). The replay viewer's Moon got the same real surface.
• Mission replay, overhauled. The lineup grew from 5 to 11 missions — adding Vostok 1 (first human spaceflight), STS-1 (first Shuttle), Artemis I, Sputnik 1, and the "successful failure" Apollo 13. Apollo 11 now plays the entire eight-day round trip — launch, Moon landing, lunar liftoff, redocking, Pacific splashdown. You can drag/swipe to orbit the camera during playback, jettisoned stages get their own picture-in-picture frames, and burn choreography, camera handoffs and re-entries were polished across every mission. In the evening Perseverance's "seven minutes of terror" Mars landing (supersonic parachute → heat-shield jettison → skycrane) joined as the eleventh mission — touching down on the real Mars terrain added the same day (replay guide).
• Orbit insertion and landing are much faster. Making the countdown honest exposed the real problem: the orbit/landing autopilot's long-range approach speed was pinned at 25 km/s, so the same destination took 17 hours by "fastest arrival" but 291 days by "enter orbit". Both now accelerate the same way the fast transit does, up to a safety limit scaled to the destination — Earth→Jupiter orbit insertion drops from 291 days to about 18 hours, Mars from 46 days to about 24 hours. Small moons (Phobos and friends) are approached even more carefully than before.
• Time-remaining is honest now. Fixed flight plans showing "18.6 h" that barely moved after a whole day. The old estimate assumed an idealized unlimited full-thrust flight, but the real autopilot caps its approach speed for safety. The countdown now integrates the actual speed profile the autopilot flies (cruise caps, braking curves, landing descent), so a long orbit insertion shows the time it really takes (days or months) and ticks down second for second. Flight plan, arrival ETA and the console all agree, and landing legs now show a time remaining too.

2026-07-01 Wednesday

• Mission replay. Rewind real rockets from liftoff to landing like a film — Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Starship, Apollo 11 and Freedom 7. Fast-forward or scrub to any moment, and view it in-game as an overlay too (replay guide).
• Real terrain across the solar system. After Mars and the Moon, seven more worlds — Mercury, Venus, Io, Titan, Ceres, Vesta and Pluto — are now rendered with measured terrain. Fly in close and real mountains, craters and canyons rise up: Valles Marineris, Olympus Mons, Sputnik Planitia and more.
• Measured surface colour (albedo). The Moon's dark maria now sit over the real basalt lowlands instead of random spots. Ceres's bright Occator faculae and Mercury's Caloris basin land at their true coordinates.
• Atmospheric scattering. On worlds with air, the limb now reddens into a bright sunset arc on the day side and a soft twilight on the night side, following the Sun's direction.
• The guide gained a note on ship scale (bodies are to true scale; ships and satellites are exaggerated so you can see them).
• Stability Added a test that checks every website link on every deploy, and improved internal performance so the simulation holds up under large fleets.

2026-06-30 Tuesday

• Ships are easier to see. Probes you track from far away (Voyager, New Horizons…) no longer render as pitch-black silhouettes, and hulls read better in the dark (anti-solar) side.
• Landing got deeper. You can now manually enter and escape gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. A ship can also retire — sent to the nearest black hole and frozen at the event horizon as a permanent memorial.
• Real terrain (Mars, Moon) arrived, and a third interstellar comet, 3I/ATLAS, joined the sky. You can even land on the tiny moons Phobos and Deimos.
• Graphics polish. Film grain (noise) reduced a lot; added depth-of-field, motion blur and a false-colour (non-visible light) mode. Browser notifications (arrival, flight-plan complete) can be turned on.
• New gamepad and console (mobile) guide pages, an end to objects poking through the cockpit, and auto orbit-insertion on undock.

2026-06-29 Monday

• Full manual flight. Fly the ship directly with 6-axis attitude control and a variable throttle (gamepad supported). An orbit-hold autopilot was added too.
• Mars landing + rotation. When you land, the ship sticks to that spot and turns with the planet's spin.
• More background ships (roaming fleets) like the Trisolaran formation, and picking up items with a robotic arm.
• Five cockpit UX improvements, a mobile-only /console panel, and fixes for the flickering autopilot trajectory line and crashes when landing on very small bodies.

2026-06-28 Sunday

• Cockpit immersion. Tuned the first-person field of view and adaptive exposure, and added background music and proximity sound effects.
• Spiral galaxies render, and the monitor UI improved.
• Multiple start locations. You can now begin not just at Earth (ISS) but at one of several real star systems.

2026-06-27 Saturday

• The universe got bigger. Fly into nebulae, reach the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's centre, a cosmic wormhole network, and all the way to the edge of the observable universe (→ the physics of cosmic expansion).
• Planet rings (Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune) — approach the ring plane and you pass among the individual particles.

2026-06-26 Friday · Official launch 🚀

• SPACE officially launched. No login — you begin spacewalking from the ISS the moment you connect. Works on mobile and desktop.
• A server-authoritative simulation where you experience real celestial bodies, orbital mechanics and relativity (the speed-of-light limit, time dilation, cosmic expansion) as an idle voyage.
• New here? Start with the first-flight tutorial and places worth visiting.

2026-06-24 Pre-launch · the leap

• You could now head out between the stars. A voyage that had stayed within the Solar System expanded into interstellar travel this day — a catalogue of real nearby stars, drawn with floating-origin rendering, puts other star systems in the sky, and you make the one-way trip on a relativistic sub-light cruise. The system you arrive at is realized by procedural generation at Solar-System-like density (exoplanets included), and one-way wormholes between the stars teleport you once found. Because of the light-speed limit, comms and other ships are isolated to your chart (star system) — go far enough and you really are alone.
• You could now sit inside the cockpit. Look around the Dragon capsule interior in first person, and watch onboard time slow with speed on a relativistic proper-time clock. Focus a front monitor to read its UI and swipe between screens with monitor navigation; a multiview also arrived, opening the external and cockpit views of the same ship in two windows at once.
• You could now keep your ship. The no-login start stays, but if you want, a recovery code and a passkey (WebAuthn) save ownership of your ship permanently and let you resume it across devices. A switcher for multiple ships was added too. Ownership is bound to a secret token rather than a public name, which also blocked ship hijacking between sessions.
• Earth took on the real shape of its continents. Natural Earth coastlines were baked in so the Americas, Eurasia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica and Greenland sit as recognizable shapes, with the polar seams gone (a first step, before Earth was later rebuilt from measured elevation).
• Fuel worries disappeared. It didn't suit an idle voyage, so the fuel concept was removed from the whole game — engine and attitude control (RCS) are now unlimited.
• You could now talk in emoji. Comms arrived with no free text — a structured vocabulary and emoji for greetings, status and navigation (with the light-speed delay intact).
• Stability Server security went up ahead of the public launch — handshake tokens, a command whitelist with argument validation, and connection/command rate limits.

2026-06-23 First commit 🌱

• SPACE's first code was committed this day. In a single day, the skeleton of a server-authoritative simulation stood up, then Solar-System bodies, single-engine flight and swing-by, then multiplayer and light-speed comms, then persistence, relativistic proper time, a symplectic integrator and real bright stars — and on top of it, a voyage you could actually fly.
• Begin at the ISS and head into space. You start docked, undock as a Dragon capsule, and face a real Earth with clouds and night-side city lights. A predicted trajectory line draws your path, an autopilot flies heading, orbit turns and swing-bys for you, and a radar scan — filling in over radio round-trip time — discovers other ships and distant bodies.
• Real satellites and probes are destinations. The ISS, Hubble, Tiangong, JWST and Voyagers 1 & 2 are placed from real orbital data (TLE, JPL Horizons, refreshed daily), and comets like Halley from their orbital elements — pick one and go, with distance, flight time and heading alignment.
• It fits your hand on mobile too. A bottom horizontal dock HUD that doesn't hide your ship, two-finger pinch zoom and vertical-swipe camera rotation let you voyage from a phone. The Milky Way and deep space are drawn in a long-exposure astrophotography style (glowing nebulae, colour-temperature star distribution, bright-star glow).
• Stability A Docker deployment setup and a Cloudflare Tunnel made it ready to share over the internet (SQLite by default, PostgreSQL optional).