🎬 Real Mission Replay

Watch famous real spacecraft flights — from launch to landing and home again — rendered in-engine, separately from live play. Relive Falcon 9's first ground landing, Falcon Heavy's dual side-booster landing, Starship's tower booster catch, Apollo 11's full lunar round trip (landing AND the return to a Pacific splashdown), Shepard's first American spaceflight, Gagarin's Vostok 1, the first Space Shuttle flight STS-1, Artemis I's lunar round trip, Sputnik 1, Apollo 13's "successful failure", and Perseverance's "seven minutes of terror" Mars landing — eleven missions, in real time or fast-forward.

Open the replay now → /replay

How it's made. Each flight's public telemetry (the times, altitudes and speeds of liftoff, Max-Q, stage separation, boostback, entry and landing) is curated into a keyframe script and splined smoothly. It's keyframe interpolation, not a physics re-integration — so it's light and deterministic — and Earth uses the same measured coastline render as the game. Zero runtime external calls (self-sufficient): every value is a built-in asset.

Use the transport below the timeline — play, speed (1·4·16·60×), scrub, and milestone chapters — to jump to any moment. New missions are added simply by adding a script.

Falcon 9 · ORBCOMM-2 — First Ground Landing 2015-12-21

The first flight (Flight 20) on which SpaceX returned an orbital-class first stage to the launch site. The booster flies boostback, entry and landing burns to a vertical touchdown at Landing Zone 1.

Falcon Heavy · Demo Flight — Dual Booster Landing 2018-02-06

A 27-engine, three-core rocket lifts off, and the two side boosters separate and fly back to the Cape to touch down side by side at LZ-1 and LZ-2 — near-simultaneously (payload: a Tesla Roadster).

Starship · Flight 5 — Tower Booster Catch 2024-10-13

The largest, most powerful rocket ever flown. The 33-Raptor Super Heavy booster lifts off, hot-stages the Starship, and flies back to be caught by the launch tower's “chopstick” arms — a world first.

Apollo 11 · First Crewed Moon Landing — the Full Round Trip 1969-07-16

A Saturn V lifts off from Kennedy Space Center, reaches parking orbit and translunar injection, and after the three-day coast the lander Eagle sets down on the real dark ground of the Sea of Tranquility. The story doesn't stop there — the moonwalk, the ascent stage's lunar liftoff, rendezvous and docking with Columbia, transearth injection, a fireball reentry under three main parachutes, and the Pacific splashdown all play out on one continuous, scrubbable timeline.

Freedom 7 · First American in Space 1961-05-05

The Mercury-Redstone stack lifts off; after booster cutoff and tower jettison, Alan Shepard's capsule coasts through its 187 km apogee, retrofires, reenters and splashes down under parachute in the Atlantic ~487 km downrange.

Vostok 1 · First Human in Space (Gagarin) 1961-04-12

Gagarin's R-7 lifts off from Baikonur, its four strap-ons falling away in the "Korolev cross"; the spherical capsule circles the Earth once, retrofires, reenters and parachutes onto a field near Saratov — a 108-minute flight.

STS-1 · First Space Shuttle Flight (Columbia) 1981-04-12

Columbia sheds its SRBs and external tank on the way to orbit, spends two (compressed) days in space, then reenters on its reusable tiles and glides to a horizontal landing on the Edwards dry lakebed.

Artemis I · SLS/Orion Lunar Round Trip 2022-11-16

The most powerful rocket ever flown sends an uncrewed Orion to the Moon — a 130 km flyby and a distant retrograde orbit — before a skip reentry to a Pacific splashdown after 25.5 days.

Sputnik 1 · The First Satellite 1957-10-04

Korolev's R-7 lofts a polished 58 cm sphere to orbit, and the Space Age begins with the "beep… beep…" from its four whip antennas.

Apollo 13 · The Successful Failure 1970-04-11

An oxygen tank explodes en route to the Moon. The free-return swing around the far side with LM Aquarius as a lifeboat, the powered-down cold ride home, and the Pacific splashdown — the whole six-day rescue plays out.

Perseverance · The Seven Minutes of Terror 2021-02-18

The capsule hits the Martian atmosphere at 20,000 km/h and sets a rover down in Jezero Crater seven minutes later. A supersonic parachute, heat-shield jettison, and the skycrane maneuver lowering the rover on cables — over the game's real MOLA Mars terrain.

Real spacecraft near Earth, in-game

Separately from the replay, when you fly out near Earth during play you'll see real spacecraft orbiting in low Earth orbit — the Hubble Space Telescope, Tiangong, Crew Dragon, Soyuz. They are display-only: not targetable, not for comms or destinations — just there, sharing the sky.

※ Screenshots are captured automatically by a headless browser from the real replay (software rendering — an actual GPU looks sharper). Tap a photo to view it larger.