Postcards From the Moon
I’ve rekindled my enthusiasm for Orbiter recently. I had stopped playing Orbiter for a while, not so much because I lost interest in it, but because I had to explore some other games. (Oh, and also, contrary to what you might think after reading this post, I do have a real life.)
“Astronaut” isn’t the only fantasy I have. This past year, I also wanted to play “Gangster” for a while, so I played through The Godfather; and I took another couple of turns as “Badass“, so I played through Quake 4 and F.E.A.R.; and even now I take an occasional sojourn into being a “Zombie Apocalypse Survivor", so I am playing through Dead Rising. I’m also quite enthusiastic about Second Life, but I’m not sure exactly what I’m gratifying when I’m playing Second Life – my inner Libertarian/Capitalist/Sprawl-Dwelling/Gambler/Chat-Addict, perhaps.
In the end, though, my strongest fantasy is still “Astronaut", which is also why my lovely wife gave me a fantastic Christmas gift: she sent me to Florida to participate in the Astronaut Training Experience at the Astronaut Hall of Fame. ("Just think,” I said, “I get to hang with a bunch of middle-aged white male nerds just like me! When do I ever get a chance to do that?") It was actually a lot of fun, and I ended up participating in a “simulated Space Shuttle mission,” and even though I didn’t get to “fly” in the “shuttle", and was relegated to “Mission Control,” it was all actually pretty good – but not as interesting or as detailed as Orbiter. (Well, you know, they have to cater to their market. Make it too hard and you turn away potential customers, like the family who were there – Mom, Dad, and three teenagers, who were all acting like they’d rather be at Universal Studios.) All in all, the trip engendered in me an even greater desire to download the latest version of Orbiter and lose myself in it again. (But I don’t get a cool polo shirt from playing Orbiter.)
My new fling with Orbiter was also catalyzed by the recent NASA decision to build a new generation of space hardware, called the Constellation system. Constellation will be used to return to the moon by about 2020, and establish a permanent base on the Moon’s south pole by about 2024.
I don’t know if Constellation will ever fly. There will be four presidential and seven congressional elections between now and then. It seems to me that the moon base, while technically feasible, may not get the kind of sustained political support it will require. However, just because it may never come to pass, that doesn’t mean I can’t “fly” the proposed hardware; so I turned back to Orbiter. Orbiter has recently been updated, and there is an extensive online community of fans and modders, contributing add-ons which make it a very rich environment for the space flight enthusiast. As luck would have it, there exist a couple of add-ons which implement NASA’s Exploration System Architecture Study, a 2005 precursor to Constellation. That was close enough for me.
Orbiter is a very complex program - it’s not a game. It’s a lot of fun (if you’re a space nerd like me), but it doesn’t hold your hand, and there’s no guarantee it’ll even work, let alone that you’ll be able to do what you want to do. Sometimes, you even need to do a little math. (Horrors!) Although I’d flown a lot of Orbiter scenarios previously, I’d never done it with a vehicle as realistic (read: as limited) as Constellation. What a difference the realism makes! Flying these vehicles is difficult, but I have managed to do it pretty well. In the process, I got stuck once, trying to figure out how to launch toward the moon when it seemed as though the rocket I had didn’t quite have enough fuel to do the trick. It turned out that I’d only had Astronaut 101, and I needed the 201 class in order to pull off the maneuver. (But that points out another great thing about Orbiter: there’s a very friendly on-line community of sympathetic folks who are always willing to help you out.) Being able to fly to the moon has given me a real sense of satisfaction and accomplishment which I don’t really get from games.
You might be saying: “Accomplishment? What accomplishment?” And I take your point. See, beating a boss in a video game isn’t an accomplishment - games are purposely designed so that 10-year-olds can do them with just a little practice, after all. On the other hand, in Orbiter I’ve guided my boosters from launch into orbit, performed orbital rendezvous and docking maneuvers, left the Earth, entered lunar orbit, and landed, only 1.7 km away from where I intended to land, near the lunar south pole (In Shoemaker Crater, actually). Do these things really count as accomplishments? I’d argue they do, because I learned a lot about how these things are actually done in practice, even if Constellation never flies.
I’ve learned something else new: getting to the moon is actually pretty easy, compared to getting back. Every step of this trip has been more difficult than the previous step – and I’m told that reentry is the hardest part of all! I’m looking forward to it.
(PS - My wife also gave me “The Godfather,” “Quake IV,” and “F.E.A.R.” How cool is she?)