TheSpaceGame — Design Your Route To Jupiter

An anonymous reader writes "The Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency is celebrating World Space Week (4-10 October 2010) with the release of 'The Space Game,' an online game for interplanetary trajectory design. The Space Game is an online crowdsourcing experiment where you are given the role of a mission designer to seek the best path to travel through space. The interactive game, coded in HTML5, challenges the players to devise fuel-efficient trajectories to various bodies of the Solar System via a user-friendly interface. The aim of the experiment is get people from all ages and backgrounds to come up with better strategies that can help improve the effectiveness of the current computer algorithms. As part of the events organized worldwide for Space Week, the first problem of the game is to reach Jupiter with the lowest amount of propellant. The best scores by 10 October will be displayed on the Advanced Concepts Team website and the three best designs will also receive some ESA prizes."

Comments

Re:Can we stake our own assumptions?

[edremy]

While light speed (or any reasonable fraction thereof) is going to be unavailable due to energy issues, we should be rethinking the assumptions here. Minimizing Delta-V is great- but perhaps it would be better to think about propulsion strategies that can give us higher total delta-V rather than working out multiple gravity assist trajectories? While they work, they also tie you to very long flight times and narrow launch windows. The Grand Tour of Voyager 2 isn't possible anymore- even New Horizons needed a narrow range of dates or it would miss the Jupiter assist, adding several years to flight time.

Chemical rockets just aren't a great option- at least let us use an ion engine, or perhaps let us see what we can do with a VASMIR?