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

You've never heard of my ship?

[White Flame]

It can make the Jupiter run in less than twelve parsecs.

Waste of time

[Angst Badger]

This is exactly the kind of combinatorial optimization problem that is superbly well-suited for solution by software and quite possibly the last kind of problem you want to hand to a bunch of humans, unless those humans happen to be programmers with backgrounds in celestial mechanics, heuristics, and genetic algorithms.

As a way of driving public interest in the ESA's space program, it's not a bad idea at all, but if any of its users manage to come up with a better solution than the ESA's software, it's not a triumph for crowdsourcing, it's a sign that the ESA needs to hire new programmers.

Re:Waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

They mention Monte Carlo by name in their video. If they know about random simulations formally, surely they know about genetic algorithms. They say at the bottom of the home page,

We do not claim that computers are not able or are particularly bad at solving such problems. Rather, we think that 'watching' humans design complex interplanetary trajectories can be of help to improve the intelligence of computer algorithms.

This is for publicity and for fun. It's the only explanation that makes sense without more information.

Also, it's a decent example of the sort of thing possible with HTML5 crap, and it's GPL, so at least it's got that going for it.

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?

While we're on the topic... Orbiter

[seanthenerd]

Check out Orbiter - without a doubt the most realistic (and incredible) space flight simulator around. My little brother has basically taught himself orbital mechanics using Orbiter and online tutorials for the game (if you can call it that!) The real deal - Hohmann transfer orbits and spaceflight mechanics-type concepts I'd never heard of.

When I saw "the space game", I thought for sure they were talking about Orbiter. If "designing your own route to Jupiter" is something you're interested in, do yourself a favour and check it out.

Two Launches Necessary

[BlueStrat]

You'd have to do it in two launches, it won't work with only one.

The first launch needs to terminate with significant mass at many miles per second in Washington D.C. prior to the Jupiter launch in order to prevent the whole Jupiter project being killed halfway through planning.

Hey, just sayin'.

Strat

Dumbed-down GTOC

[Zoxed]

Although I work in the Space Industry I am not a Rocket Scientist but it is my understanding that this is *not* a purely computer solvable problem and is explained on the GTOC website: http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/mad/op/GTOC/indexII.htm