A hands-on gravity lab where you build worlds, bend their orbits, and occasionally watch them come apart.
Gravity is the oldest rule in the universe, and almost nobody ever gets to play with it. Astro Exploratorium is your chance — fling planets around stars, assemble whole solar systems from scratch, and figure out why any of it stays up. No equations to memorize, no installs, no accounts. Just you, a cursor, and roughly four billion years of physics you can nudge with the arrow keys.
WHAT IT IS
An interactive N-body gravity simulator running live in your browser. Two ways to play: Challenge, a guided campaign of orbital missions across four acts, and Freeform, an open sandbox whose only failure state is boredom. Feeling brave? Drop into a spaceship and fly the gravity wells yourself.
HOW IT'S BUILT
Handcrafted in vanilla JavaScript and Three.js — every orbit is computed frame by frame, not faked with animation. Procedural planets, atmospheric scattering, tidal spaghettification, and a Codex that unlocks real astrophysics as you discover it. Assembled by Evol Digital Productions, one gravitational anomaly at a time.
WHAT IT TEACHES
Everything the textbook makes dull: escape velocity, elliptical orbits, Lagrange points, gravity assists, orbital resonance, and what really happens near a neutron star. Nothing to cram, no test at the end. You'll just quietly start to understand why the planets stay up — which is more than most people can say.
Camera Controls
Ship Controls
Celestial Body Selection
Choose a preset, then use Spacebar inside the simulator to place it at the cursor.
A guided campaign of orbital-mechanics missions, run from Mission Control.
OBJECTIVE
Each mission places the bodies for you and hands you a single objective — your job is to give them the right push. Aim a velocity vector, launch the attempt, and read the outcome. Missions progress across four acts, from your first stable orbit to slingshots, Lagrange points, and neutron-star pulsars.
HOW IT PLAYS
- Click-drag from the highlighted body to aim its velocity vector, then press Enter to launch the attempt.
- RESET restarts the mission; ↻ BRIEFING replays the objective.
- Progression: Completing missions unlocks new concepts, presets, and physics (tidal disruption, collisions) for use in Freeform.
An open sandbox — build and break your own solar systems in real-time N-body gravity.
OBJECTIVE
There is no win condition. Construct planetary clusters, binary stars, or black holes, then watch the delicate balance of orbits give way to chaos, collision, and spaghettification. The sim starts paused — press Enter when you're ready to run it.
HOW IT PLAYS
- Pick a preset below, then press Spacebar to drop that body at your cursor.
- Click-drag from a body to aim its velocity, then release to set it loose.
- Persistence: Save and load your favorite configurations from local storage; hold Rewind Time to scrub the whole system backwards.