Don't Panic
About this site

Why Don't Panic?

On 14 November 2026 a Starship upper stage came home from orbit and was caught by its launch tower for the first time. Ship 42 had launched from Starbase, Texas, the evening before on Flight 15. It deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites and spent 22 hours, 32 minutes and 32 seconds in orbit, about 14 orbits. Then it fired its deorbit burn, survived reentry, banked toward Starbase and slid into the tower's arms on Orbital Launch Pad 2. Its booster, B22, detected a guidance problem, called off its own catch and diverted to the Gulf of Mexico.

Ship 42 carried the words DON'T PANIC, the advice printed on the cover of the guidebook in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In those books, 42 is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. This site is a one-day tribute: a game that lets anyone try the thing that just happened.

What's here

  • The game, in four modes: the Full Mission (deorbit, reentry, bellyflop and catch), a quick Ship Catch, a Booster Catch (the one B22 didn't get to make) and Rapid Reuse, an endless arcade. Every run uses a seed, so a shared link gives a friend exactly the same wind and starting position.
  • A shareable Flight Card for every flight, which you can download as a PNG or share as a link.
  • The Flight Log: all 15 integrated Starship flights and their outcomes.
  • The Hull Painter, for putting your own message on a Starship.
  • The Mission Control quiz: 10 random questions from a bank of 33.

How the physics is simplified

This is a game, not a simulator, but it borrows the real ideas:

  • Deorbit: the moment you burn and how hard you burn decide where you come down. Earth turns underneath you, and time slows near the window so you can aim. The orbit speeds are compressed.
  • Reentry: the game integrates real-shaped equations: an exponential atmosphere (7.2 km scale height), drag from a ballistic coefficient, lift at a lift-to-drag ratio of 0.5, and gravity minus centrifugal effect. Rolling the lift vector up or down is how real spacecraft control their range, and it's what you do. Heating follows the classic rule that it grows with the square root of air density and the cube of speed. It's normalised to a "tile limit" and sped up roughly 30×.
  • Bellyflop and catch: the falling ship tends toward a terminal velocity that rises with altitude. The flip takes 2.5 seconds on engine power, and the landing burn has a minimum throttle (real engines can't throttle to zero), so you can't simply hover. Thrust-to-weight, fuel, tolerances and tower dimensions are chosen to be playable. They aren't SpaceX's numbers.

Real-world numbers used for flavour and content: Block 3 Starship is about 124.4 m tall when stacked and 9 m wide. Super Heavy has 33 Raptor engines and the ship has 6 (3 sea-level, 3 vacuum). About 18,000 hexagonal tiles are rated to around 1,400 °C. The ship has four flaps and can lift about 100 t to low Earth orbit when fully reusable.

Sources

Credits

Game design, code, art and sound by the daily web studio at dailyma.de. All art is drawn in code and all sound is synthesised in your browser. No images or audio from SpaceX are used. Fonts: Saira Condensed, Inter, IBM Plex Mono, Bungee, Permanent Marker and Playfair Display, via Google Fonts. Nothing on this site tracks you. Best scores and settings stay in your browser's local storage.

This is an unofficial fan project. It isn't affiliated with or endorsed by SpaceX or NASA. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is the work of Douglas Adams.

Go fly