The space center itself feels like an anomaly alongside these little green guys - it’s a very functional, utilitarian space filled with grey warehouses and little sign of life. They’re cute and goofy looking, and their world is pretty bland in terms of textures and graphics. The game sees you manage a space center for a bunch of little green aliens trying to explore their local solar system. Like many fantastic simulators, Kerbal may not look the part on first glance.

Despite its goofy exterior Kerbal Space Program is the detailed space simulator the layman needs, in order to fully respect the mind-boggling mental gymnastics that a space program must endure in order to overcome their greatest oppressor: gravity. That is the power of the simulation genre of video games. But one way to reclaim that fascination, that awe, is to put a regular human being in the pilot’s seat, or at the engineer’s workstation. It’s no surprise that the sense of wonder and achievement that carried the space program through the sixties and seventies has been diminished by the sheer vastness of the human imagination, to conceive of something more powerful and easier to use. It can seem basic, a far cry from the accessible and readable fiction that translates space travel into something as simple as driving a space car on an invisible highway. Sometimes it can make us a little apathetic towards the actual business of space travel these clunky aluminium tubes blasting directly up into the stratosphere, engineers whooping just because something actually got off the ground.

We’re accustomed to the idea of a Millennium Falcon or a Milano just leaping up from a standard-gravity planet into the vast depths of space, banking and flipping as it pleases and cruising to a smooth finish on an entirely different world. We’ve grown up on a diet of popcorn science fiction. Opinion Sam Quirke For anyone under the age of fifty and not actively pursuing a career in astrophysics, space travel is this strange concept pretty much removed from reality.

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