Space Developers Inc. - Space Apps Challenge

Space Developers Inc.| Breakthrough

Breakthrough

Faster-than-light travel is the key to humanity’s dreams of inter-galactic space travel. Your challenge is to create an app, tool, game, or other interactive application that showcases both existing, as well as next generation/theoretical, breakthrough spacecraft propulsion in an engaging way.

Break-Thru Lightspeed

Summary

Exploration of space is maybe the most important aim of humankind. The way on reaching our aim passes through propulsion systems. Informing people about these breakthrough propulsion types is very essential at this point. In order to reach a wider variety of people to inform and motivate about this, we designed a story-based game which is both fun and informative. The game shows important details about space travel, especially propulsion types (existing, next-generation, theoretical), values (acceleration) and important destinations. Most of the data were collected from the resources of NASA.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Humanity's one of the most important dreams is to become more developed in space travel. Reaching higher speeds (especially the speed of light and beyond) is the key to make these dreams come true. In fact, science makes more and more progression each day, although most of the people do not know much about it. A big step to get closer to our dream is to make people more informed and enthusiastic about the space travel. On this respect, we created a game, which shows the main points about the space travel by giving general information about specific propulsion types, speed and acceleration concept, and emphasizes the vastness of space. Also we designed the game fun (by using asteroids, etc.) to draw attention of more people.

Designing this game is important since it can achieve a lot of people easily and also gathers crucial informations together. While searching, we found out that there was not any proper application that explains the importance of propulsion types in an engaging way for all the age groups. So we simplified the needed data and planned it by considering people who are not very into this topic.

There is a story behind the game. Acoording to the story, the world is facing with annihilation. Sources are about to be consumed fully, the air, the water, the soil is polluted and toxic. Humankind has to find a habitable place to live, in order to survive. So working on space explorations has to be faster. And as the last resort, a small spacecraft is setting off from Earth. In the game, the starting point is Earth and there is a spacecraft which will begin a long journey into deep space. But there are asteroids that the gamer should escape, in order to reach new amazing destinations including Mars, Proxima Centauri b, Barnard's Star, TRAPPIST-1d and more. There are levels and as you level up, you will unlock new propulsion systems (both existing and next generation or theoretical) and use them in the next level to reach your goal. At the same time, what we actually aimed is that during the game, giving small and brief explanations about what changes does each propulsion type makes on the spacecraft, its speed, acceleration and time.

We hope to achieve as more people as we can and create awareness of the need for "breakthrough propulsion".

How We Developed This Project

Living in a world full of people who believe that "science can do anything" is the greatest advantage for the humanity. This advantage can open all the closed doors of the universe if it can be used wisely. That was what inspired us the most. In order to make a significant contribution to our discovery of the universe, we decided to create an urgent awareness on this subject by the story of world facing with annihilation.

We tried to approach the project in a creative way to make it more engaging. We chose the destinations which are presumed to be habitable and considered as important discoveries. For instance, Proxima Centauri b is the closest exoplanet to our Solar system, TRAPPIST-1d is one of the most Earth-like exoplanets found. In addition, we calculated all the propulsion types' numerical values in terms of thrust force, mass of the propellants, exhaust velocities etc. and use the needed formulas and laws of conservation to show the values of acceleration.

We developed the project on Unity and we used C-Sharp to code the game. We used graphics from the Unity Asset Store which were public available. We created our game logo on Adobe Photoshop and collected a part of data from the application "NASA's Eyes".

There were several problems that we faced and worked hard to solve. To provide real data, we needed to use some complex formulas that we were not familiar with, but we overcame the problem by scanning resources and talking to people who are interested in physics, mathematics, and gaming. Also we interviewed with possible users from a group of people with various ages, and learned about their expectations about the game. When we got positive feedbacks from them, we became more motivated and inspired. That helped our team in solving the problems. We learned through researches and designing the game, which was a big achievement for all of us.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Process of the project required significant researches. In order to find real and reliable values, we preferred using most of the datas from NASA (mentioned in the references).

First step in our research process was scanning the resources provided for us from the challenge's resources on the site. Mainly, we collected all the data that we would need, from NASA and sites that takes NASA as reference. Those data were mostly about the propulsion types, specific information about thrusters, and any numerical value seen in the game. Since there were a variety of data in NASA that we were able to use, we got new ideas for our project during searching and reading process. Range of articles, reports and books we found in website of NASA enhanced our understanding of this challenge and gave us new ideas. We used the data given us efficiently and it influenced our project in a professional way.