Fly Discovery One, the ship from 2001: A Space Odyssey, from Earth to any other planet or the Moon. The planets are placed for the date on the ship’s clock, the drive is fiction, and at the Moon and Mars a lander can take you down: to Clavius Base, for the trip to Tycho, or into Gale crater.
The planets’ positions are computed from JPL’s published orbital elements for the date on the ship’s clock, which starts at today’s date and moves on as you fly. The Moon’s comes from a shortened form of the standard lunar series, so it is approximate. The other moons’ positions are approximate too: they come from JPL’s mean orbital elements, with each orbit measured from its planet’s equator (the true reference plane, about which the orbit slowly turns, is within 1° of it, except for Iapetus, whose orbit is measured from its own plane), that slow turning left out, and the moons’ resonances ignored.
The ship’s constant 0.01 g drive is invented. From Earth, trips take from about a day and a half (the Moon) to about five months (Neptune), where real spacecraft need days to reach the Moon and months to years to reach the planets.
Each voyage ends with an approach to the planet and a parking orbit, where the consoles brief you on the body and its major moons: twenty moon cards in all, each of which can turn the camera to where that moon is.
How to play
- Drag / touch
- Look around the ship
- Scroll / pinch
- Zoom
- Click / tap / Enter
- Skip the arrival
- Show (moon card)
- Turn toward that moon
- Land (Moon, Mars)
- Take the lander down (needs a keyboard)
- Esc / Pause button
- Pause
Go deeper: The ship ▾
Discovery One is the spacecraft of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The ship flown here is a fan model of its design, built by the site’s author and drawn 140 m long.
Go deeper: Where everything is ▾
The planets come from JPL’s approximate orbital elements, valid from 1800 to 2050, for the date on the ship’s clock. Tests check them against JPL’s Horizons ephemeris: Mars to within 0.002 AU (about 300,000 km), Jupiter to within 0.012 AU and Neptune to within 0.02 AU.
The Moon comes from a shortened form of the standard lunar series: on 1 October 2026 it was 188 km from Horizons. The other moons come from JPL’s mean orbital elements, so their positions are approximate: each moon’s orbit is measured from its planet’s equator, except Iapetus’s, which is measured from the plane JPL gives for it.
Go deeper: The drive vs a real trip ▾
The ship accelerates at a constant 0.01 g to the midpoint, turns end over end and brakes for the second half. From Earth that takes about a day and a half to the Moon, 18 to 47 days to Mars depending on the date, and about five months to Neptune.
Real spacecraft coast most of the way and must wait for launch windows. The minimum-energy transfer orbit to Mars takes about 8.5 months, and one to Neptune a little over 30 years; Voyager 2 reached Neptune in 12 years by swinging past Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus.
Go deeper: What’s real here ▾
Real: the planets’ and the Moon’s positions for the date shown, within the accuracy above; the planets’ sizes, tilts and rotation; the direction of the sunlight; the shadows the planets cast on the ship; the light delay to Earth; and the facts in the briefings, taken from NASA’s fact sheets and science pages.
Stylised: the drive and its trip times, the 45-second voyages, the arrival’s camera move, the camera exposure, the ship’s sounds (space is silent), and the ship itself.
Sources & credits
- The Blue Danube (Johann Strauss II), excerpt · United States Marine Band, conducted by Albert F. Schoepper (recorded about 1972) · Public domain (the performance is a work of the US federal government; the composition is Strauss’s, who died in 1899) · The first 140 seconds, faded in and out and loudness-normalised
- Also sprach Zarathustra (Richard Strauss) · Conducted by Philip Milman, www.classicals.de · CC BY 4.0
- Engine rumble, thruster hiss and console tones · Generated with SoX by the site’s build scripts (tools/discovery-one, tools/tycho-audio) · The site author’s own work
- Discovery One (3D model) · A fan model of the ship from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), built by the site’s author · The site author’s own work
- Planet and Moon maps · Solar System Scope · CC BY 4.0
- Jupiter colour map · Planet Pixel Emporium (James Hastings-Trew) · Copyright James Hastings-Trew. Free to use in renderings and real-time software; the maps may not be redistributed as is (Planet Pixel Emporium terms)
- Saturn ring map · Solar System Scope · CC BY 4.0 · Reprojected from the 8K strip into a top-down picture with the rings at NASA’s radii, and brightened (tools/textures/ring_from_strip.py)
- Approximate Positions of the Planets (orbital elements) · E. M. Standish, NASA/JPL Solar System Dynamics · Public domain (NASA/JPL)
- Astronomical Algorithms, 2nd ed. (1998), ch. 47: lunar position, truncated series · J. Meeus · Cited (book)
- Draco 3D compression decoder · The Draco Authors (Google) · Apache License 2.0 (notice in /draco/LICENSE)
- Planetary satellite mean elements · NASA/JPL Solar System Dynamics · Public domain (NASA/JPL)
- Planetary Fact Sheets · D. R. Williams, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (NSSDCA) · Public domain (NASA)
- Planet and moon pages (briefing facts) · NASA Science · Public domain (NASA)