🚀 Starship

Fly a little starship from Earth to the nearest stars, right in your browser.

▶ Launch it: crueber.github.io/starship

No install, no internet, no server. Open index.html and you're in space.

What is this?

A toy universe you can leave running on a spare monitor, or take the controls of and wander.

• 🌍 The real Solar System, with the planets and moons where they actually are today
• ⭐ More than 100,000 real stars from the Gaia and Hipparcos catalogues, in their true places and colours
• 🌌 A Milky Way painted from real star-count data, and the nearest galaxies as faint smudges
• 🪐 Pick Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Barnard's Star, Proxima... and go there. Stars with no known planets get invented ones, clearly labelled fictional
• 👥 See other people flying right now. Peer to peer, no accounts, on by default when you're online (the VISITORS button turns it off, and it remembers)
• 🛰️ Slip into a quiet orbit around anything and just watch the world turn

Three engines

🔥 Rocket	For gentle, close-in flying. A proper flame out the back.
⚪ Cruise nacelles	For sailing between planets. The two nacelles glow soft white as they spool up.
🔵 Warp	Out past the edge of the Sun's reach, the nacelles thrum blue and the ship rides a flat bubble of bent space. Ten light-years takes about five minutes at full tilt.

One slider runs all three: orange for rocket, white for cruise, blue for warp.

Try it

Online: crueber.github.io/starship (the first load is about 30 MB, then it's cached).

Or offline: download the repo and

1. Open index.html in a modern browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Firefox or Safari).
2. Sit back. A tour of the Solar System starts by itself. There is also a tour of the nearby stars (the STARS button), and each tour can run FAST (time speeds up automatically) or SLOW (you pick the speed).
3. Press T to take the helm, N to pick somewhere to go, P to let the autopilot fly.

When time is racing, a little clock dial in the corner spins up to show it.

Tip: it makes a good wallpaper. Press H to hide the interface and leave it on tour.

Key	What it does
N	Choose a destination (you can search by name)
P	Autopilot on / off
G	Warp on / off
W S	Faster / slower
mouse drag	Look around the ship; scroll to zoom
M	Small map of the star system
H	Hide the interface
?	Full help

Good to know

• It's a toy, not a flight manual. The planets, stars and orbits are real; the ship, the warp bubble and the engines are made up.
• Everything lives in this folder and works offline.
• Settings live in config.js and in the in-app settings panel (,).

The nerdy details (data sources, how it's built, how to rebuild the star data) are in docs/DETAILS.md.

Credits

Star data from ESA's Hipparcos and Gaia missions, planets and moons from NASA/JPL, exoplanets from the NASA Exoplanet Archive, planet textures from Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0), rendered with three.js.