Space Exploration

Budget. Launch. Survive.

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Our Inspiration for this came from the launched Artemis II space mission - the first crewed lunar flyby since Apollo 17, launching humanity back into space. We wanted to capture this space exploration and transform it into an inspiring and informational simulation where people can take a space mission into their own hands.

The simulation uses historical context to conclude the fate of the user's mission. We incorporated features that track the amount of money invested in different aspects of the mission (fuel, research & development, materials & technology, and personnel) then uses calculations to evaluate those decisions against real-world space mission data to determine whether your mission succeeds or fails.

We built it using React for the frontend, Claude AI for intelligent mission simulation and outcome analysis, and GitHub for version control and team collaboration bringing together web development and constant updates and tweaks on backend features.

Challenges we ran into were merging files as everyone wasn't very familiar with how to push files into Git. However, we communicated through which files should be edited by which member and successfully merged all files into the main branch.

We were able to collaborate properly and come up with an idea that was liked by everybody. We were able to implement a lot of ideas people had integrate it into the overall website, adding a rocket loading screen, music, sound effects, and additional budgeting features to make the simulation easier to read and play with.

We learned a lot more about github, IDE's, and UI tools.

To improve the app, we plan to integrate an AI system that evaluates each mission's outcome based on the user's unique budget allocation, crew decisions, and real-time choices. This would replace the current rule-based logic with a model that draws on historical space mission data to deliver more nuanced, realistic, and personalized results.

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