Land the Space Shuttle
No engines, no go-around — a 100-tonne glider aimed at one runway. Fly the real approach with real orbiter handling: the −20° dive at 300 KEAS, the preflare, the flare onto runway 15 of the Shuttle Landing Facility.
Your mission choice sets the dates and the story around your flight. Launch and landing always fly from Kennedy Space Center — Pad 39A and the Shuttle Landing Facility (STS-1 and STS-31 historically landed at Edwards).
Seven times steeper than an airliner
The orbiter comes home with no engines and exactly one chance. The outer glideslope is a −20° dive flown at 300 KEAS — an airliner rides its ILS down at −3°. The aim point sits 2.3 km short of the threshold: you fly at the ground on purpose, because the flare will spend energy, and speed is the only energy you have left.
At 610 m the preflare begins — a steady 1.3 g pull that bends the trajectory onto a shallow −1.5° inner glideslope. The gear stays up until below 91 m; it costs so much drag that dropping it early wrecks the energy budget. Then bleed the last knots in the flare and put the main gear down at about 195 knots.
The runway is not the finish line. Hold the nose up through derotation, pop the drag chute and track the centerline to wheels-stop. The leaderboard scores what shuttle crews were graded on: sink rate at touchdown, centerline deviation, distance from the aim point and touchdown speed.
Controls & instruments
- ↓ ↑ pull up / push over — rate command in yoke sense, like the real CSS
- ← → roll left / right
- G landing gear
- B N speedbrake extend / retract
- P autopilot — CSS ↔ AUTOLAND
- C free camera
- V cinematic video mode
A glass cockpit rides along — every instrument can be toggled on its own:
airspeed tape · attitude indicator with flight-director diamond · altitude tape · glideslope & localizer · heading · speedbrake · gear lights · AoA & G · wind · sink-rate variometer
Thirty years, 135 flights
Five orbiters — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — flew 135 missions between 1981 and 2011. They launched Hubble and Galileo, built the International Space Station, and carried 355 people to orbit. No other vehicle has ever returned from orbit to a runway, again and again, for thirty years.
Fourteen astronauts never came home: the crews of Challenger (STS-51L, 1986) and Columbia (STS-107, 2003). This simulator honors their memory; those flights are part of the program's history, not of any game.
