A station above
a moving world.
Explore an International Space Station reconstruction, float outside with a safety tether, and watch Earth through the Cupola’s seven windows.
The station targets 15 June 2023, after the sixth iROSA installation. Its foundation is NASA’s ISS C model of a projected 2011 configuration, with documented relocations and later hardware reconstructed for the selected date. Exact robotic joint poses, some payload inventories, fine fittings, and portions of the interior remain approximations. The model has not been certified as a one-to-one engineering replica.
Choose a view.
Inside starts in Destiny. Float back through Unity and turn toward Tranquility to reach the Cupola passage. Spacewalk places you outside Quest with your tether attached. Overview lets you orbit the station, while Your suit provides a close inspection of the astronaut. Cupola takes you directly to the observation windows.
These buttons are also recovery shortcuts. Transitions between the interior and exterior are immediate; door-opening procedures are not simulated.
The tether has a 35-metre limit. Reattachment is available within ten metres of its Quest anchor. Station structure can block its route; reel back or detach to explore further. Free-flight movement, braking, and oxygen are simplified for relaxed exploration.
Your astronaut.
The approved character is a photographic scan of Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 A7-L suit. Its museum appearance and original badges are retained, with an articulated skeleton for restrained arm and leg movement. Free flight uses floating poses. The added backpack, tether and OpenAI patch are fictional additions; this is not the modern ISS EMU.
A small OpenAI blossom is printed on the shielding outside Quest. These two marks are requested customization and an explicit exception to the historical station configuration.
Earth and the orbit.
The scene uses a circular orbit at 408 kilometres, inclined 51.6 degrees. A revolution takes about 92.6 simulated minutes at approximately 7.67 kilometres per second. Earth rotates separately. Sunlight and station eclipse change during the orbit, while a local reference frame keeps your movement relative to the station stable.
Land comes from NASA’s August 2004 Blue Marble Next Generation imagery, with detail streamed from an 86,400 × 43,200 source grid. Cloud imagery uses a historical NASA composite on a 43,200 × 21,600 grid, with documented 8K repairs in missing polar and seam regions. The grid therefore does not imply uniform native resolution everywhere. Clouds drift with latitude-dependent variation, and their shadows follow the Sun. This is historical imagery with illustrative cloud motion, not live weather or live ISS tracking.
Fidelity review.
The approved full rubric contains forty station sections with ten checks each, sixty further checks for animation, controls, Earth, orbit, interiors and overall quality, and one branding check covering both logo placements. A successful render or movement test does not establish visual fidelity. Unverified dimensions and reference gaps remain visible in the review record.
The expanded review adds 460 second-pass checks and 120 checks across twelve interior components. These additional checks are defined and remain unreviewed until their own evidence is recorded.
Sources and credits.
- Station foundation: NASA Johnson Space Center Visual Communications Laboratory, ISS C High Resolution. LightWave scene converted to metres and glTF, with repaired normals and source texture projections. Projected February 2011 configuration; later reconstruction work is separate.
- Quest surfaces: five original NASA ISS C bump images restore pressed shielding relief. The crew-lock metal finish and 8 mm height range are reconstruction estimates; paper-label regions retain a matte response. NASA April 28, 2023 airlock imagery guides comparison. Source hashes and limitations accompany the textures.
- Selected station equipment: NASA/JPL-Caltech, Eyes on the Earth. BEAM, AMS-02, ELC and ESP assemblies, and selected Kibo instruments were isolated and repositioned from the original visualization model. Its mixed historical configurations were not adopted as a complete dated scene. These meshes and their texture atlases remain visualization assets, with limited close-up detail.
- Roll-out arrays: NASA 2019 iROSA design presentation, Redwire 2023 Space Power Workshop presentation, and NASA flight images iss065e144542, iss065e144867 and iss069e020612. The 19.40 × 6.11 m engineering envelope, 165.1 mm boom diameter and 10-degree cant guide the reconstruction. Local mount dimensions, complete rear wiring, blanket deflection and longitudinal cell-module count remain inferred.
- Dated station references: NASA assembly documentation and mission imagery; ESA’s ASIM relocation photograph; NASA June 2023 Nauka and radiator imagery; NASA Bartolomeo preflight photograph. Reference images informed modeling and are not textures copied onto equipment.
- Land: NASA Earth Observatory / Reto Stöckli and colleagues, Blue Marble Next Generation base map, August 2004. Tiled source geography; ocean shading is adjusted in the renderer.
- Coastline mask: Wessel and Smith, GSHHG 2.3.7, under LGPL. A derived land/water mask separates ocean shading from dark forests. The source notice, transformation script and provenance are included with the assets; coastline and photographic imagery come from different datasets.
- Clouds: NASA Earth Observatory, Blue Marble cloud hemisphere mosaics and complete cloud composite. Satellite brightness is used as an opacity approximation.
- Atmosphere: Earth atmosphere constants informed by Eric Bruneton’s precomputed atmospheric scattering reference implementation. The game uses its own first-order Rayleigh/Mie/ozone integration and Sun-transmission lookup. Multiple scattering and a full spectral display pipeline are not simulated.
- Suit: Smithsonian Digitization Programs Office and National Air and Space Museum, Neil Armstrong spacesuit; browser asset distributed through Google’s model-viewer. Smithsonian usage conditions apply. Original badges and notices remain. This personal exploration experience is noncommercial; the extra pack, animation and tether are not part of the museum artifact.
- Materials: ambientCG Fabric060 and Foil003, CC0. Foil003 is a procedural crease material, used at reduced strength for a matte white blanket approximation. Neither material is a measured NASA flight textile.
- OpenAI blossom: official OpenAI repository artwork, original glyph proportions preserved as smaller, surface-following ink marks on the added suit pack and Quest shielding.
- Rendering and interface: Three.js (MIT), three-mesh-bvh (MIT), Lucide icons (ISC). NASA, Smithsonian and OpenAI endorsement is not implied.
