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ISS Docking Simulator

by abhiminator on 1/5/22, 11:40 AM with 91 comments

  • by tomxor on 1/5/22, 1:58 PM

    I wana see the speed run on this.

    I've got it down to 3mins if I rush orientation followed by position. I'm convinced this can be pushed further if you have the coordination to combine it.

    [edit] 2:30 combined with some exciting drama at the end

    [edit] 1:40 combining pitch & yaw & forward-thrust, followed by roll while accel/decel (because doesn't affect approach), finally eyeballing Y and Z and monitoring X reading for reverse thrust (because eyes suck at distance estimation)

    [edit] 1:30 with a ~50% chance of becoming a space station projectile, am I hired?

    [edit] 1:24 with a 90% chance of becoming tomato puree

    [edit]

    Found this 00:23 seconds, but they seem to be able to accelerate and decelerate much faster than I can, maybe I need to tweak key repeat and delay times to achieve this.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ0J784PO6I

  • by ggerganov on 1/5/22, 12:38 PM

    Last time I saw this posted here, people implemented various auto-pilots for this [0]. Here is a short video of my attempt: https://youtu.be/jWQQH2_UGLw

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27252639

  • by leetrout on 1/5/22, 1:35 PM

    A lot of the various UI elements used at SpaceX are created by / under Shane Mielke (the pixel ranger, 2Advanced). Specifically he made this simulator.

    https://www.shanemielke.com/work/spacex/iss-docking-simulato...

  • by Sebb767 on 1/5/22, 12:36 PM

    Letting lay people dock space ships with your actual UI is just bragging ;-)

    But Kudos, maybe it's my KSP experience, but that interface is really great and understandable.

  • by zhan_eg on 1/5/22, 12:37 PM

    Just FYI, this looks the same simulator from 2020 they released before the Demo-2 mission. The old discussion for reference [1]

    Still, it is super cool

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23162820

  • by tigerInATurvy on 1/6/22, 12:31 AM

    Thanks for sharing. Took me around 4 minutes and docked successfully on my first try. What a great interface too. Without training and without even looking at the instructions, I managed to dock it.

    This may be a dumb question but I noticed something a bit odd. I had no trouble getting the orientation right and stabilizing those numbers. They didn't drift after getting to zero. But there was always a little drift on Y and a bit more on Z. A very small drift, but I was thinking I should have been able to completely stabilize it. That a single click right thrust would cancel out the previous single click of the left thrust.

    But that wasn't the case. Is that a fault of the simulator? Or how a spaceship would handle in reality? That the translation movements can never be completely canceled out and have to be monitored?

  • by emsign on 1/5/22, 1:12 PM

    Musk needs the working class in space or else his utopia on Mars won't even begin. This is yet another push to bring a work force of non-astronauts to space, showing off that anyone from the internet is going to be able to control a SpaceX vehicle at one point with minimal training.

  • by Toutouxc on 1/5/22, 8:14 PM

    Unfortunately the model is really simplified and it makes the whole thing infinitely easier than in reality.

    You can clearly see the weirdness if you start pitching up, say at -0.3 °/s and then add a lot of roll to either side (-2.0 °/s). The roll should not affect the pitch in any way (the reticle should continue to move along a straight line on the screen), but in this simulator the reticle actually starts drawing a circle, as if a yaw thruster was firing continuously.

  • by joshdance on 1/5/22, 8:58 PM

    It is really fun to try to dock in 4:06 while the Interstellar docking soundtrack plays.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/interstellar/comments/gmiwgh/no_tim...

  • by kunai on 1/5/22, 7:41 PM

    One of the weirdest aspects of Crew Dragon is the total lack of precision controls for manual docking. There's a reason that most aircraft, even the most computerized and automated ones like the F-35 and Airbus A350 still rely on a joystick for fine control. A touchscreen interface like this seems like a really clunky way to implement manual control, and offers less flexibility for alternate and abort flight modes where automated control may not be possible.

    The Soyuz is fully automated from liftoff to touchdown and still has a cockpit with a plethora of manual controls and two joysticks for RCS control.

    I guess the idea was to make it look all sleek and sci-fi on the interior... but at the expense of precision and versatility. It just seems to demonstrate a lack of consideration for tactility and the importance of it in a mission-critical environment like space.

  • by somedude895 on 1/5/22, 3:01 PM

    Feels like playing Outer Wilds, and just like in that game I get impatient and crash into things at 200m/s

  • by gclawes on 1/5/22, 1:54 PM

    Hahaha, you can set it to "flat" earth.

  • by MertsA on 1/5/22, 7:04 PM

    If you're not going for a speedrun and just proceeding at a casual rate it works pretty well to start https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3zvVGJrTP8 in the background. Back when this came out I used to challenge my son to get it docked safely before the music stopped. He was almost 4 at the time so it was a pretty good challenge to finish it in under 4 minutes.

  • by icoder on 1/5/22, 5:52 PM

    Can anyone comment on the fact that you seem to directly influence your speed, and not your acceleration? Is this also the case in reality?

    Compared to my first flightsim experience this was much easier, the speed with which you can 'stop' any motion seems only limited by how fast you click. In flightsim I found myself easily overcompensating, if impatient or stressed even oscillating to increasingly bigger extremes.

  • by Tempest1981 on 1/5/22, 1:49 PM

    Almost made it to the moon, but ran out of fuel and crash landed. j/k (are there Easter eggs?)

  • by GistNoesis on 1/5/22, 3:38 PM

    The real fun would be to try do dock to a space station rotating along its intermediate axis (following the lost of orientation control caused by an impact with space debris) .

  • by cornel_io on 1/5/22, 2:15 PM

    If you're on Android and missing buttons, try tapping where they should be and they'll show up.

    No idea how to get around the double tap -> zoom issue which makes this pretty hard.

  • by WorldPeas on 1/6/22, 1:11 AM

    did anyone else find the red car floating in space? fun easter egg(it's behind you when you start, but disappears when you get too close)

  • by zeristor on 1/5/22, 9:37 PM

    Has anyone set up a Deep-learning system to train against this?

    Andrew Ng was proud of training a system to fly a helicopter upside down, just curious.

  • by tibbydudeza on 1/5/22, 8:29 PM

    I thought they had automated docking ???. I tried and clearly space does not work like Wing Commander.

  • by qnkhuat on 1/5/22, 4:25 PM

    ha! this is a very cool simulator, I wrote a simple auto-pilot in Lisp [1] a while ago. Its best result is 2m [1] https://github.com/qnkhuat/spacex

  • by jonathankoren on 1/5/22, 5:32 PM

    All those years years of playing Kerbal Space Program played off.

  • by Claude_Shannon on 1/5/22, 5:44 PM

    That is interesting, thanks for the submission!

  • by lambda_dn on 1/5/22, 2:55 PM

    Saw the Tesla floating in space.

  • by gentle on 1/5/22, 1:50 PM

    Ok, that's pretty neat.

  • by verisimi on 1/5/22, 1:50 PM

    You can tell it real because its a simulation of a simulation?