Orbit Lab

Fly a real rocket to orbit — and find out why getting there costs 9,500 m/s when the orbit itself only needs 7,800. Pick a launch pad and see what its latitude costs you: Kourou hands you 463 m/s of Earth's spin for free, a polar launch throws all of it away. Fly the gravity turn yourself or tune the autopilot, then read the Δv ledger that splits every metre per second you burned into gravity, drag and steering losses — the one readout that turns "fly a better ascent" into a number that goes down. Then plan: manoeuvre nodes, Hohmann transfers, plane changes, geostationary insertion, re-entry. Switch Earth's equatorial bulge off and watch sun-synchronous orbits stop working, because J2 was the only reason they ever did. Ground tracks drift west because the planet turns underneath you. Orbits decay because the thermosphere is really there. Nothing is animated — the vehicle is integrated by a symplectic solver whose energy drift you can watch on a live plot, and every number the app states is checked against closed-form orbital mechanics by a 52-test harness.