A full flight runs about 66 minutes of mission time: a 42-minute countdown, an 8½-minute ascent to ship engine cutoff, the booster's return and catch at about T+7:24, a long coast (compressible with time warp), entry at T+47:00, and the ship catch at roughly T+66:25. You make a handful of decisions in that window — but they are the decisions that matter, and several of them are irreversible.
Your vehicle flies itself. What the sim asks of you is judgment: reading seven stations' boards, holding when something is amber, scrubbing when it's red, and committing to catches with two vehicles' worth of hardware — and your campaign budget — on the line.
| Time | Event | What you should be doing |
|---|---|---|
| T−42:00 | Sim start | Look around. Cameras 1–5 cover the pad; the tank farm is already breathing vapor. |
| T−40:00 | Propellant load begins | Watch the frost line climb both vehicles as densified LOX/CH4 flows — it tops out around T−3:30. The PROP board tracks temps and levels. |
| T−10:00 | GO/NO-GO POLL — LAUNCH (45 s, holds allowed) | Seven stations report. All green: press G. Any red: N — a scrub costs money but a pad fire costs the campaign. Amber is your call: read the station's reason line. |
| T−0:40 | Built-in hold at T−40 s | The count holds automatically for your final commit. Do not sit on it — propellant temperatures drift out of limits after a few minutes of holding, and forcing a GO through out-of-limits temps risks a hard start. |
| T−0:15 | Trench deluge opens | Water starts weak and builds to full pressure by T−2 — the pad protecting itself. |
| T−0:08 | Deck deluge opens | The water-cooled deck floods under the engine ring. Farm level is live on the DELUGE FARM panel. |
| T−0:02 | Ignition sequence | The inner 13 light together, then the outer 20 in scrambled opposed pairs — watch the mount-engine cam (camera 5). |
| T+0:00 | Liftoff | Hold-downs release at full thrust. The white overpressure cloud rips outward; dust follows as the stack climbs. |
Every poll shows a board per station with a GO / CAUTION / NO-GO badge and a reason line. What they actually mean:
| When | Poll | NO-GO consequence |
|---|---|---|
| T−10:00 | LAUNCH | Scrub — safe the vehicle, detank, small budget cost. |
| T+2:40 | BOOSTER RETURN | Booster diverts to a Gulf soft splashdown (lost hardware, mission continues). |
| T+6:35 | CATCH COMMIT | Divert to splashdown — the safe call if winds picked up or a landing engine is out. |
| T+40:00 | SHIP REENTRY (DEORBIT BURN on orbital missions) | Ship targets an open-ocean disposal entry instead. |
| T+63:10 | SHIP CATCH COMMIT | Ship diverts to a Gulf splashdown after the flip. |
Polls have deadlines (12–45 seconds). Letting the launch poll expire holds the count; letting a catch poll expire is treated as a wave-off. Warp automatically drops to 1× and locks as each poll opens, so you can't accidentally skip one.
Max-Q arrives just under a minute in — the throttle bucket around it is automatic. MECO is at T+2:30: most engines cut, keeping a 5-engine cluster running, and the ship lights its six through the vented interstage — hot-staging, the brightest moment of the ascent (chase cam or booster-fin cam are the views).
Separation kicks the booster into its flip, and the boostback ignition happens during that flip — all 33 in the same scrambled wave as liftoff, thrust swinging with the nose until it points home. Boostback shutdown at about T+2:50 leaves it on a ballistic arc peaking near 110 km. From apogee it falls for three minutes; grid fins deploy and start flying the vehicle as the air thickens around 55 km.
The landing burn is a dynamic solve — 13 engines fire around 2.6 km at roughly 415 m/s, stepping down to 5 and then 3 as the booster slides sideways toward the tower, shedding its lean until it hangs vertical between the chopsticks. The arms close in the final seconds and the catch pins seat on the rails at essentially zero sink. The deck deluge, then the trench, run at reduced pressure through the burn.
After SECO (T+8:57) the ship coasts. On Starlink missions a deploy gate opens around T+19:00: the bay vents to vacuum (a hard interlock — the door cannot open pressurized), the single letterbox door tucks inward and stows up, and the PEZ dispenser pushes sats out one every 30 seconds, the last one carrying the camera. On orbital profiles the reentry poll becomes a deorbit burn commit — one engine, retrograde, about 14 seconds.
Entry begins around T+47:00: plasma builds on the windward tiles, flaps fly the vehicle through peak heating, and by T+63:00 it is subsonic in a bellyflop, falling flat toward the tower from behind. The landing flip at ~T+66:00 lights three engines, swings the ship vertical, and the same arms that caught the booster catch the ship — the full double-catch this vehicle was built for.
The warp ladder is 1× / 4× / 15× / 60× / 150× (Z = 1×, X = 15×, C = 150×, ,/. step the rungs). Warp locks to 1× automatically around every major event — polls, staging, burns, catches — and shows a "WARP LOCKED" banner with the reason, so compression never steals a decision from you. The long ship coast is where 150× earns its keep.
The auto-director cuts like a webcast; take over any time. 1–9 select directly, 0 returns to AUTO, [/] cycle all 15 rigs, grouped pad → booster → ship → payload: pad wide, tower, catch cam, tracker, mount engine; booster chase / fin / aft; ship chase / flap / aft / engine bay; payload bay, bay interior, sat view. Chase cams orbit: hold right-mouse and drag to swing 360° around the vehicle, scroll to dolly in and out. Onboard cams are bolted to the hull and roll with it.
U opens photo mode — the sim pauses, you free-fly, set focal length, exposure and a film preset, and export up to 4K PNG stills.
Every mission ends with a debrief: an event timeline, a score, and a grade from S to F. Full success with both vehicles caught, clean polls and no damage pushes toward S; scrubs, diverts and lost hardware pull it down.
The campaign chains four missions — the historical debut, the double-catch, the 20-sat Starlink deploy, and a booster-reuse flight with degraded engine reliability — against a program budget: full success +$120M, partial −$60M, scrub −$15M, a lost vehicle −$250M, losing the pad −$550M. A grade of F fails the mission — you re-fly it before the chain advances. Passed missions stay unlocked in Mission Select for replay (replays never skip you ahead; they're for score and budget repair).
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| G / N | Answer an open poll GO / NO-GO |
| 1–9, 0 | Camera select · 0 = AUTO director |
| [ / ] | Cycle all cameras |
| RMB drag | Free-look · orbits the vehicle on chase cams (scroll = zoom) |
| Z / X / C | Warp 1× / 15× / 150× |
| , / . | Step the warp ladder down / up |
| T | Jump to the next poll (tutorial coaching) |
| U | Photo mode (WASD + E/Q fly, Shift faster) |
| P / M | Pause · mute |
| Esc | Settings (audio, tips, wobble, quality) |
Questions this page didn't answer are probably in the FAQ. Now go fly: launch the sim.