Space Explorer

Space is something that most of us would like to explore, but only a handful of people made this dream a reality. Thanks to computers, we can at least simulate such an experience. You can choose to call Space Explorer a game, a software application or whatever you want, but we can all agree that it is a means to explore our solar system and anything beyond, without the hazards of solar radiations or the danger of being sucked in by a black hole. It lets you explore the depths of space, in a 3D environment, while using a series of controls, to move and rotate your ship.

Space Explorer can be installed on your computer like any other application. It comes in a 5.58 MB package and it works on most Windows platforms. To run the application successfully, you will need to install DirectX 9.0 or a later version, but this should not be a problem if you are using one of the later Windows editions, like Vista or Win 7. If you intend to run it on these Windows versions, you will have to run it in compatibility mode.

Before you take off into space, you will encounter a small window, which places a series of options at your disposal. First, you should know that you may record your journeys and play them back later. You can replay a recording or create a new one, by clicking different options, on the aforementioned window. Your experience starts when creating a new recording. The 3D environment will be loaded, in full screen mode and you may start exploring.

Space Explorer places you at the helm of a space ship, although you will not see any part of it. A series of controls are located in the upper right corner of the screen and you can use them to pan the camera and travel in any direction or in other words, change the ship's heading. You will need some time to adjust to the controls and the way they work, but you can hit the F1 key to reveal a series of keyboard functions. The ship, planets and stars behave realistically. Their movement is based on Newton's gravitational law. Although your ship's speed is realistic and it would be pointless to wait a few months to reach your destination, you may click a button to jump forward, over a great distance.

Space travel requires great precision. If you see a distant star and you attempt to reach it, you will find yourself off course more often than you'd like. This is why you can activate a crosshair, for your ship, as well as a destination icon. Before you begin your voyage, you must have a little patience to adjust the ship's pitch, yaw and rotation, until the crosshair is perfectly aligned with the destination icon. A set of vital information can be found in the upper left corner of the screen and they can prevent you from getting lost into space. You will find a list of objects, like planets or stars, various directions, for individual thrusters, details about the ship's motion, mission time and more.

Before loading the 3D environment, you can access Space Explorer's configurations panel. Besides selecting destination folders for screenshots and recordings, you can add new objects to the environment, by moving different items from one list to another. The interesting part is that you may create new objects from scratch. Creating a new planet requires a bit of knowledge, but you will be able to make it behave in a realistic manner. A wizard will take you through a few stages, during which you must specify the object's ascension, declination, mass, equatorial and polar radius, angular velocity, apply a mesh and texture and much more. This gives you numerous possibilities. The solar system can look however you want and you may create scenarios in which you discover new planets. Just make sure you don't open one of the ship's windows along the way. Space is a vacuum.