awesome-space VS sfsim

Reminds me that SpaceX has now landed rocket boosters successfully over 200 times. Landing just a single rocket was huge news a few years ago.

The US is launching things into space about 20 times as frequently compared to 10 years ago [1]. Now, most rocket launches don't make mainstream news—I only keep up with things by subscribing to a niche newsletter [2].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...

[2] https://orbitalindex.com

NASA needs multiple lander options; putting all their cards on a lunar Starship landing was always a bit ridiculous, even if it seems reasonably likely to happen. So if you want the Artemis program to actually happen, this is likely a good thing. However, with congress in a deadlock around the debt ceiling, and SLS costing $4B per launch, this is only going to add to Artemis's serious funding challenges.

If you're interested in the space industry in general, I'll cover this more next week in the weekly Orbital Index newsletter (https://orbitalindex.com) which I co-author with blach.

This week on H+ Weekly - the first guest post! Ben and Andrew from The Orbital Index highlight an exciting development in the space industry - the rise of startups betting hard on SpaceX’s Starship to succeed.

You should definitely submit this to https://github.com/orbitalindex/awesome-space#earth!

A couple that I get:

- aeon and Psyche: https://aeon.co

- Benedict Evans: https://www.ben-evans.com

- The Orbital Index: https://orbitalindex.com

Real-time planetary cloud rendering using cascaded deep opacity maps and mipmapping. Resolution 960x540, framerate 20 fps unless shadows are long. Using octaves of 643 Worley noise and curl noise for the global cloud coverage 512x512x6 cubemap. Source code: cloudsonly.clj

Source code: atmos.clj.

The source code of the main program is in etc/planet.clj. It is Clojure code but it is mostly Java calls using LWJGL and OpenGL shaders. The cloud shaders are in resources/shaders/clouds. I recommend Sebastian Lague's video on volumetric clouds to get started. Here is my implementation of a cube filed with clouds: etc/cloudcube.clj.

Cloud layer implementation using OpenGL shaders. Unfortunately the performance is not great and the clouds are repetitive when viewing from above. Also there are artifacts in zenith and nadir. Let me know if you have any ideas/suggestions! The shaders are here.

Prototype Worley noise rendered with multiple forward scattering (Harris, Lastra). Prototype using OpenGL and Clojure (see github.com/wedesoft/sfsim25 for remaining code).

Orbiter 2016 is a brilliant game. I am currently trying to do a small space simulator in Clojure (https://github.com/wedesoft/sfsim25) and I probably should take a look at the Orbiter source code.