The Backyard Astronaut

The Backyard Astronaut hands you your own space programme, run from the bottom of your garden.

It starts small: a shed for mission control, a picket fence, a pad at the end of the garden path. Every flight you complete unlocks something bigger, until the yard is a full launch complex with an umbilical tower, floodlights and a hangar full of hardware.

Fly it or watch it. Stand at the fence with the countdown in your ears and feel the ground shake as the rocket clears the tower, or climb the gantry, strap in and fly the mission yourself from a hands-on cockpit: flip the switches, pull the abort handle if you have to, and watch the plush star float up when you hit zero-g.

Five rockets, built to real proportions and real detail, from the single-seat Sparrow 1 on a suborbital hop, through the reusable Eagle 9 to orbit and home, to the Neptune 5 Moon rocket: Earthrise from lunar orbit, a landing on the surface, and a walk in the dust.

Every mission is a full flight: liftoff, staging, orbit with time warp so you never wait around, re-entry inside a sheath of plasma, chutes and splashdown, with a calm mission-control voice on the radio keeping you on the timeline.

Accurate where it matters, simple where it counts. If you can turn a key and press a guarded red button, you can fly. Made for everyone who ever pointed a telescope out of a bedroom window.

Music: “Titan” by Scott Buckley, CC BY 4.0 (scottbuckley.com.au). Voice: Kokoro-82M (Apache-2.0). Imagery courtesy of NASA.