Test Out Next-Gen Space Tech in ’Kerbal Space Program’

Most games lose relevance after a few years, but the indie rocket-building game Kerbal Space Program is a bit different. It’s a glitchy, 10-year-old underdog of a game with a cult following of programmers, engineers, astronaut candidates, and your typical lay explosion enthusiasts, and it has a unique and active community of modders who’ve been fixing bugs, adding new features, and generally keeping the game fresh for nearly a decade.

In the game, you are the omniscient director of a space program composed of literal little green men (and beloved little green woman Valentina Kerman—we see you trailblazer) that you send skyward in spacecraft of your own design. It often feels like watching those blurry old videos of rockets launching only to come straight back down in an explosion of fiery schadenfreude: You feel a little bit frightened, a little bit sadistic, and you really want to try it again.

One of the most prolific Kerbal modders is Chris Adderley, Nertea in the game, who is an engineer at the Canadian space company MDA by day, designing ground-based systems that retrieve data from spacecraft. But in his off time, Adderley gets into the pilot’s seat himself. He started playing Kerbal Space Program soon after its release, and in 2013 started building his first mod for the game—a pack of spare parts, including a xenon fuel tank and a magnetoplasmadynamic thruster (just try saying that three times fast).

Since then he’s designed dozens of additional mods, including a Mark IV Spaceplane and space station add-ons like centrifuges and inflatable habitats.

“I build stuff that I’d like to see us as a species build in the future,” says Adderley.

Recently, Addlerley decided to take some of the most plausible far-future theoretical rocket engine concepts and build them in the game—introducing a way for gamers to try out these sci-fi concepts in a simulated environment that can teach us how they might actually work, on a more practical level, in the future.

Adderley combed through dozens of scientific papers that outlined theoretical blueprints for these ultra-advanced propulsion systems, looking for those that were most realistic.