LEO
MOONLunar orbit (Luna 10)
Thanks for the replies and suggestions so far! This might help:@ Airlock: It's a boardgame. Your perspective is as an administrator of a nation's space program (like James E. Webb) juggling the different priorities of space exploration while trying to be the first to attain these milestones. It has a bit of an alternative history feel, as if the Cold War space race had continued beyond Apollo/Salyut to the present day and a planned Mars landing.@ mtakala24: The ultimate goal of the game is a manned landing on Mars. It is ok if some other interplanetary milestones like Voyager and Venera are placed in the Mars "tier" since they represent exploring beyond the lunar vicinity.My main problem right now is coming up with accurate milestones that represent our future on the Moon and Mars/interplanetary space. wrt the Moon, I know a Lunar base was part of the Bush VSE. What other things will we be achieving in LEO and the Moon in the future that are not just scifi? Space elevators? Robotic mining? Orbital factories?wrt Mars, what further steps will we be taking to prepare for a manned landing beyond the planned MSL and near-future sample return? Will we land an earth return vehicle before the mission? Will we skip developing the Moon like Buzz Aldrin suggests? etc.I realize these are big and fuzzy questions
Are we talking about a board game or a computer game? I am a software developer and have built a couple of concept game layouts with the same idea you have: getting people excited about space. Here's a sample, don't know if it's really compatible with your ideas but it might help. As you can see in the picture, there are tiles for each region of interest such as LEO and the Lagrange Points, with a delta v cost to travel between each location in space. This is about as far as I have gotten with the concept but would imagine that there are a lot of interesting possibilities with this concept if given enough thought into the design. If you are planning on making this a computerized-type game, what languages/technologies were you looking into for it?
Thanks for the replies so far.What do you think are reasonable things we might do to develop the Moon before we manage a Mars landing? If helium mining and so on are out of the question.