Every SpaceX Game You Can Play: Docking, Booster Catch and Rocket Landing

There are two official SpaceX games, both playable in a web browser: the ISS Docking Simulator, where you fly a Dragon capsule onto the space station by hand, and Starship: The Game, where you steer a Super Heavy booster down into the tower’s catch arms. Beyond those, community-made booster-catch games and classic rocket landing games fill the gap.

This guide covers each one, what it actually asks you to do, and how to get good at it. It also explains why the booster catch is harder than a normal landing, which is the part most people underestimate the first time they try.

Official game 1: the SpaceX ISS Docking Simulator

SpaceX publishes this one at iss-sim.spacex.com. It is a browser simulator of the interface astronauts use to fly a Dragon capsule manually to the International Space Station.

The screen is a heads-up display. On one side are rotation controls for roll, pitch and yaw; on the other, translation controls that move the capsule up, down, left, right, forward and back. Both sets have a precision toggle for fine adjustments. The page states the goal plainly: docking succeeds when all the green numbers are below 0.2 and your closing rate is under 0.2 metres per second.

How to get good at it:

1. Fix rotation first. Zero out roll, pitch and yaw before you worry about position. A capsule that is still turning makes every other number drift.
2. Use the precision toggle for everything near the end.
3. Make one small input, then wait. In space nothing slows you down, so every tap adds speed that you will later have to cancel. Patience is the actual skill.
4. Approach slowly in the last few metres. Arriving too fast is the most common failure.

It is the most realistic of the games here, and the slowest. Expect your first successful dock to take a while.

Official game 2: Starship: The Game

This is the booster-catch game. According to Not a Tesla App’s write-up, SpaceX released it in October 2024 at starshipthegame.spacex.com, around Starship’s fifth flight test. You launch Starship, and while the ship heads off, you pilot the Super Heavy booster back down, collecting stars and avoiding space debris, aliens and other obstacles. The aim is to slow down and be in exactly the right spot for the tower’s “chopsticks” to grab the booster. It has several difficulty levels and is playable in a web browser, on a phone, and even in a Tesla.

The real event behind it happened on 13 October 2024, when Booster 12 became the first Super Heavy booster caught by the launch tower’s arms, according to Wikipedia’s Super Heavy article.

How to get good at it: the game’s own goal is to slow down and be in the right spot for the chopsticks to grab the booster. Spend the descent lining up horizontally, so that the last few seconds are only about slowing down.

Community-made booster-catch games

Since the first real catch, others have built their own versions. The same Not a Tesla App article describes Mechazilla.io as a community game: a 3D take on the booster catch where you judge how much to adjust the booster’s angle as it comes in and then bring it to a stop. It runs in a browser and on a phone.

Community games come and go, and their physics vary a lot. Treat them as quick fun rather than simulators, and do not expect them to stay online forever.

The ancestor of every rocket landing game: Lunar Lander

Before any of these, there was Lunar Lander, Atari’s arcade game from 1979. Its Wikipedia entry describes two buttons to rotate the module and a large handle to fire the thruster, with points based on how softly you landed and how difficult the landing site was, plus a little extra fuel for good landings. That is still the core of the genre: tilt, thrust, limited fuel, land softly.

If you enjoy the booster-catch games but want more depth, lander games are where to go next. They are more forgiving to learn and harder to master.

For a full simulation: Kerbal Space Program

If what you actually want is to build a rocket and fly it to orbit, the answer is not an arcade game. Kerbal Space Program (Squad, 2015) is a rocket-building game with what Wikipedia calls “a pseudorealistic orbital physics engine”, and it has been praised by people in the spaceflight industry, including NASA, ESA and Elon Musk. It runs on PC and console and has a steep learning curve, and the reward for climbing it is a genuine feel for orbits.

Why catching a booster is harder than landing one

Every landing game asks you to arrive slowly. A booster catch adds a second, stricter condition: you must also arrive in exactly the right place, sideways.

A landing pad gives you some room to touch down a little off-centre. Between two catch arms there is no such room: miss the gap and there is nothing to land on. So the skill changes from “slow down before the ground” to “cancel all sideways movement first, then slow down in a straight line”.

A few habits help in every booster-catch game:

• Line up early. Fix your horizontal position high up, where you have time and fuel.
• Kill sideways speed, not just position. Being centred while still drifting means you will not be centred one second later.
• Make the last part a vertical problem. If the final seconds involve steering, the approach was wrong.
• Watch fuel. Correcting late costs far more fuel than correcting early.

Where Rocket Landing: Moon Lander fits

Rocket Landing: Moon Lander is our independent rocket landing game, built around exactly that booster-catch problem. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by SpaceX; the names are references for fans, and the vehicles are our own.

It has six worlds: Earth at Boca Chica, the Moon, Mars, Titan, Europa, and a tower-catch arc called Mechazilla, where a booster has to arrive inside a pair of catch arms, so sideways drift is pass or fail. Every pilot flies the same daily mission, and when you crash, the game writes you a deadpan apology letter explaining what went wrong. If the official games left you wanting more landings and more ways to fail them, that is what it is for.

The short version

• SpaceX’s own games are the ISS Docking Simulator and Starship: The Game, both in a browser.
• Docking rewards patience: fix rotation first, then approach slowly.
• Booster catches reward lining up early and killing sideways speed before the final descent.
• For depth, try lander games; for a full simulation, Kerbal Space Program.