Gravity In A Bottle: NASA SPACE APPS

This is a submission for the MLH x DEV Writing Challenge

What I Built

Gravity in a Bottle is an interactive, retro-styled space-archaeology and narrative simulation game set aboard the stranded deep-space vessel Odyssey-6. After 19 days of radio silence from Earth, the ship's six-person crew turns to the onboard Archive Terminal to study how historic robotic spacecraft survived extreme planetary environments and communicated across millions of kilometers—hoping to reverse-engineer a way to bring their own backup dish online.

How It Works

• Interactive Solar System Orrery & Planetary Dossiers: Explorers navigate an orbital telemetry radar covering 10 celestial bodies—Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Titan, Uranus, and Neptune. Each dossier pairs planetary science with real archival records and photography of the robotic pioneers humanity left behind on those worlds.
• 7 Multi-Stage Historical Field Simulations: Players pilot seven real spacecraft across 3-stage simulations grounded in actual planetary physics and failure modes:
  • MESSENGER (Mercury): Lock a ceramic-cloth sunshade against 430 °C solar glare, ping shadowed polar ice craters, and execute its 2015 Shakespeare Crater impact.
  • Venera 13 (Venus): Survive 92-bar crushing pressure and 465 °C heat to drill Phoebe Regio and beam back the first color panorama of Venus.
  • Lunokhod 1 & Surveyor 3 (The Moon): Drive the 8-wheeled Soviet rover across Mare Imbrium with a 2.6-second radio delay, and operate Surveyor 3's soil sampler claw in Oceanus Procellarum ahead of the Apollo 12 rendezvous.
  • Ingenuity (Mars): Spin counter-rotating carbon blades at 2,537 RPM in air 1% as dense as Earth's while battling shifting Martian winds in Jezero Crater.
  • Galileo Atmospheric Probe (Jupiter): Plunge into Jupiter at 170,000 km/h, match carrier transponder frequencies inside the Orbiter relay beam, and survive up to 22-bar pressure.
  • Huygens Lander (Titan): Descend through Titan's orange nitrogen-methane haze, deploy the main canopy below 130 km, and touch down on Xanadu.
• Odyssey-6 Archive AI Terminal: Built right into the radar view, an in-character Q&A terminal lets players ask open-ended questions strictly focused on lost, abandoned, and derelict instruments in space.
• Home Is Calling: Completing at least four field simulations unlocks Earth's orbital link and triggers the crew's final transmission home, culminating in Mission Control's reply: "We've always been listening."

What Inspired It & What I Learned

When we talk about space exploration, we usually celebrate launches and first landings—rarely the silent hardware left behind as permanent monuments to human curiosity. Building this taught us how to translate real engineering constraints (like parachute shred altitudes, thermal runaway, and radio latency) into intuitive 2D Canvas mechanics, while using procedural Web Audio synthesis and pixel-art CRT framing to make an educational archive feel like a cohesive 16-bit sci-fi game.

Demo

• Live Deployed App: Play
• Source Code: Github

Partner Technologies

Google Gemini API (@google/genai — gemini-2.5-flash)

We integrated the Google Gemini API to power the Odyssey-6 Archive Terminal, a collapsible Q&A assistant embedded directly inside the Solar System Radar scene.

• Serverless Architecture: We built a dedicated Next.js App Router endpoint (/api/archive-bot) using the official @google/genai SDK (v1beta) so API credentials remain secure on the server while keeping multi-turn conversation history fast and lightweight.
• Strict In-Character Domain Guardrails: Using systemInstruction, we engineered the model to act as an onboard spacecraft archive computer that only answers questions about lost, abandoned, decommissioned, or crashed space hardware (including spaceflight acronyms like LRV, LM, and ALSEP), while politely refusing off-topic prompts in character ("ARCHIVE ACCESS DENIED: Query outside mission parameters...").
• Resilience & UX: Because live hackathon demos can face spotty network conditions, we added automatic retry handling for transient socket drops alongside one-click starter prompts so players can immediately query missions like Beagle 2, Philae, or Venera 13.

Hackathon Experience

We built Gravity in a Bottle as Team Gravity in Space for the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2026. The energy throughout the sprint was electric—balancing rapid full-stack engineering with deep dives into real NASA, ESA, and Soviet mission telemetry to make sure every temperature, pressure, and mission milestone was historically accurate.

What stood out most was seeing the narrative and technical pieces click together: watching the six crew members come to life on the Odyssey-6 deck, tuning custom Web Audio synthesizer blips, and testing the Archive AI terminal against obscure space-archaeology questions. Even with the crunch of debugging serverless routes and responsive sprite layouts across screen sizes, turning real planetary science into an interactive story our team was genuinely excited to play made the entire hackathon unforgettable.