The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2025
Atlas of Space turns the Solar System into a clickable, time-traveling 3D encyclopedia
A space nerd built a browser-based Solar System atlas where bodies move under Newtonian physics and you can zoom, read and travel through time.
gordonhart (developer)
What it had to solve
The developer behind Hacker News handle gordonhart is a self-described space nerd who realized he had no real intuition for the scale, speed and relative orientation of the celestial bodies around us. Over the holiday break he built a kind of spatial Wikipedia — a browser atlas to click around and learn about planets, moons, asteroids and comets.
How it works
Atlas of Space began as a confession from a space nerd: he had read endlessly about the Solar System but had no real feel for the scale, speed and relative orientation of the bodies in it. Over a holiday break he built what he called a spatial Wikipedia — a browser atlas where you click on planets, moons, asteroids and comets, read about them and watch them move under Newtonian mechanics, with The Expanse and Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space among the inspirations.
The engineering follows the fantasy. It is a static React app: Three.js renders the 3D scene, canvas draws labels and off-screen indicators, and Netlify functions handle the small backend. Every body starts from Keplerian elements scraped from JPL databases, research papers, Wikipedia and university pages, is mapped into a single epoch, and is then simulated as it orbits the Sun — so Pluto visibly leans out of the ecliptic and trans-Neptunian objects sit where the data says they are.
The launch conversation became part of the product. When readers asked for time controls, the developer shipped a real-time clock that runs backwards; when someone mentioned the dwarf planet FarFarOut, he added it; when a commenter caught a flipped axial-tilt sign, he fixed it in the thread. Hacker News answered with 770 points and 124 comments, many from parents who had lost their children to the atlas for an afternoon.
Why it lands
- True relative scale and motion made the tool teach by exploration: users discovered Pluto's inclined orbit and the strange trans-Neptunian bodies on their own instead of being told about them.
- Modelling the Solar System as a graph of clickable bodies, each with its own orbit and page, turned a physics simulation into an encyclopedia with a natural hierarchy.
- Shipping inside the launch thread — real-time clock, backward time travel, axial-tilt fixes, new objects — made the Show HN itself a live demo of responsiveness.
- Open-sourcing the code and naming science-fiction inspirations recruited a community of fellow space nerds who proposed objects, features and missions to replay.
What it did
The 8 January 2025 Show HN drew 770 points and 124 comments. Parents said they showed it to children and ended up talking about space for half an hour; commenters asked for a fictional toggle, pan controls and deeper links; and the author said HN traffic went far over his 100GB Netlify free-tier bandwidth. The code is open source on GitHub.
What you can take
Give people an intuition, not just information: when knowledge lives in an explorable model, relationships like orbital scale and inclination become visible in a way text and images cannot.
Since then
The site stayed live and open source, with a clear roadmap from the thread: non-Keplerian orbits, Trojan co-orbitals, replayable spacecraft missions and labelled background stars. The developer was candid that the physics was an approximation — Keplerian elements drift at high zoom, and every object had to be mapped into one epoch — and said a deeper dive down the ephemeris rabbit hole lay ahead. The long tail was educational: dozens of commenters described losing track of time, and parents said the atlas started half-hour conversations about aliens, distance and light speed.
Sources
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