A few years ago, a passion for space struck me, seemingly out of nowhere. I explain it to myself as though a fear of the unknown and the whole and big universe turned into curiosity for its exploration. Luckily the time my passion arose, human endeavor in space got very interesting again; seeing a rocket take off, release a payload and land again was the coolest thing I had ever seen and set me up for a whole fascinating world of spaceflight. Scrolling around the internet, I found a picture of a SpaceX worker standing next to a Falcon 9 rocket, who next to that gigantic machine merely seemed like an ant, and I thought to myself: I always thought rockets were big, but I was mistaken — they are HUGE.
Luckily, due to COVID lockdowns, I had a lot of time on my hands and a newfound passion. When an idea struck me: why don’t you animate a rocket next to a human and put it in VR? At that point in time I had a cheap Google VR headset for years and had played a fair amount of time with a variety of games and experiences I found on the Play Store. So I started to look around, found a YouTube video on how to build a VR app for phones in Unity and got to work. I snatched a 3D model of a Falcon 9 rocket from the internet and got to work and BANG. After connecting my phone to the laptop and pressing “Build and Run,” I couldn’t believe what was happening on my phone even though that was the goal to begin with. The Unity splash screen pops up and reveals two separate, slightly shifted windows on the left and right looking straight onto the rocket. I was fascinated and my mind started to explode with ideas: What if I take history’s most important rockets and put them together into a museum everyone can visit from their home? To be honest, I have to roll that back a little — I first didn’t think of other people; I wanted it for myself.
Waking up, I knew what I had to do. Every day. I was so fixed on the idea of building that app. To this day I reminisce about those times; they were truly fulfilling. Finding many models on the internet that suited what I wanted, I wrote tons of emails asking for licenses and even got a response from NASA themselves. Unity’s controls and ways got clearer and clearer to me, but I did have my fair share of almost crying because of not finding bugs or not understanding the texture system. Unfortunately, many unknowns remain to this day and I sometimes resort to solving them by brute force.
The app started to take shape, ran into some problems in the final steps, but the app built without problems and then I made a Google Developer account and released it to the whole world. Not thinking much would happen, I was pleasantly surprised some people were downloading it and having their fun. Somehow it started to gain traction, so on some days I noticed even 10 PEOPLE downloading my app. How awesome is that? But the momentum didn’t stop. 10 would become 20, 20 became 50 and on some days more than a hundred people downloaded it, for it to now reach about 96,000 downloads in the whole wide world.
By going after my own curiosity I made something that a bunch of people would enjoy and maybe like as much as I do. So I guess: just build what you would like to have yourself — there might be some people looking for exactly that as well!