FondGalaxy is a focused cabinet about a universe you can actually fly. It puts the Sun, eight planets, twenty-five major moons, the ISS, Hubble, and a bounded NASA exoplanet snapshot into one continuous 3D view. It belongs to the Spacefront Wing floor because it turns orbital geometry, scale, and catalog evidence from the Spacefront library into a short, repeatable exploration loop. You can play without an account or installation, then return to the page to read the reasoning behind the mechanics.
How to play
Start on the title card and enter the universe. Object view is the default: drag to orbit the selected body. Switch to free flight to look around and travel with WASD, R and F to climb or descend, and Shift to boost. Click a world, moon, or spacecraft to select it without teleporting; G goes there, C centers it, and O frames the whole physical Solar System. Scroll, pinch, or the scale slider zooms from a surface out to an illustrative Milky Way.
The first run is for orientation. Notice which labels appear only when a body is large enough on screen, which moons keep physical size in closeup, and how the system map compresses distances so every planet stays visible. On the second run, choose one deliberate destination — a moon family, a spacecraft, or a named exoplanet — and leave the rest alone. If the cabinet offers search, layers, or a date control, use it. Those are part of the lesson rather than friction around it.
What the simulation actually models
The model is an educational visualization, not an ephemeris or an N-body integrator. Planets use circular coplanar orbits. Natural satellites use fixed Kepler ellipses with approximate JPL mean elements. ISS and Hubble use nominal orbital parameters and do not track live positions. Exoplanet destinations come from a dated NASA Exoplanet Archive snapshot; surfaces, phases, and unknown orientations stay illustrative.
The cabinet is not a forecast, certification, clinical assessment, engineering design, or field procedure. Its value is narrower and more useful: it gives you a safe place to feel a relationship. In FondGalaxy, the relationship to watch is between physical scale and the shortcuts a map has to take before a human can see the system at all. A run that feels lost can still teach you where the margin was, which signal you ignored, or which assumption was too broad.
A better second run
Before replaying FondGalaxy, write one sentence about the previous result. “I treated the overview as true distances,” “I expected live spacecraft tracking,” or “I assumed every famous exoplanet was in the snapshot” is enough. Then change one decision and leave the rest alone. This is the small experiment that turns a game over into an observation. It also makes the game a useful bridge into the longer guidebooks rather than a decorative button beside them.
How it was built
The cabinet is a browser observatory: a Three.js scene, a catalog you can search, and local assets with explicit credits. The intent is to reward careful looking at scale and then send the player back to the guidebook shelf for the slower version of orbit determination and observatory operations. The landing page stays separate from the playable bundle so the game can remain quick and focused while this page carries the explanation, links, and safety framing. No account is required, progress stays in the browser, and the cabinet does not ask the player to touch a real system or submit personal data.
Read the idea behind the cabinet
If you want the slower version, start with Flight Dynamics and Orbit Determination: Knowing Where Spacecraft Really Are and Space Telescope Observatory Operations: Turning a Spacecraft Into a Scientific Instrument . Read for the model, not a perfect score: the guidebooks name the evidence, constraints, maintenance habits, or human context that a short session has to compress. Then come back and try the cabinet with one of those ideas in mind.
The useful outcome is not that the game tells you what to buy, believe, diagnose, or do in an emergency. It is that the next real question becomes more precise. That is what a good learning cabinet should leave behind: curiosity with a boundary, a model you can explain, and a reason to look at the evidence again.