'Dad, This Makes Me Want to Play KSP!' — 11-Year-Old Kerbal Space Program Gets Player Boost Amid Artemis II's Mission to the Moon

Space simulator Kerbal Space Program has seen a resurgence arsenic players observe the motorboat of the world's archetypal manned ngo to the Moon, Artemis II, successful decades.

The Artemis II unit are heading location aft travelling further from Earth than anyone before, with a splashdown backmost connected Earth scheduled for April 10. This ngo is simply a elephantine measurement toward a instrumentality to the satellite and aboriginal missions to Mars, and it besides marks the archetypal clip humanity has flown to the Moon successful implicit 50 years.

It has besides seemingly reignited our fascination with space, with thousands of players jumping into the 11-year-old simulator game, Kerbal Space Program. While it usually bobs astir connected a precise respectable 3-4,000 highest concurrent players connected Steam, since Artemis II's launch, SteamDB has recorded an unusually precocious concurrent highest of 11,390 players successful the past 24 hours.

While that doesn't rather lucifer its motorboat grounds — that sits astatine 19,149 players — it's awesome nonetheless, peculiarly coupled with a 732% summation successful Twitch views of the crippled successful April 2026, too, up from an mean of astir 96 views to 799.

The resurgence has spilled implicit into the game's subreddit, too. "Was watching the unrecorded watercourse of Artemis with my son, helium looks astatine maine and says 'Dad, this makes maine privation to play KSP!'" said 1 player. Another hopes the involvement "sparks immoderate renewal for different bully sim game."

"Count myself among [the returning players]," added idiosyncratic else. "I was speechmaking astir the now-cancelled plans for the Lunar Gateway portion looking up Artemis and thought, 'I privation to bash that.' Now I'm successful vocation mode struggling to reliably orbit. Good times."

Steam reviews are besides referencing Artemis II. "Watching the Artemis II launch, I present person a overmuch larger knowing of abstraction question due to the fact that of KSP lol," 1 subordinate with implicit 300 hours connected record, said. "To spot each the concepts successful the crippled construe somewhat to existent beingness is amazing."

Of course, Kerbal Space Program doesn't precisely lucifer what Artemis II's astronauts are seeing and doing, but it does let you to make your ain abstraction program, which, according to our review, offers a "deep, funny, and elaborate physics sim that ne'er takes itself excessively seriously." It returned an 'Amazing' 9/10 successful IGN's 2015 review.

While we already knew the Artemis II unit watched Project Hail Mary earlier their mission, yesterday (April 6) we received different fantastic callback to the novel/film arsenic Mission Control responded to Commander Reid Wiseman's statement of the Moon by quoting Rocky and saying, "Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!" It occurred during NASA's authoritative broadcast of Artemis II's abstraction voyage, and it happened arsenic they were conducting their lunar flyby.

Vikki Blake is simply a newsman for IGN, arsenic good arsenic a critic, columnist, and advisor with 15+ years acquisition moving with immoderate of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's besides a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her astatine BlueSky.