Discover
Ground sites are invisible from orbit. Zoom in and hunt them — every country hides one or two, placed deterministically from its own name, so the same world exists on every device with nothing stored anywhere.
Phase 1 · Single player · iOS
Orbit is the gameplay.
Orbit is the gameplay.
Δv is the scarcity.
Celestrike is a game about running a satellite intelligence company. Design a platform inside a budget, launch it into an orbit you can live with, and earn on what it can see. Money is a flow. Delta-v is a stock that never refills in flight, and every burn spends it permanently.
97 minLEO revisit
0Simulation ticks
FreeNothing gated
Free on iOS, September 2026. No accounts, no ads, no tracking.
Ground track · Earth view
Propagator ×60 · —
VANTA-3
—
KESTREL-9
—
NULLPOINT
—
Core loop
Find it. Reach it. Hold it.
Five steps, and the physics decides four of them. There is no build queue and no energy meter — the thing standing between you and the payout is orbital geometry.
Plan
Reaching a latitude means a plane change, and plane changes are the most expensive thing you can buy in orbit. The cheap answer is usually to wait for the geometry instead.
Burn
Δv leaves the tank and does not come back. Only a servicing mission — expensive, slow, and real — puts any of it back, which makes every burn a decision about the rest of that satellite's life.
Lock
Task a site and wait for the pass. It arrives when the orbit says it arrives, not when you open the app, and a LEO imager gets about four minutes to work with.
Collect
Intel accrues per hour of footprint coverage, scaled down by altitude. Close the app for an hour and the number is exactly right when you come back — not because anything ran, but because it was always derivable from the orbit.
Regimes
Orbits are choices, not tiers.
Higher is not stronger. Each regime is excellent at one thing and poor at another, and no amount of progression moves you up a ladder — it only widens the set of orbits you can operate in. A veteran flies all three at once.
LEO
200 – 1,000 km
Imaging. The sharpest resolution and the fastest revisit in the game — and four minutes per pass to get the shot. Crowded, and atmospheric drag bills you for station-keeping every week you stay.
- Period
- 1 h 37 min
- Footprint
- ~670 km
- Costs
- Δv, constantly
MEO
2,000 – 20,000 km
Timing, navigation and wide-area coverage. Slow, stable, reliable and frankly boring — which is exactly why it is the income floor that pays for the interesting orbits.
- Period
- 4 h 46 min
- Footprint
- ~835 km
- Costs
- Patience
GEO
35,786 km
Comms and signals work. Park over one longitude and stare forever. Ground resolution is poor, but every neighbour is permanent — which is what makes satellite-versus-satellite espionage possible at all.
- Period
- 23 h 56 min
- Horizon
- 81°
- Costs
- Resolution
You are not flying a spaceship. You are running an intelligence business whose physics won't negotiate.Design pillar
Under the hood
The physics is the product.
Most space games treat orbits as decoration — a sine wave over a map, a number that goes up. Take the physics out of Celestrike and there is no game left underneath it.
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Keplerian, not decorative
Six classical elements and an epoch —
a, e, i, RAAN, argp, M. A burn is elements → state vector → add Δv → back to elements, which is why the fuel gauge and the trajectory are the same fact expressed twice. The globe at the top of this page is running that code, not a loop of a recorded animation. -
J2 nodal precession
Earth is not a sphere, so its equatorial bulge drags the orbital plane round over time. Modelling it means ground tracks drift between passes and sun-synchronous orbits actually stay sun-synchronous. Ten lines of maths, and without them the whole sky reads as fake.
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No simulation tick
Position at any timestamp is computable in constant time, so nothing has to run while you are away and nothing can fall behind while you sleep. The world running offline is not a feature that was built — it is a property of the mathematics.
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An opaque Earth
The far half of an orbit disappears behind the planet instead of x-raying through it, because occlusion here is a depth comparison rather than a renderer feature. That is the whole reason the globe is a 2D orthographic drawing and not a 3D scene.
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Borrowed from the real thing
The premise is barely fiction. In 2023 a US surveillance satellite manoeuvred toward two newly arrived Chinese satellites in the geostationary belt; they scattered, and one repositioned to get a sunlit view of its observer. Inspector satellites shadowing each other in GEO is documented, ongoing behaviour.
Non-negotiable
What Celestrike will never do.
These were decided before a line of code was written, each one against a specific way this genre normally fails. They are not a marketing promise that can quietly lapse in an update — they are the design document, and the design document outranks the code.
Delta-v is never sold for money.
Not as fuel, not as a refill, not as a "boost". Delta-v is the scarce strategic resource the entire game is built around, and it is restored by exactly one thing: a servicing mission you pay for in-game.
Prevents — selling the win condition. This is the single most destructive thing that could be done to this design.
Nothing is taken while you are away.
Real anti-satellite engagements are telegraphed: a co-orbital interceptor takes hours or days to close and is visible the whole time. You get the warning and a real decision — evade and spend Δv you will miss, deploy a decoy, or gamble that it is a bluff and finish the contract.
Prevents — the offline-destruction failure that has buried a lot of asymmetric mobile PvP.
No offline defence buff.
Engagement timing comes from orbital mechanics and is identical whether you are watching or not. The engagement window is already the protection. Being online buys you better reactions, never immunity.
Prevents — rewarding players for logging off.
Insurance is a mechanic, not a purchase.
Satellite insurance is a real and large industry, so it is in the game — premiums paid in game currency, available to everyone. It pays out money. It does not confer immunity. You still lost the asset, the orbit and the position.
Prevents — making "never actually lose" a state you can buy.
Altitude is never a level gate.
Progression unlocks the capability to operate in more regimes; it never pushes you upward. A beginner watching a veteran's imager pass overhead should read as aspirational, not as a threat from a higher tier.
Prevents — collapsing the strategy into "climb as high as you can afford", and the absurdity of endgame players being worse at imaging.
Debris outlives the fight.
Destroyed satellites leave a debris field in their band, and it degrades that band for everyone using it — including whoever caused it. Below about 500 km drag clears it in months. At 800 km and above it persists for centuries. In GEO, effectively forever.
Prevents — griefing, without a single arbitrary anti-grief rule. Physics does the work.
Starting fleet
Three platforms, three problems.
You begin with one of each regime, and their differences are entirely physical — the same numbers the globe above is propagating right now.
VANTA-3
ImageryKESTREL-9
SIGINTNULLPOINT
Relay
Price
Free. One optional thing to buy.
The whole game is free. Nothing is gated, no content is held back, there is no energy timer and there are no ads. There is exactly one purchase — a supporter cosmetic for your photo archive — and buying it changes nothing about what your satellites can do.
The principle behind that, written down long before there was anything to sell: monetise identity, never power.
Status
Where it actually is.
Written the way it is tracked internally, including the parts that are cut. A roadmap is only useful if it is falsifiable.
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v1.0 iOS · September 2026
Three screens — WORLD, CMD and FLEET. Discover a site by zooming, task a burn, watch it fly, lock the target, watch intel accrue, and find all of it intact after a restart. Single player, no accounts and no backend: your state lives on your device and nowhere else.
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v1.1 After launch
The ORBIT schematic view, the terrain shader, and the engagement screen — built as a decision under a countdown rather than an arcade duel, because a duel would contradict three design rules at once.
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Beyond Unscheduled, and conditional
A persistent shared sky, an insurance economy and player-versus-player engagements. Only if v1.0 finds an audience. That version is a company rather than a feature, and it will not be started on optimism.
Every burn is permanent. Choose the orbit you can live with.Free on iOS · September 2026