Artemis II Explorer: Turning a Space Mission Into Something You Can Feel

For the past few weeks, I have been sharing small previews of a project that started as an experiment: screenshots, short clips, fragments of a 3D scene, camera tests, Earth-Moon views, and bits of Orion moving through space.

Today, I can finally share the first working version.

Artemis II Mission Explorer is an interactive 3D mission experience built to help people follow Orion’s journey around the Moon in a more spatial, emotional, and intuitive way.

• Not as a diagram.
• Not as a static animation.
• Not as a timeline of events.

But as a journey you can move through.

Why I Built the Artemis II Mission Explorer

At Astrography, we have always been interested in the meeting point between science and beauty. Our posters, prints, and visual stories are built around a simple idea: space is not only important because it is scientifically meaningful. It is powerful because it changes how we feel about our place in the universe.

Artemis II is exactly that kind of story.

It is not just a mission profile or a set of technical milestones. It is a changing relationship between Earth, the Moon, the Sun, Orion, and the people inside the spacecraft. It is Earth slowly shrinking behind the crew. It is the Moon growing in the window. It is the strange geometry of a lunar flyby. It is distance, light, motion, silence, and return.

I wanted to build something that makes that geometry visible.

Something that lets you press play and watch the mission unfold. Something that lets you pause, move the camera, switch perspectives, enter the capsule view, and understand the mission not only intellectually, but spatially.

That became Artemis II Explorer.

What You Can Experience

The Explorer lets you follow Orion through an interactive Earth-Moon-Orion scene directly in the browser. You can scrub through the mission timeline, jump between key mission checkpoints, change playback speed, and explore the journey from different camera views.

You can watch Earth recede.
You can follow Orion from outside.
You can look back toward home.
You can shift to the Moon.
You can enter a capsule-style perspective.
You can move through the mission at your own pace.

The goal is not to replace official mission materials. The goal is to create a more human way to explore them.

A mission like Artemis II is usually understood through articles, diagrams, renderings, livestreams, press kits, and isolated images. All of those are valuable, but they are fragmented. I wanted to bring the story into one continuous spatial interface where the mission becomes easier to feel.

The Core Features

At the center of the app is an interactive 3D scene showing Earth, the Moon, Orion, and the mission trajectory. The timeline includes MET and UTC-style readouts, play and pause controls, mission checkpoint jumps, and speed controls ranging from real time to highly accelerated playback.

The interface includes mission checkpoint cards with phase descriptions, altitude, speed, and contextual tags. There are telemetry-style dials for distance, velocity, altitude, mission progress, and DSN-style communication and light-delay context.

The camera system is one of the most important parts of the experience. You can switch between overview, Orion follow, Earth, Moon, capsule-in, and capsule-out views. The capsule-style view includes look controls, camera roll, reset options, and animated aiming toward Earth, the Moon, or Orion.

There is also a fullscreen exploration mode, orbit controls, smooth camera transitions, and settings for trajectory visibility, orbit rings, labels, Earthshine, cloud shadows, the Milky Way, and a developer HUD.

Gallery Reconstruction

One of the parts I care about most is the connection between the simulation and real mission imagery.

The app includes a curated Artemis II image gallery with source metadata, credit lines, dates, image IDs, and source links where available. Some gallery items can move the 3D scene to the approximate mission moment and apply a matching camera preset.

That means the gallery is not just a collection of images. It becomes a reconstruction layer.

You can move from a real image into the simulated geometry around it. You can compare a reference photo with the scene. You can start to understand not just what the image shows, but where the spacecraft was, what it was looking at, and how the larger Earth-Moon geometry shaped that view.

The Rendering Layer

Under the hood, the project became much deeper than I expected.

The Earth is rendered with day textures, night lights, atmosphere, Earthshine, cloud layers, and cloud shadows. The Moon uses NASA-based texture references, terrain detail, Earthshine response, eclipse handling, and distance-aware level of detail.

Orion is assembled from NASA 3D asset sources. The scene also includes a real star field based on the Yale Bright Star Catalog, a Milky Way background, Sun glow, lens flare, eclipse/corona behavior, and occultation logic.

The intention was never to create a perfect scientific simulator. This is still an MVP. But I wanted it to feel grounded in real mission geometry and real visual context, not like a manually animated cinematic shortcut.

Built as a Browser-Based 3D App

Technically, Artemis II Explorer is a static Vite + Three.js application. There is no backend, no database, no authentication, and no environment variables. It runs directly in the browser.

The project uses trajectory data where available, fallback curves for gaps or failed loads, live cloud imagery with browser caching and static fallback, custom shader patches, texture LOD, and GPU-conscious rendering paths for heavier visual layers like clouds and night lighting.

There is also a developer HUD that exposes FPS, camera position, rotation, quaternion, FOV, target, and copyable viewport state. This became essential during development, because building a spatial interface is not only about making things appear. It is about tuning the feeling of movement, perspective, scale, and orientation.

A New Way of Building

This project was also an experiment in how I build.

One of the most important things about Artemis II Explorer is that 100% of the application code was written with AI agents under my direction.

I was responsible for the concept, research direction, architecture decisions, visual taste, testing, iteration, and all the “this still does not feel right” feedback loops. The code itself was produced through AI-assisted engineering workflows.

Codex handled many of the hardest technical parts: 3D mechanics, trajectory logic, camera systems, coordinate-space problems, model loading, rendering behavior, shader work, performance decisions, telemetry logic, and fallback systems.

Claude Code helped more with the UI layer, application structure, panels, controls, state wiring, and bringing the different systems together into a usable product.

This was one of the most interesting parts of the whole project. AI did not replace the need for direction. It made direction more important. When implementation becomes extremely fast, unclear thinking becomes expensive. Taste, architecture, QA, and persistence matter even more.

The workflow felt less like “asking AI to make an app” and more like directing a very fast, very capable, but very literal engineering team. The result depends on how clearly you can describe the problem, how carefully you review the output, and how strongly you protect the project from collapsing under its own growing scope.

From Space Art to Space Experiences

For Astrography, Artemis II Explorer feels like a natural next step.

For years, we have created visual stories about the cosmos: posters, prints, maps, mission-inspired designs, and scientifically grounded space art. But an interactive 3D experience opens a different door.

Instead of only looking at a story, you can move through it.

Instead of seeing a mission as a finished image, you can explore the geometry behind it.

Instead of reading that Orion traveled around the Moon, you can follow the spacecraft, change the camera, pause the mission, look back at Earth, and start to feel the scale of the journey.

That is the direction I am most excited about: space storytelling that is visual, scientific, emotional, and interactive at the same time.

Still an MVP

This is still a first working version. It is not finished. There are things to improve, simplify, optimize, explain, and correct.

But the heart of the project is already there.

A browser-based 3D mission explorer.
A spatial story of Artemis II.
A bridge between mission data, public imagery, and human imagination.
A small experiment that became much bigger than expected.

The best experience is on desktop, in fullscreen, on a large screen.

Open it, explore it, break it, and tell me what you felt.

Artemis II Explorer
https://artemis.astrography.com/