Orbiter (simulator)

Orbiter is a space flight simulator video game developed to simulate spaceflight using realistic Newtonian physics. The game was released on 27 November 2000; and the latest edition, labeled "Orbiter 2024", was released on 31 December 2024. The developer, Martin Schweiger, announced to the community that Orbiter is being published under the open source MIT License.

Orbiter was developed by Martin Schweiger, a senior research fellow in the computer science department at University College London, who felt that space flight simulators at the time were lacking in realistic physics-based flight models, and decided to write a simulator that made learning physics concepts enjoyable. It has been used as a teaching aid in classrooms, and a community of add-on developers have created a multitude of add-ons to allow users to fly assorted real and fictional spacecraft and add new planets or planetary systems.