10 Best Space Games To Keep Fueling Your Artemis II Obsession

Artemis II returned to Earth on April 10, 2026, after the first trip to lunar space in more than 50 years. With an exciting launch, breathtaking photos, and a daring reentry, the Artemis II mission helped recapture the wonder that typified space exploration in the 20th century. Spaceflight and exploration remain deeply fascinating, and there are luckily plenty of sci-fi games that attempt relatively realistic adaptations of such endeavors.

Below are 10 space flight, exploration, colonization, and simulation games that, for the most part, have some semblance of verisimilitude. A few involve concepts in the realm of soft sci-fi, but I’ve tried to avoid space operas like Mass Effect (despite those games coming extremely highly recommended) in favor of games that more accurately capture the feelings inspired by Artemis II and other real-world missions beyond our Blue Marble.

Kerbal Space Program

If you are mainly interested in the planning, building, and executing of spaceflight missions, there’s really no better option than Kerbal Space Program. Goofy green characters aside, KSP is actually a fairly thorough simulation. It’s not entirely accurate to real-world physics – that would make it actual rocket science, and that’s not necessarily fun for the average player – but it’s still realistic enough to have a long learning curve.

Kerbal Space Program had 10 years of support, and is recommended over its sequel, which was made by a different developer and suffered all sorts of issues. The original KSP is a wonderful facsimile for running an agency like NASA. You start with the basics, simply figuring out how to get Kerbals into orbit and back safely, before gradually moving on to lunar and planetary missions.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker

If building ships turns out to not be your thing, try destroying them instead. Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a space salvage sim where you work in a zero-g orbital scrapyard. It’s effectively a puzzle game – you pull increasingly complex spaceships apart piece by piece, sorting the resultant materials, without triggering explosive decompression or running out of oxygen.

There’s a story to work through, and there’s some satisfying progression as you master the trade, but it can be a bit stressful. I have the most fun in Hardspace: Shipbreaker by playing on the easiest difficulty, where there’s no time limit and the game is more lenient with a few things. It can be incredibly relaxing to float around in orbit and meticulously pull apart a spaceship.

Elite Dangerous

Actual space travel involves sitting in a very small vehicle, like the Artemis II crew in the Orion spacecraft, and there’s arguably no better virtual substitute than Elite Dangerous. Its big draw for those fascinated by deep space exploration is its 1:1 recreation of the Milky Way galaxy. It was designed as an MMO, but can be played alone or in a private lobby with friends too.

Elite Dangerous is, broadly, an interstellar civilization simulator. When it launched in 2014, it was set in the year 3300, meaning the in-game date is now 3312. Your journey through Elite Dangerous begins humbly, with a modest ship, but the game is ultimately what you make of it. Its sandbox includes colonization, settlement building, trading, piracy, mining, or even just simple exploration.

Starfield

Starfield has two big things going for it that will interest Artemis II fanatics: its NASA-punk aesthetic and its ship-building systems. The former is the crowning achievement of its setting – Starfield takes place in 2330, and its design philosophy is largely a hypothesis of what current spaceflight technology would look like given 300 years of iteration.

Building your own ship is arguably the best part of Starfield, though. It may take a while to earn the required money and find the components you want, but the modular spacecraft builder is excellent and gives you a lot of creative freedom. Starfield‘s new Free Lanes update even made some much-needed improvements to spaceflight gameplay, so cruising in your custom ship is better than ever.

Stellaris

If you enjoy the big-picture ideas pertaining to space exploration and colonization – and I mean the really big picture – Stellaris is grand strategy on a galactic scale. Anyone who has played or is familiar with Europa Universalis will have a rough idea of what to expect from Stellaris. Instead of a European nation-state, you command an interstellar empire looking to expand its territory and influence.

You’ll make first contact with opposing alien empires, so Stellaris is well beyond our relatively rudimentary off-world endeavors, but it is a very thorough imagining of the logistics involved in governing massive, multi-planetary society. Developer Paradox Interactive’s games are notoriously systems-heavy, and Stellaris is not an outlier, so expect a lot of depth and a significant learning curve.

RimWorld

Say a whole interstellar empire is a bit much – RimWorld‘s focus on a single planet may be the perfect alternative. In RimWorld‘s fiction, faster-than-light travel is not possible, so colony planets on the edge of known space, rimworlds, are left to fend for themselves. That’s where you come in.

RimWorld is largely a management sim. You build a colony on a rimworld after your first citizens crash-land, and attempt to grow it while dealing with randomly generated events. The goal is to eventually escape the planet, but most of the gameplay revolves around ensuring colonists survive, expanding the colony, and managing its resources.

∆V: Rings Of Saturn

Those last few games have wandered quite a bit into soft sci-fi territory, so let’s course-correct with a more realistic gaming depiction of spaceflight, ∆V: Rings of Saturn. Calling itself “the ultimate asteroid mining simulator,” ∆V has you navigate the titular gas giant’s iconic rings, blasting asteroids to bits with a laser and harvesting their resources.

In real life, humanity hasn’t achieved asteroid mining, but ∆V uses only real-world technology like rocket propulsion and fission reactors. Your mining laser is another example – it’s invisible unless it passes through a medium. It attempts to be theoretically sound in its spaceflight, and like other simulation games, has a narrative experience that largely coalesces from the choices you make along your journey.

Helium Rain

Helium Rain takes interplanetary trade to a slightly larger scale than ∆V, but is not nearly as ambitious as Elite Dangerous. Helium Rain is a single-player spaceflight simulator that takes place around a gas giant called Nema. As the head of a company and captain of its lead ship, your goal is to exert control over the planetary sector.

Various contracts can be fulfilled within Helium Rain‘s economic simulation, but there’s a notable emphasis on combat. As your influence grows, you’ll need to upgrade your ships and their firepower to contend with more dangerous rivals and pirates. Helium Rain‘s modular ship designs provide a lot of depth to skirmishes; e.g., targeting propulsion systems will achieve different results than aiming for life support.

Children Of A Dead Earth

Spaceflight combat is taken to another level with Children of a Dead Earth, which claims to be “the most scientifically accurate space warfare simulator ever made.” Much like ∆V, Children of a Dead Earth features real-world technology, letting you design your own ships to engage in complex orbital simulations – and also blast others to bits with a hail of lead.

If you’ve ever watched The Expanse, you’ll have an idea of what theoretically realistic space warfare looks like: rockets flying past each other at incredible speeds and cranking high-g turns to avoid enemy fire. Children of a Dead Earth does have a campaign, but it also features a sandbox mode, both of which take place in an accurate recreation of our solar system, absurd speeds and unfathomable distances included.

No Man’s Sky

Compared to those last few recommendations, No Man’s Sky is exceptionally light on realism. It puts you in a procedurally generated galaxy with more than 18 quintillion explorable planets – I find the zeros help sell the absurd scale: No Man’s Sky generates more than 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets that can be visited. It would be literally impossible to visit all of them in your lifetime, but I digress.

With a decade of free updates jam-packing No Man’s Sky with new content, there’s no shortage of sci-fi antics to get up to. But where No Man’s Sky really succeeds is in creating that unbridled sense of wonder that real spaceflight missions like Artemis II manage to draw out of us. There’s a whole galaxy out there with limitless possibilities to discover.

Systems

Released

August 9, 2016

ESRB

T for Teen: Fantasy Violence, Animated Blood

Engine

Proprietary