Ground-Control Delay: Life-Support Stability Simulator (2D)

Every command a mission controller on Earth sends to a spacecraft's life-support hardware has to survive a round trip at the speed of light before it can act — a round trip that stretches from milliseconds near Earth to nearly three-quarters of an hour at Mars's farthest range. This 2D companion drives the same real proportional CO₂-scrubber control loop with that light-time delay, laid out as three linked panels: a draggable radio-link view showing telemetry and command packets crossing the gap, a scrolling strip chart of cabin CO₂ against target, and a draggable, zoomable phase portrait that turns the loop's stability directly into a spiral you can watch shrink, ring, or blow up. Push the spacecraft farther from Earth, tune the controller's gain and the scrubber's hardware ceiling, and toggle between Earth-based remote control and onboard autonomy to find exactly where ground-loop control stops working.