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Design for Demise: Satellite Reentry Survivability (2D)

Interactive 2D reentry simulator: a decommissioned satellite's fuel tank, reaction wheel and structural bus fall through the atmosphere on a side-view altitude chart you can pan and zoom. Switch between legacy high-melting-point materials and design-for-demise materials and watch which components ablate away versus survive to strike the ground, with live Sutton-Graves heating and NASA-style casualty-area readouts.

Space & Astronomy2DAdvanced60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 3D version

When a decommissioned satellite is deorbited, not every part burns up. This simulator drops a fuel tank, a reaction wheel and a structural bus panel through a real Sutton-Graves heating pulse and tracks each fragment's own temperature against its material's melting point, on a pannable, zoomable side-view altitude chart. Switch between a legacy design (titanium tank, steel wheel) and a design-for-demise version (aluminum-lithium tank, aluminum wheel, demisable composite bus) to see which fragments ablate away in the upper atmosphere versus survive to strike the ground — and how that changes the NASA-style casualty-area risk estimate that drives real post-mission-disposal standards.

⚙ Under the hood

A 2D side-view reentry simulator: a decommissioned satellite's fuel tank, reaction wheel and structural bus panel fall through a real Sutton-Graves heating pulse on a pannable, zoomable altitude chart, each fragment's own temperature racing its material's melting point. Switch between a legacy design (titanium, steel) and a design-for-demise design (aluminum, composite) to see which parts ablate away versus survive to hit the ground, with a live NASA-style ground casualty-area estimate.

design for demisesatellite reentrycasualty riskatmospheric heatingspace debris mitigationablation

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install