About Stick the Landing

Stick the Landing is a free browser game about the hardest part of a reusable rocket's day: coming home. It was made for World Space Week 2026 (4–10 October), whose theme is “Rocket Revolution”. Boosters have become routine to reuse — one Falcon 9 booster has now flown 37 times, New Glenn has reflown its first stage, and a Chinese company landed an orbital-class booster for the first time in August 2026.

It's a game, not a flight simulator. The physics (gravity, thrust, drag, wind, rotation) are real ideas simplified so the game stays fun, and the numbers are tuned for play. Gravity values for each world are real.

How to play

• Thrust: ↑, W or Space (or the big THRUST button on touch screens).
• Tilt: ← → or A D. Tilting while thrusting pushes you sideways — that's how you steer.
• Land on the target with low downward speed, low sideways speed and the booster nearly upright. The HUD turns green when you're inside the limits.
• Droneships move. Your speed is measured relative to the deck. Miss it and you're in the ocean.
• Tower catches: the super booster has no legs. Hover so the yellow hardpoints sit in the glowing catch box, moving slowly, and the arms close. Touching the tower or the ground ends the flight.
• Pause with P or Esc, retry with R, mute with M.

Difficulty & scoring

Cadet automatically levels the booster when you let go of the tilt keys and uses wider limits (score ×0.75). Pilot damps spin only (×1). Ace has no assists and tighter limits (×1.4).

A successful landing earns a 1,000-point base, plus up to 500 for softness, 800 for precision, 200 for being upright and 800 for fuel left over (half a tank or more gets the maximum). Stars are based on the score before the difficulty multiplier: 2,000 for ★★ and 2,600 for ★★★.

Daily Landing

Every day at local midnight a new landing is generated from the date, so everyone gets the same one. Your first flight of the day is your official score; after that you're practising. Fly on consecutive days to build a streak.

Ghosts & share links

The physics runs at a fixed 60 steps per second, so the same inputs always give the same flight. When you share a result, your inputs are compressed into the link. Whoever opens it flies the same level with your booster as a ghost beside them, and sees the score they need to beat. Free Flight links carry the whole scenario too.

Privacy

No accounts, no trackers, no ads. Progress, stars and streaks are kept in your browser's local storage and never leave your device. The only third-party request is for Google Fonts.

Sources

Real-world facts in the level briefings, timeline and home page come from:

• World Space Week 2026 dates and “Rocket Revolution” theme — National Today, Awareness Days, Wikipedia
• First Falcon 9 landing at LZ-1, 21 Dec 2015 — Wikipedia: Landing Zones 1 and 2, SpaceNews
• Droneship landing history — Wikipedia: Falcon 9 first-stage landing tests
• New Shepard's first landing, 23 Nov 2015 — EarthSky
• B1067 records (33rd, 35th, 37th flights), 598 landings — Spaceflight Now, Space.com (35th flight), Space.com (37th flight), Wikipedia: Falcon 9
• First chopstick catch, 13 Oct 2024, and the “one second” abort margin — Space.com, Space.com, Wikipedia
• New Glenn landings on Jacklyn and first reuse — Wikipedia: Jacklyn, Space.com
• Zhuque-3 booster landing, 18 Aug 2026 — Wikipedia, Spaceflight Now, Space.com
• Blue Ghost and Athena lunar landings, March 2025 — Wikipedia: IM-2, Scientific American
• Apollo 11 program alarms and fuel margin — NASA Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
• October 2026 sky events (Draconids) — National Geographic
• Planetary gravity values — NASA Planetary Fact Sheets

Other historical milestones (Luna 9, Viking 1, DC-X, Huygens, Chang'e 4, Perseverance, SES-10, Falcon Heavy) are widely documented; see their Wikipedia articles.

Credits

Game design, code, art and writing are original to this site. All graphics are drawn live in the browser. Fonts: Space Grotesk, Inter and JetBrains Mono (Google Fonts, SIL Open Font License). This is an independent fan project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by SpaceX, Blue Origin, LandSpace, NASA, ESA or the World Space Week Association. Mission and vehicle names are used only to describe real historical events.