New NASA Game

The game, "Moonbase Alpha," will allow players to work together in a futuristic lunar base. Players must tackle the challenge of restoring oxygen flow and critical systems after a meteor strike cripples a solar array and life support system.

This comes as a precursor to NASA's massively multiplayer online game, called "Astronaut: Moon, Mars & Beyond," where players would take on astronaut roles, such as a roboticist, and explore virtual versions of the moon and other extraterrestrial locations.

NASA and the game developers had debated about whether to keep the "Moonbase Alpha" setting on a lunar base, after the cancellation of NASA's Constellation Program that aimed to return astronauts to the moon. But they eventually decided to forge ahead with their original plans.

"The moon's not going anywhere," said Daniel Laughlin, project manager for NASA Learning Technologies at the agency's Goddard Earth Science and Technology Center in Maryland.

Games that recreate real space environments inside a user's computer can entertain casual gamers and perhaps spread the word about space exploration activities. At least that's the hope among NASA's "Moonbase Alpha" designers, and the U.S. space agency isn't alone in trying to tap into that potential.

Consider: If paying $200,000 for a real-life suborbital spaceflight on a Virgin Galactic space liner sounds like a hefty price, that ticket price still falls short of the $330,000 one gamer spent to buy a virtual space station in the online game "Entropia Universe."

The company behind "Entropia Universe" has since created a demo for the European Space Agency (ESA) to show how online gaming could promote space exploration.

The developers at MindArk used their "Entropia Universe" game engine to create a virtual base set on Jupiter's moon Europa. Their scripted demo shows players cooperating on in-game missions, such as repairing a broken-down rover

"[ESA] was expecting a mock-up, but not a prototype," said Christian Bjorkman, chief marketing officer for MindArk. "But for us to create the mock-up, we might as well create the environment and run around in it."

But Joachim Fuchs, a technical officer and system modeler at ESA, had also seen examples of engineers holding collaborative work sessions in online games. He wondered if an online game could not only promote space exploration among gamers, but also allow engineers to play out scenarios for future space missions.