The machines of spaceflight.

Four pressurised modules on a spine, a 44 m truss carrying four solar wings and radiators, a cupola, a robotic arm and a docked cargo craft.

• Four pressurised modules docked along a spine, a ring, hatch and capture guides at every join
• Rotary joints at the truss ends turn the four solar wings; the radiators stand at right angles so the two never shade each other
• A robotic arm on a mobile base reaches over the spine, and a faceted cupola hangs below
• A visiting cargo craft is docked at the far module's nadir port

Class

Stations

Built scale

59 m wing tip to wing tip · 44 m truss

Where the class lives

Low Earth orbit, about 400 km up

Geometry

51,080 triangles, modelled as real parts

Flying today: the International Space Station, 109 m end to end, and China's Tiangong. The model is the class, not either of them.

Orbit desk →Missions desk →

Foil-wrapped bus, twin deployable arrays and a steerable main dish.

• A foil-wrapped box bus with two solar wings on a single rotation axis
• The steerable main dish points at Earth; two smaller horn feeds sit beside it
• A radiator on the anti-sun face and a station-keeping thruster cluster at the base

Class

Satellites

Built scale

4.9 m across the solar wings

Where the class lives

Geostationary orbit, 35,786 km up

Geometry

11,260 triangles, modelled as real parts

The class in service: hundreds of communications satellites hold geostationary slots, fleets from Intelsat, SES and Eutelsat among them, the largest spanning over 30 m across their wings. The model is the class, not any of them.

Satellites desk →Orbit desk →

Two stage crewed lander: gold blanket descent stage on four shock strut legs, pressure cabin and ladder above.

• Gold-blanket descent stage: four tanks in the quadrants, a throttleable engine under the centre
• Four splayed legs on telescoping shock struts, built as real struts, sleeves and ball joints
• The ascent-stage cabin above: canted approach windows, thruster quads, a docking tunnel on the roof
• The ladder down the forward leg is how a crew reaches the surface, and gets back off it

Class

Landers

Built scale

9.6 m across the footpads

Where the class lives

The lunar surface

Geometry

50,896 triangles, modelled as real parts

The class that has carried crew: Apollo's Lunar Module, six landings from 1969 to 1972. Its successors, SpaceX's Starship HLS and Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK2, are being built for NASA's Artemis programme. The model is the class, not any of them.

Moon desk →Missions desk →

Six wheeled science rover on rocker bogie suspension: camera mast, stowed instrument arm and a radioisotope power unit.

• The rocker-bogie suspension is the signature: real bars on real pivots, not sticks; the linkage is what says rover
• A mast with a stereo camera head, and a robotic arm folded against the front bumper with an instrument turret at its wrist
• A radioisotope power unit with cooling fins on the tail, and a small steerable dish for the link home

Class

Rovers

Built scale

3.3 m long, six wheels

Where the class lives

Planetary surfaces: Mars, today

Geometry

39,488 triangles, modelled as real parts

Real rovers of the class: NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance, driving on Mars since 2012 and 2021 on exactly this suspension. The model is the class, not either of them.

Mars desk →Robotics desk →

Eighteen gold hexagons on an open backplane, a secondary on a tripod and a five-layer sunshield below.

• Eighteen gold-coated hexagonal mirror segments: segmentation is what lets a mirror wider than any fairing fold for launch
• A convex secondary held out on a tripod, five and a half metres from the primary
• The five-layer membrane sunshield keeps the optics cold enough to see infrared; the bus and solar array hang on the warm side

Class

Telescopes

Built scale

12 m across the sunshield

Where the class lives

High orbits and Sun-Earth L2, 1.5 million km out

Geometry

42,464 triangles, modelled as real parts

The class's famous members: Hubble, in orbit since 1990, and the James Webb Space Telescope at L2, whose segmented gold mirror this archetype echoes. The model is the class, not either of them.

Science desk →Data desk →

First stage back from orbit: legs deployed, grid fins folded and the lower tank darkened by re-entry.

• Four landing legs down and locked, built as real A-frames on pushrods
• Grid fins folded back against the interstage after steering the descent
• Nine engines up inside an open octaweb; the centre engine relights for the landing burn
• The lower third of the tank is darkened by the soot of re-entry

Class

Launch vehicles

Built scale

41 m tall · 14 m across the deployed legs

Where the class lives

Pad to orbit and back: the only machine here that comes home

Geometry

56,732 triangles, modelled as real parts

Flying today: SpaceX's Falcon 9 first stage proved the class, with single boosters past twenty flights, and Blue Origin's New Glenn landed its booster on its second flight in 2025. The model is the class, not either of them.

Falcon 9 reuse project →Launches desk →Business desk →

Full stack in flight configuration: nine first stage engines, a dark interstage and an ogive fairing.

Blunt-cone capsule on its service module: ablative shield, docking adapter, radiators and one main engine.

Foil-wrapped bus, three-metre dish, a nuclear generator on one boom and a magnetometer on the other.

A servicer bus with two articulated arms reaching past a capture ring, a refuelling nozzle and a stereo inspection camera.