Celestrike
Spy satellites · Orbital warfare · Unexplained contacts

Spy on the world.
Something else is up there.

They came to shut your black-budget programme down, so you took it rogue: the satellites, the stealth launch site, all of it. Fly over other governments' secret sites and sell what you find. Then the other nations' satellites in your sky start to matter — shadow them, steal their technology, arm your own and take them out. And somewhere in that arms race, your cameras start catching things that answer to no registry at all.

97 minLEO revisit
4Orbital weapons
0Official explanations
Download on the App Store Get it on Google Play
How it works

Out now on iPhone and Android. Free to play — no accounts, no tracking.

Ground track · Earth view Propagator ×60 · —
VANTA-1
—
KESTRAL-1
—
NULLPOINT-1
—
How it escalates

It starts as espionage.
It does not stay that way.

A campaign opens on one satellite and a map of other people's secrets. What you collect buys better hardware, the better hardware notices more, and what it notices changes the game you are playing.

01 · ESPIONAGE

Sell what you see

Hunt out other governments' hidden sites, bring a satellite over them on a real orbit, and sell the intel. Every finished site pays credits and research, and the sites you choose decide which upgrades you unlock.

02 · ARMS RACE

Their satellites are targets

Foreign satellites share your orbits. Fall in behind one and hold close to steal its technology, or drain the data it has collected. Then fit mines, a railgun or an EMP and take it out of the sky.

03 · CONTACT

Not everything up there is ours

Objects that circle faster than any orbit should allow. Craft that come down on the open ocean, sit there for days, and leave. Photograph them, follow where the sightings cluster, recover what they leave behind, and build something that can chase them.

Act one · the job

Find it. Reach it. Sell it.

Four steps, and the physics decides three of them. There is no build queue and no energy meter — the thing standing between you and the payout is orbital geometry.

01

Find

Secret sites are invisible from orbit. Zoom in and hunt them — every country hides one or two, placed deterministically from its own name, so the same world exists on every device with nothing stored anywhere.

02

Target

Pick the satellite, pick the site. If its orbit already passes over, that is the whole order. If it does not, the game prices the move — a slower route costs less propellant, a faster one more — and you choose a row or close the sheet. Nothing is spent until you do.

03

Wait

The pass arrives when the orbit says it arrives, not when you open the app, and a low imager gets about four minutes over the target to work with. Collection carries on with the app closed — not because anything runs, but because it was always derivable from the orbit.

04

Sell

A finished site pays out, and what it pays is printed on it before you start. Intel accrues per hour of coverage, scaled by altitude, by how well the payload matches what the site gives off, and — for optics alone — by where the sun is. Spend the credits on a refit, or on another satellite.

Act two · the arms race

Every other satellite is a target.

Your camera spots what is flying near you, and the better the camera, the more it can tell you: first a blur, then a picture, then what the thing is carrying and whether it is armed. It is the inspector-satellite game real nations play in geostationary orbit, and here you get to finish it.

Fly past

One close pass for a photograph. Cheap, quick, and you learn what you are dealing with before you commit to anything.

Shadow

Fall in behind it at long, medium or close range and stay there. At any range you drain the data its recorder is holding, and it pays like any site you collect.

Steal

Hold close long enough and you take its technology home, as research you did not have to collect. A better antenna takes it in hours rather than days.

Strike

Mines fired backwards round the orbit so the target flies into them head-on. A railgun at medium range. EMPs that reach from long range but drain the battery, which recharges only in sunlight.

Weapons are researched like every other upgrade, from the ECM posts and radar arrays you collect. A fight is always one you started, and you can always pull back: disengage, and it is over.

Act three · unexplained

Not everything you photograph is ours.

Among the foreign satellites are objects with no registry and no nation, going round faster than an orbit should allow. The stock camera sees a smear, and a smear is also what a distant spacecraft looks like, so for a long time you cannot tell which you caught. Fit the best camera and a contact finally holds still in frame. The game never tells you what they are.

A grainy, pixelated sighting photograph of a bright blur against black, labelled UNRESOLVED CONTACT, taken by a stock camera.
Unresolved contactWhat the stock camera brings back. Too far or too faint to make out.
A sighting photograph of a metallic disc with a domed top and three pods underneath, inside a dashed yellow tracking box.
Contact held1,801 km away, in frame for a few seconds. Gone before the next pass.
A sighting photograph of a dark triangular craft with a bright light at each corner and one in the centre.
Contact heldA light at each corner and one in the middle. It does not match anything on file.
A sighting photograph of a smooth, pale, egg-shaped object with no visible features.
Contact heldNo seams, no array, no engine. Nothing on file.
The TRB-01, a large black triangular craft with a glowing ring at each corner, parked on the floor of a dark hangar under an AERIAL SYSTEMS DIVISION marking.
TRB-01Built in your own hangar from what the recovery teams bring back.

  • The sightings lean somewhere

    Every photograph goes into a log, and plotted, the log starts to cluster: never on a point, always on a region. Follow it with a thermal imager and you find heat signatures where nothing should be built, out on the open ocean and under the polar ice.

  • Some of them land

    A craft flies a few low orbits and comes down for a few days. Catch it on the way down, identify it, and send a recovery team from your home base, while it sits there or to the disturbed ground it leaves. What comes back is a reactor core, a gravity-wave emitter, a metamaterial panel. The assay on one sample reads element 115.

  • Build the black triangle

    Recovered parts build the TRB-01, the one craft credits alone can never buy. It is fast enough to chase a craft in flight, and when it catches one you fight it yourself, steering with one thumb and firing guns and an EMP burst with the other. Bring it down and the wreck is yours to recover.

  • And one of them fires back

    If you know the Black Knight story, keep an eye on low orbit. Something up there has been going round for a long time, and it does not like being shot at.

It takes a while to get here. Sightings are rare, the first ones are smudges, and no photograph ever pays: the only way to profit from the unexplained is to go out and get it.

Screens

This is the shipping build.

Captured from the shipping build — the same frames that go to the App Store listing. Nothing here is a mock-up of a panel or a number typed in for the picture: every figure on these screens was produced by the propagator at the instant the shutter went.

A phone showing Celestrike's WORLD screen: an orthographic globe with VANTA-1 over northern Russia, its ground track drawn ahead of it in cyan, and a look-down panel underneath reading footprint, nadir, speed, power, propellant and integrity.

  • Ground track · 561 km

    The cyan line is where the satellite goes, not where its plane is — each point rotated by the Earth's own angle at the moment it arrives there. The dashed ring is the site it has been tasked on.

  • Nothing on the panel is stored

    Footprint, nadir, speed, charge, propellant, condition. Every one is the orbit plus the clock, which is why the numbers are right after a week with the app shut rather than right because something was left running.

  • Shadow in 00:43:11

    The sun is in the model, so the terminator drawn across the globe and the battery on the panel are the same fact stated twice. It gates optics and nothing else — an emitter emits at three in the morning.

  • Dry in 102 days

    Station-keeping costs this satellite 0.388 m/s a day and there are 39.6 left in the tank. The endurance figure is on screen before anything is spent, because running out has to be something you were told about and chose.

The WORLD screen zoomed to 3.4x over the Middle East and East Africa, with dozens of ground sites revealed as violet diamonds and two satellite footprints on the ground.
Zoom in to find themGround sites are invisible from orbit until you go looking, and every country hides one or two.
A ground target panel for IRA-65, an uplink relay in Iran, listing what it pays and every satellite in the fleet: when each next flies over, and how far the parkable ones are.
Every target has a routeWhat it pays, which satellite has a pass, and how far the rest of the fleet would have to be walked.
The satellite catalogue, showing the polar imager at 496 credits with its collection rate, swath and propellant alongside the modules it flies.
No design beats anotherEach leads on something and gives ground somewhere else. Nothing is behind a level.
NULLPOINT-1's satellite screen: the bus render, its orbit and condition, and its bays each naming the module it carries beside a SWAP button.
Every bay is a ladderSet on the pad where a module costs the part, or swapped in orbit where it costs the rocket too.
The FLEET screen listing KESTRAL-1, VANTA-1 and KESTRAL-2 with their orbits, integrity and propellant bars, station-keeping cost and days until dry.
Propellant is a stockEvery satellite pays station-keeping whether you fly it or not, and no burn is ever refunded.
A foreign satellite report for UNK-1920: a clear photograph of the spacecraft taken by NULLPOINT-3's PCX-7 camera, with its range, role, offence and defence listed underneath.
Know what you are shadowingA good enough camera tells you what a foreign satellite does and what it is armed with.
The swap sheet for a satellite's onboard camera, listing three cameras with their stats and prices, and a locked fourth tile reading NOT YET RESEARCHED, collect radar array sites.
Upgrades are researchedA locked part says what to collect and nothing else. What it is, you find out when it unlocks.
The UNEXPLAINED log on CMD: a grid of sighting photographs, some grainy blurs and some clear discs, triangles, eggs and capsules, each with a date.
The log fills slowlyTwenty-five sightings from one long campaign. Plenty of them are still blurs.

Captured on Android, because that is the hardware the build is soaked on. The app lays out at the same point size there as it does on a 6.5-inch iPhone, so nothing above has been upscaled or restaged — what has been cropped off the top and bottom is the phone's own clock and its gesture hint, and not a pixel of Celestrike.

The fleet

You start with one. The rest you earn.

A campaign opens on a single signals satellite, and the first site it finishes pays a training award big enough for a second satellite on any airframe in the catalogue. From there it is three hulls and three problems, and their differences are entirely physical. A callsign is a hull class and an index, so the picture and the name always agree: your second imager is VANTA-2 on the same airframe as the first.

The KESTRAL signals bus: a compact body with a wideband receiver array and a steerable dish.

KESTRAL-1

SIGINT
1,200 km · 55° inclined
Δv 220 m/s · footprint 8.0° · no sun gate

The satellite you start with. It listens, so the clock over the target means nothing to it — a site at three in the morning is exactly as workable as one at noon, and your first target never stalls because it happened to be dark.

The VANTA imaging bus: a boxed body with a long optical telescope forward and two deployed solar wings.

VANTA

Imagery
620 km · sun-synchronous or 53° inclined
Δv 200–260 m/s · footprint 5.0–5.5° · ~4 m at nadir

The sharpest thing you can own, and the busiest. The polar design reaches every latitude on the map; both lose part of every revolution to Earth's shadow, and only work when the sun is up over the target.

The NULLPOINT geostationary bus: a squat body with a high-gain antenna and short wings.

NULLPOINT

SIGINT
35,786 km · parked over a region you pick
Δv 90 m/s · footprint 4.5° · never needs a pass

Bought over a named region — Europe East, say, or a spot on the equator — and it arrives already parked there. It can be walked over any point on the globe afterwards, but hovering away from the equator costs propellant every day, and it has the smallest tank in the catalogue.

Equipment

What a satellite carries.

Ten equipment bays on every hull, filled by group. Eight can be swapped for a better part — on the pad before launch, or by a servicing flight afterwards — and the pricier part is always the better one, never a sidegrade. Every part above the one a satellite launches with has to be researched first, from the intel you collect: launch pads teach engines and tanks, radar arrays teach optics, and so on. How the pricing works →

Optical

The imaging telescope. A better one reads finer ground detail, sweeps a wider strip on each pass, and keeps working after dark.

SIGINT

The signals receiver. A better one hears fainter, more distant emitters — and day or night makes no difference to it either way.

Camera

The small engineering camera every satellite carries. It never earns credits — a sharper one just lets you see farther and finer.

Propulsion

The engine. Decides how far a tank of propellant will carry you, and how fast a manoeuvre finishes.

Tankage

The propellant tank. A better one holds more and ages slower — a longer career for the satellite carrying it.

Power

The solar wings. Keep a satellite running through Earth's shadow, and a better one is lighter too, which frees room for more propellant.

Comms

The antenna. Downlinks what a satellite has collected — a better one reaches farther without losing rate.

Offence

The weapon bay. Mines, a railgun and two EMPs that run on the battery, each hitting harder and reaching further than the one below it.

The last two bays, defence and hardening, are Coming soon. Every design carries the same ten bays, so two satellites differ only in which parts fill them — never in how many they have. See the full equipment list for every part in the catalogue.

Price

Free to play.

Celestrike is free to download and free to play. The one thing sold for real money is optional: packs of in-game hours that fast-forward the whole world clock, for anyone who would rather not wait out a pass or a servicing flight. Waiting always works, you choose how many hours to spend every time, and satellites, upgrades and propellant are only ever bought with credits the fleet earns.

Not everything you photograph is ours.
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Free on iOS and Android · out now