Orbital Flight School

Orbital Flight School is an agentic, gamified textbook for spacecraft dynamics — the subject I teach at the University of London. It tackles the problem of existing textbooks — physical or digital — that are marginally interactive but do not adapt to the student: they cannot tell where the reader is stuck or what should come back tomorrow. Orbital Flight School does more than invert learning; it teaches engineering science in a playful manner. Students learn from this textbook by *playing* — Level 1 wraps a Hohmann-transfer rendezvous in a Mario Kart-like racing game — and by working with agents that personalise their study. Inside the textbook, students can highlight and annotate any passage; these annotations are read by Orbo, an Opus-4.7 teaching assistant who suggests connections, drafts spaced-repetition system (SRS) cards so ideas return before they're forgotten, and provides feedback on the answers. A second managed agent — LISA (LIve SAtellite tracker) — pulls live orbital data from CelesTrak / NASA NTRS / Space-Track and links the student into a 3-D debris visualiser (https://space-debbie.vercel.app), so the textbook also opens out into research: LISA references existing missions and debris while Orbo surfaces ideas and facts on demand. The visualiser is an ongoing research project of mine. I'm deploying this in my next-semester offering. Alongside the project I'm publishing a sibling repo — my hackathon stretch goal — that lets anyone convert any PDF into the same agentic textbook format; they get the SRS + Orbo TA out of the box. I call it Booksmart (https://github.com/angadhn/booksmart), a learning technology that adapts to students instead of students having to adapt to the technology and education system.