StudentHack 2018 had a "Space Hack" challenge which basically just meant the hackathon project needed to be space themed. It was the second hackathon I had attended, joining up with three other, relatively inexperienced, first-years. I had a look around some space-related APIs and found a Nasa JPL API which gave locations of near-earth objects. From this we (I and two other teammates) decided to build a solar-system exploration game, where a player could fly from Earth to asteroids, the main appeal (and technical challenge) being that the solar system would be to scale. During the development process I found the Asterank API, which ties Nasa JPL information with spectral analysis of asteroids to give composition (and therefore estimate worth) of them. This lead to the eventual idea of the player progressively exploring further from Earth, mining asteroids to then buy upgrades to their ship, therefore allowing them to go faster and further. The entire app was written in JavaScript (using p5.js), and that came with its own challenges. We needed to hold the information of thousands of asteroids, as well as being able to render the entire solar system to scale, in the web-browser. I utilised a quad-tree to selectively render nearby objects, and we used IndexedDB to store the asteroid data extracted from the API at start-up.