{"id":458412,"date":"2026-06-03T07:03:32","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T07:03:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/458412\/"},"modified":"2026-06-03T07:03:32","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T07:03:32","slug":"how-lunar-strike-builds-a-moon-from-nasa-data-esa-imagery-and-photogrammetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/458412\/","title":{"rendered":"How Lunar Strike builds a Moon from NASA data, ESA imagery and photogrammetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cognition\u2019s creative director Brian Pope doesn\u2019t lead with worldbuilding or even technology, whether that’s the use of Unreal Engine 5<\/a> or photogrammetry<\/a>. He starts with preservation, or as he puts it, \u201cLunar Strike was actually originally developed as the idea of a game being used to tell both the story and the purpose behind archiving endangered heritage.\u201d<\/p>\n

That idea of archiving doesn\u2019t stay abstract for long; instead, it starts to dictate how everything else is framed in the game. Set a century from now, Earth is ravaged by climate change, wars and ambitious future-forward thinking has ground to a halt. Against this backdrop, the Moon \u2013 Shackleton Station, at the lunar south pole, to be precise \u2013 becomes a storage site, a place of residue for data, debris, human traces – some deliberate, others left behind without ceremony, scattered across the lunar surface.<\/p>\n

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In Pope\u2019s framing, even the Moon isn\u2019t neutral, and it already carries weight; as Pope explains, “we’re really littering the moon already\u2026 we turned it into a bit of a dump site\u201d. Then he pushes the thought further, adding: \u201cAt what point does one person’s garbage become another person’s space history and heritage?\u201d<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s a passing remark in our conversation, but it carries some weight, not simply because Lunar Strike’s commitment to realism drives the game’s systems and builds its world, but because preservation and the use of photogrammetry to record our world are close to Pope’s heart and central to the game. The Moon, in Lunar Strike, is being remade as an archive assembled from lost-and-found fragments, not simply an invented setting for a game.<\/p>\n

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(Image credit: Cognition)Science fiction as a way of thinking<\/p>\n

Pope doesn\u2019t treat science fiction as decoration or mood; rather, he frames it as a way of thinking about what comes next, calling it \u201cmy great love\u201d and \u201cprobably the most noble form of all literature, because it tells us who we might become.\u201d That perspective becomes the philosophical backbone of Lunar Strike, shifting it away from speculative fiction as surface aesthetic and towards something closer to a working hypothesis about humanity under pressure and constraint \u2013 distance, isolation, time \u2013 and how all of that boils over at the worst time.<\/p>\n

He extends that line of thought into more uncomfortable territory: \u201cwhat it is to be human, and in a game such as Lunar Strike, we even ask the question, what it might be to become more than human, better than human.\u201d From there, the game\u2019s central tension sharpens into something playable: it questions what kind of species would decide to build a base there in the first place, and what gets preserved in the process, even when survival is on the line.<\/p>\n

For a project built on such large ideas, the visual design has to carry weight to keep up. Lunar Strike\u2019s technical backbone is photogrammetry<\/a>, but it’s not here simply to make the game look and feel real; Pope hopes to educate players on how and why the tech can be used. He explains that \u201cthe player walks away with a little bit of a skill set of how to do photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning, but more importantly, why it’s important.\u201d<\/p>\n

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That emphasis on ‘why’ becomes the pivot point as scanning lost and found items becomes central to the game’s narrative, and that narrative becomes instruction on how photogrammetry can be used now: a framework for preserving humanity\u2019s legacy by capturing scientific, cultural, and personal artefacts before they\u2019re lost, both in game and in our lives.<\/p>\n

The push for realism isn\u2019t about simulation purity, then; it’s about trust and engagement. As Pope puts it: \u201cBy having and making ourselves stick to, as often as we could, a high degree of realism, we really increase engagement, so that that way when we do step outside the bounds of science and physical possibilities, I think we’ve earned that trust.\u201d Realism, then, isn\u2019t a constraint; it\u2019s the building blocks, the framework, giving the game’s fiction room to exist and develop, and push the big ideas Pope loves science fiction for.<\/p>\n

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(Image credit: Cognition)Building the Moon from Earth<\/p>\n

To build Lunar Strike’s realistic moon and base, the team used as much real information as possible, starting with NASA geological data as a base layer, particularly around the South Pole, where lighting and terrain behaviour are grounded in mission data rather than imagined conditions. Earth environments such as California’s beaches and Iceland’s cliffs were scanned and repurposed as raw material for lunar surfaces, recontextualised rather than recreated.<\/p>\n

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From there, the scope broadened to include spaceborne observation data. Pope notes that \u201cwe harvested several thousand photographs [from] the European Space Agency public site,\u201d including imagery from the Rosetta mission, which the team used to reconstruct Comet 67P through photogrammetry. The real scientific data served as a reference for creating the in-game Comet 67P model, blurring the line between research material and the final visual language. The effect is a Moon that feels oddly credible before gameplay is added, and a threat so real because, well\u2026 Comet 67P is real.<\/p>\n

Once the terrain was in place, the focus shifted to what could be built on it, and here Lunar Strike’s artists moved from using environmental data into material research. Real-world lunar engineering already points in this direction: ‘regolith’ \u2013 loose rock, dust, and soil that can be used for shielding, structural support, and protection against radiation and micrometeorites. From that principle comes the game\u2019s fictional construction material, ‘mooncrete’, described by Pope as \u201ca resin polymer mishmash of crushed up rock and dust from the moon\u201d. Using this imagined substance as a basis defined the Moon colony\u2019s architectural design.<\/p>\n

With that in place, architecture stops being decorative and becomes a direct outcome of physics and the restrictions of mooncrete. Pope is blunt about the result, calling it \u201cnot very pretty, it\u2019s not very sexy\u201d. That austerity is exactly why Brutalism fits so naturally into Lunar Strike: the style’s heavy forms, repetition and density are driven by function over form. So we get a game world designed by real-world constraints, and the result is something unique and very believable.<\/p>\n

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(Image credit: Cognition)Gameplay meets realism<\/p>\n

For all the scientific grounding and real-world data-driven design, there\u2019s a point where Lunar Strike has to become playable. Executive producer Jan Goossen is blunt about that tension: \u201cWe\u2019re still making a game.\u201d That line effectively sets the boundary for what gets adjusted behind the scenes, especially around movement and traversal, where pure lunar physics don\u2019t translate cleanly into exploration.<\/p>\n

He explains the problem directly: \u201cIf you give that to a player and you take away the possibility that you can\u2019t change your direction, that\u2019s going to feel very punishing.\u201d The team keeps the Moon\u2019s 1\/6 gravity intact, but softens its consequences so movement remains readable, responsive, and exploratory rather than restrictive.<\/p>\n

Other systems lean into sensation over visibility; Moon dust, for example, is described in starkly physical terms by Pope, as \u201ca series of super sharp microscopic needles that are so sharp and so tiny they can actually invade a cell wall” that can potentially “then shred the DNA\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sound design is equally developed around realism, so it’s understood in terms of vibration and internal perception rather than air-based movement, since there\u2019s no atmosphere to carry it. Pope jokes that players can feel sound emanating from their feet because surfaces and spacesuits carry the vibrations, creating a uniquely real, space-based audio design.<\/p>\n

Even the UI is pared back, as Goossen notes, \u201ceverything that has to do with GUI (Graphical User Interface) often sits in the way of that feeling of like, ‘okay, I am on the moon, I’m not playing a game, but I feel like being on the moon’\u201d. The principle is consistent, though, and means that anything that brings players out of the moment and feels like a ‘game’ is reduced or removed.<\/p>\n

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(Image credit: Cognition)Looking up to the player<\/p>\n

That game design philosophy, which focuses on immersion, extends to how the game positions its player base. Goossen is explicit: \u201cWe’re not talking down to our players; we’re looking up to them\u201d. The team are reframing puzzles, ethics, and narrative complexity as things to be trusted rather than simplified, and that same attitude carries over into Pope\u2019s broader view of how gaming should be seen. He argues that \u201cgames are art, that games are stories, that games are fun on different levels,\u201d placing Lunar Strike within a wider shift towards experiential, systems-led storytelling.<\/p>\n

More broadly, there\u2019s a growing cultural recognition of games beyond their commercial framing, something recently reflected in publications like Reset magazine<\/a>. Pope also notes that the project received development support from Belgium\u2019s film fund, a traditionally film-focused cultural body now extending into games. It\u2019s a small but telling signal of where gaming and the games industry are heading, with games increasingly treated as cultural products rather than just entertainment.<\/p>\n

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(Image credit: Cognition)<\/p>\n

What Lunar Strike is ultimately aiming to build is not a fictional Moon but a reconstructed one assembled from observations, datasets, environmental scans, architectural realism, and scientific fact, then tuned into something playable, engaging and poignant. So NASA data defines the terrain, ESA photography provides structural reference, Earth scanning fills in geological texture, Brutalism emerges as a stylistic consequence, and Photogrammetry ties it all together, functioning as both a production tool and a gameplay metaphor.<\/p>\n

Underneath it all runs a consistent idea that doesn\u2019t shift across the interview: the Moon isn\u2019t being invented so much as it is being reassembled from what we\u2019ve already left behind, whether deliberately or not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cognition\u2019s creative director Brian Pope doesn\u2019t lead with worldbuilding or even technology, whether that’s the use of Unreal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":458413,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-458412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458412\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/458413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}