Moonlander, Roadster edition

Jack Burness wrote Moonlander in 1973 for DEC's GT40, a PDP-11 with a vector display and a light pen. This is that program: recovered, translated routine by routine into Rust, proved against the original binary step for step, and compiled to run here. The physics, the rules, the terrain, the messages and the fuel budget are his, unchanged. What you see is 2026.

The car

A Roadster, the one-seat kind that is meant to leave the ground, coming down on compressed air. It weighs 10,086 lb because that is the number the 1973 code divides by, and that number is an address, not a weight. Nobody has published a weight for the real one either.

Controls

Drag the thrust bar, or use the up and down keys. The arrows turn; Shift makes them the big arrows. Under the hood every one of these moves a light pen onto the controls Burness drew, and the program reads nothing but the pen. V shows the 1973 tube. R starts again. S copies a link that replays this flight exactly.

Sources

The recovery, with the hardware model and the journal. This site's source. The car and the diner are drawn from public photographs and carry no marks; nothing here is affiliated with or endorsed by anyone who makes cars. The quotations are on the record: the unveil of 15 October 2026 as reported by TechCrunch and Euronews, the 2018 launch as recorded on Wikipedia.

MIT licence. Moonlander is Jack Burness's work.