Maybe it's a coincidence and maybe it's not, but as the Artemis 2 spacecraft comes rolling around the moon like Jimmy Kirk and co. heading off to save the whales, the aging reach-for-the-stars simulator Kerbal Space Program is seeing a major uptick in players on Steam—according to SteamDB, achieving the highest concurrent player count the game has seen since it launched into 1.0 more than a decade ago.
Kerbal Space Program debuted in April 2015 and has remained popular despite its age—you can still reliably find at least a few thousand people playing on Steam at any given moment. Over the past two weeks, though, that number has shot way up: Not enough to put it back among the top 100 most played games on Steam, but it's awfully close.
