It was an interesting day to try my hand at virtual reality space flight and fight.

Sitting in a lounge chair in a downtown New York hotel room, with an Oculus Rift headset strapped to my face and high-end flight stick and throttle in my hands, I couldn't help but be reminded of the day's big news from NASA.

I spent the time leading up to this scheduled appointment with the team behind Elite: Dangerous, watching a historic, live press conference from NASA.

It's called Orion, the gathering of administrators and rocket scientists told the world, and if it succeeds it will take people to Mars.If everything works out, if there are no issues and a team can be put together, it would be another six years at least before Earth said goodbye to its intergalactic explorers.

As a fan of science fiction, growing up on Star Trek and Star Wars and Heinlein, it's hard to keep the butterflies away when NASA starts talking about a Mars landing.

I thought about it during my short walk to the hotel to see Elite, a space combat and exploration game built on the premise that a future society splits in two, some sticking around Earth and the rest breaking away to the distant edges of the universe.

When I arrived, I couldn't help but ask David Braben, the director on this game and co-writer of the original title, about the real world news and its timing.

"It's great and exciting and fun," Braben said, launching us into a conversation about the game's astrophysics, the state of our universe and the game's AI-driven procedurally generated universe.

"The night sky is a blizzard of stars," he said. "We have been unbelievable lucky the solar system hasn't had a close encounter with another star, but within another thousand years there will be.

"Systems pass through each other, some of those could cause serious change."

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Playing Elite on the day NASA detailed its mission to Mars