I've had an idea to build something similar - or more specifically, a game in this form, since I saw Eric Bruneton's Rendezvous With Rama video, now about 15 years ago.

Never did hand code it, even though I gained a lot of the skills and work in gamedev. This makes me feel time is running out to implement it with some of the unique twists I had in mind that become apparent with something like this ...

Oh, great idea! Maybe consider building it with Orbiter Simulator?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiter_(simulator)

https://www.orbiter-forum.com/

https://github.com/orbitersim/orbiter

I believe it supports C and Lua.