The spacecraft range from small SSTO spaceplanes, to large interstellar spacecraft which are all designed with realism in mind, featuring radiators, fusion rockets, and micrometeorite shields. SpaceEngine also has a built-in flight simulator (currently in Alpha) which allows for users to spawn in a selection of fictional spacecraft which can be flown in an accurate model of orbital mechanics and also an atmospheric flight model when entering the atmospheres of the various planets and moons. In the case of planets and moons, specific environmental types, surface temperatures, and pressures can be used to filter through the vast amount of different procedurally generated worlds. Within the software, users can use search tools to filter through astronomical objects based on certain characteristics. It uses star catalogs along with procedural generation to create a cubical universe 10 billion parsecs (32.6 billion light-years) on each side, centered on the barycenter of the Solar System. The proclaimed goal of SpaceEngine is scientific realism, and to reproduce every type of known astronomical phenomenon. The UI of SpaceEngine, showing a procedural earth analog with planetary rings. The default version of SpaceEngine includes over 130,000 real objects, including stars from the Hipparcos catalog, galaxies from the NGC and IC catalogs, many well-known nebulae, and all known exoplanets and their stars. Users can observe celestial objects ranging from small asteroids or moons to large galaxy clusters, similar to other simulators such as Celestia.

Properties of objects, such as temperature, mass, radius, spectrum, etc., are presented to the user on the HUD and in an accessible information window. The program has full support for VR headsets. Version 0.990 beta was the first paid edition, released in June 2019 on Steam. SpaceEngine is in beta status and up to version 0.980, released in July 2016, it was and still is available as a freeware download for Microsoft Windows. Users can travel through space in any direction or speed, and forwards or backwards in time. It creates a 1:1 scale three-dimensional planetarium representing the entire observable universe from a combination of real astronomical data and scientifically-accurate procedural generation algorithms. SpaceEngine (stylized as 'Space Engine') is an interactive 3D planetarium and astronomy software developed by Russian astronomer and programmer Vladimir Romanyuk. English, Catalan, Croatian, Chinese, Czech, Spanish, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, etc.

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