Hey... I found Orbiter about a week ago, but the path to finding it goes further...
I was looking for a flight simulator for a friend, I found X-Plane... which I don't suggest you go for if you like realism.
Anyway X-plane had a plane that could obtain orbit... of course the orbit would last forever... And Completely impossible to descend, woohoo! Of course looked at the X-Plane site, It showed me their space simulator... it was ok... four ships that you could edit using building blocks, add your own engines right in the game, or even turn on stability control.. which stops you from flailing around like you would trying to obtain Pro grade at 1000x time. A basic Autopilot feature.
After playing with that for less than an hour I got bored with it. There was nothing to do in the game but steer through an asteroid field that you could hit all the asteroids anyway. Also there was no community for it, no mods no support.
So I looked for Space Flight Simulators...
Found a Wiki article on the history of space flight or something, in the research section of the links I saw Orbiter... A spacecraft with a generic name? (Don't space ships have more descript names? Like the Orbital Space Station?) I was intrigued.
Clicked on the link, took me to another wiki article...
LINK!!!
If you don't care about the article, or have already seen it, it contains pictures of spacecraft. the links at the bottom brought me here and there. Finally I downloaded it
played around... and yeah...
This site was found through that wiki too so yeah, here I am!