This game provides no instructions which, combined with the extremely counter-intuitive gameplay, provides for a terrible gaming experience for player.
Fortunately I figured out how to play this and hopefully this info will help others trying to play this game. So, gameplay is as follows -- you immediately start moving upwards. You must rapidly press the down arrow key to move downwards. Merely holding the down arrow key provides only the slight initial boost and you'd then immediately go flying off wondering what happened as happened to @HerbieG
Basically, you're always moving upwards unless you're rapidly pressing the down key. Now that you know the controls, you then have to balance this out so you move between the poles instead of crashing into them and avoid the spaceships although sometimes a spaceship goes in the middle of two poles and you're just screwed. Along the way, pick up the cookies, and try to get 100 of these.
Also do all of the above, but within a time limit, where time extending cookies will extend the limit somewhat.
Really hard anyway (not a bad thing) but made unplayable for most due to unexplained gameplay (an extremely bad thing)