Satellite Location · Entry VIII

Earth

Launches Map

Every orbital launch scheduled in the next ~30 days, fetched live from the Launch Library 2 catalog and joined on a hand-curated inventory of active orbital pads and vehicles with stage-level propellant chemistry. Kinetic precursor to earth-satellites.html — what's about to populate the catalog.

Source: Launch Library 2 / The Space Devs (refreshed every 30 min) · Pad inventory: USSF / Roscosmos / CASC / ISRO / JAXA / Arianespace published coordinates · Vehicle reference: per-stage propellant chemistry curated for downstream emission inventories
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Upcoming
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Go
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NET / TBD
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Pads tracked
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Vehicles
30 d
Window

earth-launches is the forward-looking counterpart to the live satellite map. Where earth-satellites.html answers "what's in orbit right now," this page answers "what's about to be, and from where." Pads sit at their published WGS84 coordinates and rotate with Earth at GMST; upcoming launches are listed chronologically in the side panel and tied geometrically to their pad of origin. Selecting an event highlights its pad and draws the launch azimuth + target injection orbit when Launch Library 2 has the orbital elements, with an explicit "orbit TBD" marker when it does not. Schedule churn in this domain is real — anything beyond ~2 weeks is provisional. Status flags (Go / TBC / TBD / Hold) reflect the canonical LL2 state at fetch time.

Initialising

Loading pad inventory…
RAVEN Satellite Location · Earth · Forward 30 days

Earth-Centered Inertial · TEME — Pads rotate with Earth; launches plotted at their pad of origin

Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom. Click a pad or a launch in the panel to inspect.

Layers

Pads
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Upcoming markers
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Azimuth wedges
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Selected trajectory
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Equator + axis

Clock

UTC—
JD—
GMST—
Offset+0 d
Time slider scrubs from −1 h to +30 d. Earth rotates accordingly. Pads ride with Earth; upcoming launches appear when the slider passes their NET.
now

Upcoming—

All
Go
TBC
TBD
Hold

Methodology

Frame & rotation

Earth is rendered in Earth-Centered Inertial (TEME for SGP4 compatibility with the sibling map) and rotated about its spin axis by the Greenwich Mean Sidereal Time of the current simulated instant — GMST = 280.46061837 + 360.98564736629·(JD − 2451545.0). Pads ride with Earth: their published WGS84 (lat, lon) is converted to body-fixed Cartesian once at load and then the whole earth-fixed group is rotated as one. The two Earth maps share this convention, so pad longitude lines up with the satellite catalog rendered next door. (Before 2026-08-20 this page was missing the pole rotation and the claim was false.)

Data flow

The page fetches /api/launches/upcoming from satellite_location_server.py, which proxies Launch Library 2 with a 30-minute disk cache + stale-on-failure fallback. The server performs a server-side join: each LL2 event is matched to a hand-curated pad (with full propellant-relevant metadata) and vehicle (with stage-level propellant chemistry) from Data/launches/pads.json and Data/launches/vehicles.json. Unmatched events still render — the server synthesizes a minimal pad/vehicle from LL2 fields and flags them as synthetic so coverage gaps are visible rather than silent.

Trajectory rendering

When LL2 provides the target orbit (inclination, altitude), a single revolution of the injection orbit is drawn in a plane inclined by that angle, with longitude of ascending node chosen so the orbit intersects the pad's surface location at the marked launch azimuth. When LL2 carries only an orbit class label ("LEO", "GTO") with no orbital elements, the trajectory layer reports "orbit TBD" rather than fabricating geometry. The azimuth-wedge layer shows each pad's nominal safe-overflight corridor — Cape Canaveral's ~37–112° east, Vandenberg's ~140–201° south, Kourou's near-equatorial wedge spanning most prograde headings, and so on — making the relationship between site latitude and achievable orbit inclination visible at a glance.

Pads in inventory —

References

  1. Launch Library 2 — The Space Devs. thespacedevs.com/llapi. Canonical free aggregator of upcoming orbital + suborbital launches; queried with 30-min cache TTL.
  2. Celestrak General Perturbations (GP) Catalog — Kelso, T. S. celestrak.org. Underlying TLE catalog that newly-launched payloads join 6–48 h post-injection.
  3. FAA AST — Commercial Space Transportation Reports (2020–2025). Pad operator and active-status confirmations for US sites.
  4. USSF Range Safety — Cape Canaveral SFS & Vandenberg SFB. Public range corridor and azimuth-band documentation.
  5. Roscosmos — Baikonur / Plesetsk / Vostochny site coordinates and pad assignments.
  6. CASC — Long March family vehicle reference and CNSA published launch base coordinates for Jiuquan, Taiyuan, Xichang, Wenchang.
  7. ISRO — Satish Dhawan Space Centre operations documentation; PSLV/GSLV/LVM3 vehicle reference.
  8. JAXA — Tanegashima / Uchinoura facility documentation; H-IIA / H3 / Epsilon stage data.
  9. Arianespace — Centre Spatial Guyanais (Kourou) ELA-4 / ZLV / ELS pad coordinates and Ariane 6 / Vega-C stage configurations.
  10. Three.js r128 — threejs.org. Rendering library.
  11. Petit, G. & Luzum, B. (eds.) 2010 — IERS Conventions (2010), Tech. Note 36 — GMST and reference-frame definitions shared with the sibling Earth map.