The launch desk · read live
The next launch.
Counted down properly.
The board lists the next rocket launches on Earth — every agency, every pad — with the mission, the vehicle, where it lifts off from, the window in your own timezone, and a countdown ticking to the second. The list is Launch Library 2, the Space Devs’ open register of launches, read by this page without a key or an account.
Below it, the International Space Station crosses a world map drawn on a canvas by this page’s own hand — position polled every five seconds, the trail behind it made only of points this page has actually polled, so it grows as you watch.
Launch Library 2 · one read per quarter hour, in courtesy of the library’s ration · the station every five seconds
The board
Every launch. One board.
Mission, vehicle, pad and window, in the order they will fly. A countdown ticks only when the library says the time is good to the hour or better — a window known only to the day is said as exactly that, not counted down to a second nobody has set.
Launches
waiting for the library
Not read yet.
The station
Sixteen sunrises a day.
The dot is the International Space Station, placed by a position read five seconds ago; the line behind it is the last ninety minutes of track — one orbit — drawn only from points this page has polled while you had it open. The small ring is the subsolar point, straight from the same feed.
Ground track
waiting for the feed
Not read yet.
About
A desk, not an agency.
The launch list is Launch Library 2, the Space Devs’ openly published register of orbital and suborbital launches, read here directly — no key, no account, no server in the middle. The library rations free reads to roughly fifteen an hour per address, so this page reads it once, keeps that read in this browser, and will not ask again within fifteen minutes — the status line says whether you are looking at the wire or at the cache, and how old the cache is. That is the library’s courtesy, honoured rather than dodged.
A countdown is only as honest as its target. The library states how precisely each T-0 is known; where that is an hour or better the board counts down to the second, and where it is a day or a month the board says so in words instead. The times are said in your own timezone because that is the clock on your wall.
The station’s position is wheretheiss.at, polled every five seconds — generous enough that polling is the polite way to read it. The trail is not a computed orbit: it is the points this page has itself received, and it grows only while you watch. The coastlines are Natural Earth’s public-domain small-scale set — the 1:110 million one — carried whole and drawn by the page. What either feed does not say, this page does not invent; a feed that will not answer is reported as exactly that. Nothing is stored anywhere but this browser.