About LowEarth
See what's overhead.
LowEarth is a free, public reference for everything humanity has placed in orbit. It began as a way to see what is passing overhead and has grown into a broader resource: a live map of more than 16,000 tracked objects, a record of the launches that put them there, interactive reconstructions of historic missions, and a set of tools for understanding the sky above your own location. Every object, launch, and mission has its own detailed, well-sourced page, and the core experience is free for everyone.
What you will find
- A live map of more than 16,000 satellites and debris objects, each with its own detailed reference page.
- A launch tracker covering cataloged orbital launches, past and upcoming, with countdowns, launch sites, and cost-to-orbit comparisons.
- Interactive mission replays that reconstruct real orbits, with mission insignia and crews where they exist.
- An orbital-debris view of the major on-orbit breakup events, filterable by object size.
- Sky tools, including pass predictions for your location, identification of bright objects overhead, and Starlink train timing.
- Reference material on the major constellations and on the International Space Station, module by module.
Why we built it
After Stuff in Space went offline in early 2022, there was no general-audience way to explore the public satellite catalog. Professional tools are capable but built for operators, and the most powerful services sit behind enterprise pricing. LowEarth makes the same public data approachable for students, journalists, and anyone curious about what is in orbit, at no cost and without an account.
Orbital debris and where we stand
Low Earth orbit is filling up. Alongside the cataloged objects we track, space agencies estimate there are well over a million fragments too small to follow individually, each moving fast enough to disable or destroy a working satellite. Every collision creates more debris, and a severe enough chain reaction, often called the Kessler syndrome, could leave parts of orbit difficult to use for generations.
We consider this one of the most consequential and least visible problems in spaceflight. LowEarth gives the major breakup events their own debris view so the scale is easy to see for yourself, and we actively support the development and funding of solutions that prevent and remove it, from stricter end-of-life disposal rules to dedicated active-removal missions. Keeping orbit usable is a shared responsibility, and making the problem visible is where it starts.
How we handle accuracy
LowEarth does not claim real-time precision. Every position is propagated from a Two-Line Element set (TLE), the standard orbital data format that CelesTrak and Space-Track publish several times a day. Accuracy decreases the further a position is propagated beyond the TLE's epoch, so we display that epoch on every page. You can always see how current the underlying data is, and we label reconstructed trajectories as such where precise telemetry is not public.
Data sources
- Orbital data (TLEs) and SATCAT metadata: CelesTrak (Dr. T.S. Kelso)
- Mission narratives: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA, attributed)
- Structured properties: Wikidata (CC0)
- Launch metadata: TheSpaceDevs Launch Library 2
- Photography: Wikimedia Commons (largely public-domain NASA/ESA)
- Mission detail: NASA NSSDCA Master Catalog
The embed widget
Every per-object page includes an embeddable live globe view, free for editorial use with attribution. You will find the snippet near the bottom of any satellite page.