About this globe

A free, interactive 3D globe of every launch from Sputnik in 1957 to today, orbital and crewed suborbital, and the satellites they carried, made by McVal from public data.

• 7,633 launches from 51 launch sites, each at its pad on the day it flew, coloured by whether a government or a company ran it, with failures marked.
• About 20,000 satellites in Earth orbit, one per payload in CelesTrak's catalogue, each linked to the launch that carried it by its COSPAR number (all 27,900 payloads launched since 1957) and coloured by who uses it: defence, civil government, commercial or academic.
• Live positions: at today, the 16,800 or so satellites with current orbital elements for are shown where they really are, moving in real time. Each launch's satellites leave as a train and spread into the real arrangement of their orbits over the following weeks.
• Beyond Earth orbit: the Moon, the Sun–Earth Lagrange points and 77 deep-space missions since 1959, on NASA JPL Horizons trajectories.
• Guided tours of any launch provider's history, stopping at its firsts and its latest launch, and launch videos for key flights such as Falcon Heavy's first flight and Isar Aerospace's Spectrum.

Links to a view

Every view has its own address. ?p=spx shows SpaceX's launches and satellites; add &tour=1 for a guided tour, as in ?p=isar&tour=1 for Isar Aerospace. Other launchers: casc (CASC, China), asa (Arianespace), rfsa (Roscosmos), ula (United Launch Alliance), rl (Rocket Lab), isro (ISRO), bo (Blue Origin), mhi (Mitsubishi Heavy Industries), ge (Galactic Energy). ?s=d shows defence satellites, ?s=g civil government, ?s=c commercial, ?s=a academic. ?l= with a Launch Library 2 launch id shows one launch's satellites.

Findings and launcher pages

What every launch since Sputnik shows: seven findings worked out from this data, each with its method, among them the share of Europe's satellites launched on European rockets, SpaceX's share of the world's launches, Starlink's share of satellites in orbit, and how often new rockets fail on their first flight. Every launcher since Sputnik: a page for each launch provider with ten or more launches, with its highlights, rockets, launch sites and satellites.

Sources

Launches: Launch Library 2 by The Space Devs, every one since Sputnik. Satellites: CelesTrak's catalogue and current orbital elements, and Jonathan McDowell's General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects. Deep space: NASA JPL Horizons. Imagery: NASA Blue Marble and Black Marble.