Space AtlasLearn
Explainers about the machinery overhead, written for anyone curious rather than for specialists. Every number on these pages is computed from the same catalog the 3D atlas runs on, 33,311 tracked objects since 1957, and every idea comes with a link that shows it moving.
Every fragment ever catalogued, the handful of events that made most of them, the altitudes that keep them, and the quiet physics that has already removed most of what went up.
Read it →Why a satellite stays up, why higher means slower, what apogee and perigee mean, and why the tilt of an orbit decides everything from a Starlink shell to a spy satellite's morning light.
Read it →Twelve ready-made lesson topics, each with an age and subject tag, discussion prompts, a one-click link into the atlas, the matching guided story and a copy-paste embed. Free, no accounts, works on any device.
Open the teacher page →In the works
The next articles in the queue. Each one gets the same treatment: real catalog numbers, charts built from them, and links that put the idea on screen.
Radar, telescopes and the two-line element set: how a global sensor network keeps tabs on tens of thousands of objects, and why a prediction gets fuzzier the further ahead you look.
Half of everything ever launched went up in the last six years. What changed, what the new shells look like, and how operators are designing them to clean up after themselves.
Communications, imaging, navigation, weather, science: the real job breakdown of everything in orbit, and how each job picks its own orbit.
Where the atmosphere starts to bite, what burns up and what does not, why reentries cluster around solar maximum, and how a controlled deorbit is aimed.