Neighborhood Earth · a project by SteamHead

Launches from Earth

Explore upcoming space launches through an interactive globe, live countdowns, and launch-site stories.

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Why we made it

Space launches are often presented as isolated events: a rocket, a company, a nation, or a dramatic countdown. Viewed together on a globe, they tell a larger story. They reveal patterns of geography, engineering, infrastructure, international collaboration, economics, and access to space.

Launches from Earth was created as part of Neighborhood Earth, a SteamHead initiative that helps learners investigate the technologies, systems, places, and people connecting our planet.

Launches from Earth is an interactive globe that lets people explore upcoming space launches around the world. Visitors can watch live countdowns, locate launch sites, and select individual spaceports to learn more about the missions beginning there.

What you can learn

Launches from Earth is both a public exploration tool and an open-source learning project. Students, educators, developers, and curious visitors can use it to investigate questions such as:

Why are launch sites located where they are?
How do geography and Earth's rotation affect launches?
Which countries and organizations are launching into space?
How accurate are launch schedules and public datasets?
What can launch activity tell us about our changing relationship with space?

Use it in a classroom

A teacher could build lessons around geography and time zones, orbital launch locations, engineering constraints, international cooperation and competition, launch frequency and patterns, data reliability, interface design, environmental effects, and the economics of spaceflight.

View or contribute on GitHub

The source code is publicly available so that others can study, adapt, improve, and build upon the project — it's a single self-contained HTML file with no build step.

github.com/SteamHead/earth-launches

Known data limitations

The bundled fallback snapshot is rebuilt every day by an automated job from The Space Devs' Launch Library, so it should never be more than about 24 hours behind — and the page tries the live feed first anyway, with a Refresh button for the gap between the two. Launch dates are often precise only to the month or quarter and change frequently; the countdown and the card's confidence line reflect that uncertainty rather than hiding it. Mission details are only as complete as what launch providers choose to publish, so some fields read "TBD" or "not disclosed".