SpaceDebris

Live US Space Force data plugged in to visually represent live tracking of Space Debris around the orbit of the Earth.

Inspiration

What it does

Inspiration

SpaceX performed 300,000 collision avoidance maneuvers in 2025 alone — a 50% increase over 2024. 27,000 pieces of debris orbit Earth right now. One collision can trigger Kessler Syndrome — a chain reaction that makes all orbits permanently unusable, killing GPS, internet, and weather satellites forever. I built this to make that threat visible and understandable in real time.

What it does SpaceDebris is a real-time AI-powered orbital collision risk dashboard. It pulls live TLE data from Space-Track.org (the official US Space Force debris tracking database), propagates 2,000 object positions using satellite.js SGP4 physics, and renders them on a 3D Earth globe. Claude AI scores collision risks for any satellite on demand and summarizes real government Conjunction Data Messages in plain English.

How I built it Next.js 14 App Router, TypeScript, Three.js for 3D rendering, satellite.js for SGP4 orbital propagation, Anthropic Claude API for AI risk scoring, Space-Track.org API for live government data, deployed on Vercel.

Challenges I ran into Space-Track.org deprecated their tle_latest API class without clear documentation — it silently returns HTTP 404 even with valid authentication. Diagnosed this by adding auth logging, confirmed the session cookie (chocolatechip) was valid, then discovered the gp class is the current standard. Also optimized Three.js rendering to handle 2,000 simultaneously propagated objects at 60 FPS using a single draw call with custom ShaderMaterial.