Spaceflight gets reported as a departure: a rocket left this pad on this day carrying that payload. PadWatch puts the missing half back into view by connecting the launch to the orbit it reached.
The Missing Half Of The Launch Story
Most launch trackers tell you when a rocket goes up and where from, then stop at the edge of the atmosphere. The question worth answering is where it ended up. PadWatch answers that by flying you from the launch site to the orbital ring the payload occupies today.
Pick a recent launch and the camera drops to the pad it left from, then watches the vehicle climb off the ground and resolve into the exact orbital ring it is on today. One click takes you from a point on a map to a line around the planet.
Built With SwarmWatch
PadWatch is the companion to SwarmWatch. SwarmWatch shows what is alive in orbit now, mainly from a low Earth orbit perspective. PadWatch shows how it got there. Together they let a visitor follow the whole arc, from a single launch pad to a shell of satellites passing overhead.
Launch Sites
Maps publicly known orbital launch sites and recent launch activity.
Modelled Ascent
Shows a physically reasonable ascent path from the pad toward the target orbit.
Real Orbit
Uses published element sets to place the orbital ring where the payload actually went.
Built On Open Data
The launch-site gazetteer comes from Jonathan McDowell's GCAT. The live launch schedule comes from The Space Devs' Launch Library 2. The orbits come from CelesTrak element sets and satellite catalogue data. A Cesium 3D globe handles the rendering, while satellite.js propagates the orbit in the browser from the real two-line element set.
The orbit is real and verifiable. The ascent is modelled, because public ascent telemetry does not exist for most flights. PadWatch labels that distinction rather than blurring it: the honest version is more useful, and more interesting, than pretending the modelled path is a recording.
Why It Matters
The orbital environment is getting busier and harder to picture, and much of the public conversation runs on intuition rather than observable data. PadWatch makes the geography of spaceflight legible: why polar launches depart from particular sites, why the Cape leans east over the Atlantic, and how a launch becomes part of the orbital infrastructure above us.