space.craft
The craft of space is vast — mathematics, metal, code, signal, patience, and always looking up.
What is this?
Spacecraft — the vehicles. And the craft of space — every discipline that gets us there and keeps us connected to what's above.
Computing a trajectory by hand. Writing software that cannot fail at 40,000 feet. Winding copper into a dish in a backyard and hearing the galaxy for the first time. Modeling how a speck of aluminum moves through a gravity well 60 years from now. Designing a protocol so anyone with a radio can talk to a machine in orbit.
This site tracks some of that — satellites, orbits, passes, frequencies, celestial objects. But the real subject is bigger than any dashboard. Space craft is the accumulated work of everyone who ever pointed something at the sky and refused to look away.
For the ones who looked up
Dedicated to the mathematicians, engineers, builders, observers, operators, and dreamers who have worked toward astronomical goals — whether they wired core rope memory by hand, discovered pulsars while everyone else saw noise, built a radio telescope in the backyard because nobody said they couldn't, or stayed up all night tracking a pass with a handheld and a wire antenna.
Navigators
Signal chasers
Orbital mechanics
Portraits: NASA (public domain), Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA), CelesTrak