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space.warehack.ing
Space Ware
This is spaceware — software for tracking what's above. Satellites, orbits, passes, frequencies, launches, reentries, celestial objects. Tools for knowing where things are and when they'll be overhead.
It propagates orbits from TLE data, computes pass predictions for your location, drives antenna rotors to follow a signal across the sky, and pulls together data from a dozen sources into one place. The kind of ware you build at a workbench — the warehack.ing kind.
Space Craft
But the ware is just one part of the craft.
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.
Spacecraft — the vehicles. And space craft — every discipline that gets them there and keeps us connected to what's above. Mathematics, metal, code, signal, patience, and always looking up.
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