Protomota
Protomota experiment
Every object tracked in Earth orbit since 1957, every launch that put them there, and 20 of the rockets and spacecraft that got us here. Drag to look around.
Oct 4, 1957
0 in orbit0 tracked since 19570 launches
Latest launch
To scale
This globe needs WebGL. Turn on hardware acceleration in your browser settings and reload the page.
Each dot is one object from GCAT, the catalog of everything launched into space kept by astronomer Jonathan McDowell. A dot appears on the day its object reached orbit, or broke away from another object, and disappears on the day it reentered or was destroyed. The counts come straight from those dates.
Each orbit has its real height, shape and tilt from the catalog: today's orbit for objects still up, and the orbit the catalog records for the rest. That is why the rings and shells look the way they do: the crowd in low orbit, the Starlink shells below 500 km, and the ring of geostationary satellites 35,786 km above the equator.
The catalog doesn't say which way each orbit faces or where along it each object is, so those are set at random, the same way on every visit. Objects from one launch share an orbit, satellites from one launch leave in a line and spread out over the following weeks, and the pieces of a breakup start where the broken object was. So the dots' exact positions are illustrative, while their heights, tilts and numbers are real.
Debris clouds spread out the way real ones do: pieces thrown onto slightly larger orbits fall behind, smaller ones get ahead, and Earth's equatorial bulge slowly turns each orbit. Motion along the orbits is sped up between 40 and 600 times: slowest while a ship is on screen, 110 times in the slow-motion moments.
Every launch since 1957 is a brief orange pulse at its launch site, red when it failed to reach orbit; the bars along the timeline count the launches that made it each year. They come from GCAT's launch log.
The ships are shown at true proportions, with their real heights and a scale bar in metres; the lineup at the end puts the rockets side by side at one scale. Dates and times are the launch, in UTC, and the marker on the globe is the launch site. While the timeline plays it stops at each milestone long enough to read its card; click any mark on the timeline to open one.
Objects that left for deep space, spacecraft while docked to a station or carried by the Space Shuttle, and anything with no recorded orbit. The catalog is current to Oct 29, 2026.
Data from GCAT (J. McDowell, planet4589.org/space/gcat), licensed CC BY 4.0. Changes: filtered to objects in Earth orbit and to launches headed for orbit or beyond, and converted to compact files for this page. Coastlines from Natural Earth, public domain. 3D models of Juno I, Mercury, Gemini, Saturn V, Skylab, Apollo–Soyuz, the Shuttle orbiter, Mir, Hubble and the ISS from NASA 3D Resources, public domain; the rest were built for this page from published dimensions and photographs. Mission facts from NASA, ESA, Roscosmos and CNSA records and the vehicles' Wikipedia articles. An independent project, not affiliated with GCAT or Jonathan McDowell.