Space governance argues over a place almost no one can picture: the shells above us and who is responsible for what fills them. This turns that place into something you can rotate. Drag to turn the globe, scroll or pinch to zoom, and tap any object to read whose flag it flies, when it launched, and how it is catalogued.
Well-known objects with a verifiable flag and regime. Select one to inspect it.
The first accidental hypervelocity collision of two intact satellites: an active Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian Cosmos satellite, near 789 km. It created thousands of tracked fragments still on orbit today.
Coordination: No effective coordination. The defunct object had no operator to maneuver it, and no shared warning was acted on.
ESA's Aeolus wind-mission satellite performed a collision-avoidance maneuver to move clear of a Starlink satellite. The two operators did not coordinate the maneuver between them.
Coordination: Unilateral action, coordination gap. One operator moved; the two sides did not agree who would. It became a reference case for operator-to-operator norms.
The globe reads a fixed edition compiled offline, in keeping with how the whole site works. It is a picture as of a date, never a real-time tracker, and it does not predict any object’s future position.
Every object is real, joined from CelesTrak’s active element sets and the public satellite catalogue: name, flag, launch year, and orbit come from those records. The globe propagates each object’s element set with SGP4, the standard model, at real speed. It is a visualization, not precise tracking.
The coordination-demand read counts the distinct national flags that share each shell and ranks the bands against the busiest one. It is a Diplo framing for where a band asks the most of diplomacy, not an operational risk or collision metric.
Dated edition of real catalogued objects (CelesTrak active GP + SATCAT, joined by NORAD id). The globe propagates each object's element set with SGP4 at real time. This is a dated snapshot, not a live feed, and positions are a visualization, not precise tracking. The full real-catalogue edition, compiled from public authoritative sources, publishes on the same standard as the rest of the record: sourced, dated, and only when it checks out.
