Made by a Spaceflight Fan.

I've always loved space and rockets, but as a kid I never got to see a Space Shuttle launch. My parents always said they wished they could take us. The hard part was knowing when. Before smartphones and Twitter, a launch was a small blip on the evening news.

Around 2015 I started listening to a podcast that had a "This Week in Spaceflight" segment which ran through the launches of the past and coming week, and credited something called Launch Library. That year there were about 87 orbital launch attempts, more than one a week. It blew my mind.

Launch Library was a simple public service, run by a handful of volunteers, that tracked who, what, where and when for every launch. Its website was basic and the few apps built on it had been abandoned. When one of the volunteers stepped away, I joined, and started building an Android app of my own. I'd never shipped a real app before. After a sleepless weekend or two I posted a beta on r/SpaceX. It got 1,500 installs and a pile of feedback telling me to keep going.

"I don't want another kid to grow up without the chance to watch a rocket launch live."

Space Launch Now grew from there: an iPhone app, then launch alerts through Discord, Twitter and Instagram bots. Launch Library itself had no funding at all; its original owner had been paying out of his own pocket. When he was ready to hand it on, another developer from the community and I took it over, and a few more developers joined to modernize it.

In 2020 that became Launch Library 2 and a new organization, The Space Devs, which I co-founded and help lead. Its volunteer librarians, from Ukraine to Australia, keep the data current around the clock.

In 2025 I rebuilt the iPhone and Android apps from the ground up, as one modern app on one shared codebase. This website is the newest piece. It tells you when the next launch is and, now, where to look for it from your own back yard.