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Real-time Solar System with 526k asteroids and all tracked satellites

Details

External ID
49898778
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Real-time Solar System with 526k asteroids and all tracked satellites
Website domain
bl2.net
Launched
Sept. 29, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
342
Upvotes percentile
0.9872408293460925
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 30, 2026, 5:01 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 30, 2026, 5:01 p.m.

Enrichment

Theme
space and geospatial visualization tools
Vertical
Education
Function
Analytics & BI
Audience
Prosumer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
real-time 3d solar system visualizer for space enthusiasts
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial Building a standard 3D solar system in Three.js is achievable, but rendering and propagating orbits for 526,000 asteroids and thousands of satellites in real-time requires high-performance graphics optimizations.

What it would actually take: Stack requires WebGL/WebGPU (via Three.js or custom shaders) and Web Workers. The difficult challenge is propagating orbital mechanics (Keplerian elements, SGP4 for satellites) for 500k+ bodies at 60 FPS, necessitating GPU compute shaders or InstancedMesh optimizations with heavily optimized spatial indexing, binary packed orbital datasets, and level-of-detail management.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Celestia, kete / ketev

Concerns raised: Satellites not drawn to scale, Space debris and satellite clutter, Slow zoom with mouse wheel

Feature requests: Mobile zoom support, Way to close overlay panels, Faster zoom option

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 263 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #5 of 264 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 330 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.