Real-time Solar System with 526k asteroids and all tracked satellites
Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.
Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.
HN · launched Sep 29, 2026 · 405 upvotes (top 1%) · 1 view
Niche: data and scientific visualization tools · 146 launches, 3 in the last 7 days ▼ -50% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Analytics & BI
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 146 launches in data and scientific visualization tools →
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 : 722 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #8 of 723 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 330 days after the earliest competitor.
- Faraway · hn · 2026-11-11 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.66
- My live 3D satellite tracker, now with asteroids and a UAP archive · hn · 2026-10-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.63
- The Celestialer's Orrery · ph · 2026-10-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- One hundred LLMs Generating a HTML/CSS Solar System · hn · 2026-06-18 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- exolune · github · 2026-10-31 · 39 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- A satellite control room from 100% open data, self-hosted in Europe · hn · 2026-07-23 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Constellation — The Operating System for Space · yc · 2026-01-12 · 46 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- space-data-rig · github · 2026-10-10 · 67 upvotes · similarity 0.53
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.