Learn GIS online — a free 30-week curriculum.
Most online GIS courses are either short (a single weekend boot camp) or expensive (university-degree-priced). LaunchDetect Academy is the third option: 30 weeks of free, self-paced curriculum from absolute foundations through expert-level production deployments, with five hands-on capstones using real geospatial data.
Who this is for
You should take this course if you fit any of these descriptions:
- You are an engineer or developer who needs GIS skills for a new project but does not have the time or budget for a university program.
- You are a geographer or earth scientist who is comfortable with theory but wants to build practical software with modern tools.
- You are a self-directed learner who prefers depth over breadth and wants to know why things work, not just how.
- You want a verifiable credential to put on a resume but balk at paying $5,000 for an online program.
What you will learn
The curriculum is organized into 5 tracks. By the end of each, you have a real artifact you can show:
- Ground Station Operator (4 weeks) — coordinate systems, projections, QGIS, plotting global launch sites. Capstone: a published-quality global launch-site atlas.
- Orbital Analyst (6 weeks) — PostGIS, orbital mechanics, SGP4, ground tracks. Capstone: a Python tool that produces ground tracks and coverage polygons for any satellite.
- Remote Sensing Specialist (5 weeks) — EM spectrum, Landsat/Sentinel-2, thermal IR plume detection. Capstone: a working plume detector for real NOAA GOES NetCDFs.
- Mission GIS Engineer (5 weeks) — web mapping, CesiumJS, real-time WebSockets. Capstone: a real-time satellite tracker on a 3D globe.
- Space GIS Architect (10 weeks) — ML for satellite imagery, SAR, geodesy, production AWS pipelines. Capstone: a complete end-to-end detection pipeline + GitHub repo + demo video.
How the labs work
Every week ships a downloadable Jupyter notebook with a one-click "Open in Colab" button. The data is real (NOAA GOES NetCDFs, CelesTrak TLEs, Natural Earth boundaries). The code runs end-to-end. Solutions are provided in collapsible accordions on each week page.
What you do not need
You do not need:
- A paid software license — every tool used in the course (QGIS, PostGIS, Python, Jupyter, Cesium) is free and open-source.
- Specialized hardware — every lab runs on a standard laptop or in Colab.
- A GIS background — Track 1 starts from "what is a coordinate system?"
- Math past undergraduate level — the orbital mechanics in Track 2 is approachable with basic calculus.
From Hawaiʻi
If you're a Hawaiʻi-based learner — high school, community college, university, or self-directed — this course was designed with you in mind. The 'Connecting to Hawaiʻi' sidebar on every week ties the technical concept to local ʻāina, institutions, and tradition. The capstones ask you to think about kuleana (responsibility) alongside the code. Hawaiian wayfinding traditions are treated as part of the curriculum, not a footnote. The cost is free (Gold for verifiable certificates); the curriculum is free + public forever.
Related weeks in the course
- Week 1: What is GIS? Coordinate systems and datums
- Week 2: Vector vs raster, and map projections
- Week 3: QGIS hands-on: load, style, export
- Week 5: Spatial operations: joins, buffers, intersects, dissolve
- Week 16: Web mapping: Leaflet vs MapLibre vs OpenLayers
- Week 27: Production pipelines: S3 → Lambda → EventBridge → DDB