The full 30-week syllabus.

Every week of the LaunchDetect Academy curriculum, organized by certification track. Weeks marked with a capstone tag complete the track and unlock a verifiable certificate.

WeekTopicTrack
1What is GIS? Coordinate systems and datumsGround Station Operator
2Vector vs raster, and map projectionsGround Station Operator
3QGIS hands-on: load, style, exportGround Station Operator
4Plotting global launch sites (Capstone 1 week) · Capstone 1Ground Station Operator
5Spatial operations: joins, buffers, intersects, dissolveOrbital Analyst
6PostGIS: spatial SQL fundamentalsOrbital Analyst
7Orbital mechanics primer: TLEs and Keplerian elementsOrbital Analyst
8SGP4 propagation in Python with skyfieldOrbital Analyst
9Ground-to-satellite line-of-sight and coverageOrbital Analyst
10Spaceports and orbits (Capstone 2 week) · Capstone 2Orbital Analyst
11EM spectrum, sensor types, and radiometryRemote Sensing Specialist
12Landsat / Sentinel-2: bands, NDVI, false colorRemote Sensing Specialist
13GOES-R ABI: full-disk, CONUS, mesoscaleRemote Sensing Specialist
14Thermal IR Band 7: brightness temperature and hotspotsRemote Sensing Specialist
15Georeferencing GOES and parallax (Capstone 3 week) · Capstone 3Remote Sensing Specialist
16Web mapping: Leaflet vs MapLibre vs OpenLayersMission GIS Engineer
17Vector tiles with tippecanoe and MBTilesMission GIS Engineer
183D globes: CesiumJS and orbital visualizationMission GIS Engineer
19Real-time GIS: WebSockets and streaming TLEsMission GIS Engineer
20Spatiotemporal change detection (Capstone 4 week) · Capstone 4Mission GIS Engineer
21Multi-sensor fusion: GOES-East, GOES-West, Himawari-9Space GIS Architect
22ML for satellite imagery: CNNs and U-Net segmentationSpace GIS Architect
23SAR: Sentinel-1, polarimetry, InSARSpace GIS Architect
24Geodesy: ellipsoid vs geoid, EGM2008Space GIS Architect
25AR for satellites: sky-direction overlays and az-el mathSpace GIS Architect
26Cloud-native: COG, Zarr, STAC catalogsSpace GIS Architect
27Production pipelines: S3 → Lambda → EventBridge → DDBSpace GIS Architect
28Privacy + ethics: MGRS, sub-meter, ITARSpace GIS Architect
29Geospatial APIs: PostGIS + FastAPI + spatial RESTSpace GIS Architect
30Capstone defense and synthesis (Capstone 5 week) · Capstone 5Space GIS Architect
← Academy home Track 1: Ground Station Operator