QGIS is the free and open-source workhorse of desktop GIS. This week is hands-on: load real launch-site data, query it, style it with rules-based symbology, and export a publication-quality map.
QGIS is the free and open-source desktop GIS. It is the industry-standard alternative to ESRI's ArcGIS Pro, used by governments, NGOs, research institutions, and a huge swath of professional GIS practitioners. For an academy graduate, fluency in QGIS is non-negotiable — and unlike commercial alternatives, the entire toolchain is free, cross-platform, and installable in 5 minutes.
Download the long-term-release (LTR) version from qgis.org/download. The LTR is what professional teams standardize on; the regular release ships every 4 months and has more bugs. At time of writing, QGIS 3.34 LTR is current.
On macOS, the official installer is a .dmg that puts QGIS in /Applications. On Windows, the official installer is an MSI. On Linux, your distribution's package manager almost always has a recent build. After installation, open QGIS — you'll see a project view, a layers panel on the left, a map canvas in the center, and a toolbox of geoprocessing tools on the right.
A QGIS project is a stack of layers. Each layer is either vector (GeoJSON, Shapefile, GeoPackage, etc.) or raster (GeoTIFF, NetCDF, COG, etc.). Add a layer via Layer → Add Layer → Add Vector Layer, or just drag-and-drop a file onto the canvas.
For this week's lab, you'll load three things:
Every vector layer has an attribute table — a spreadsheet of the layer's properties. Right-click the layer → Open Attribute Table. From there you can filter, sort, and run expressions. Try the expression "operator" = 'SpaceX' to filter for SpaceX pads only. The filter applies live to the map.
Attributes are also what you style by. Layer styles can be uniform (every feature same), categorized (group features by an attribute value and assign each group a color), graduated (continuous values binned into ranges), or rules-based (the most flexible: an arbitrary expression per rule). For the lab, you'll use a categorized style on the operator field — every operator gets a distinct color.
Open Layer Properties → Symbology. Choose Categorized, set the Column to operator, click Classify, then assign each category a color from the QGIS palette. The legend updates automatically.
For labels, go to Layer Properties → Labels. Choose Single Labels, set the field to name, then choose a font (Inter or Helvetica look professional), a buffer (white halo, so labels are readable over any basemap), and a placement rule (offset from point, with leader line for overlapping labels).
A QGIS map isn't done until it's exported. Open Project → New Print Layout. Give the layout a name. In the layout window, add a map item (the canvas content), then add a title, a legend (automatically pulled from the layers panel), a scale bar, a north arrow, and a data attribution text box in the corner.
Export to PDF at 300 DPI. The result is print-publication ready — the same quality you'd expect from a professional cartographer's deliverable.
Ctrl+Shift+S — save projectCtrl+J — zoom to layerF7 — toggle attribute tableF9 — toggle field calculatorCtrl+Shift+M — toggle measure-distance tool (uses geodesic by default)QGIS is the foundation. Every subsequent week's lab can be opened, validated, and visualized in QGIS — even when the lab itself runs in Python. Get comfortable here.
Open QGIS, load a global spaceport GeoJSON and a basemap raster, style by country and operator, label by name, export to PDF.
Test yourself. Answer key on the certificate-track page (Gold-tier feature: progress tracking and auto-grading).