Capstone defense and synthesis (Capstone 5 week)

Thirty weeks. Five tracks. You've moved from "what is a coordinate system" to building a production AWS pipeline that ingests real geostationary thermal imagery and serves geocoded detections over a REST API. This week is the synthesis: stitch everything together into one end-to-end deliverable that demonstrates expert-level competence in space GIS.

What you've learned

• Track 1 (Weeks 1–4): GIS foundations — coordinate systems, vector vs raster, QGIS, mapping global launch sites. Spatial literacy.
• Track 2 (Weeks 5–10): Spatial analysis + orbital mechanics — PostGIS, SGP4, ground tracks, ground-station visibility, spaceport-to-orbit matching. Geometric reasoning.
• Track 3 (Weeks 11–15): Remote sensing — EM spectrum, Landsat / Sentinel-2 / GOES-R, thermal IR, plume detection, parallax correction. Sensor physics.
• Track 4 (Weeks 16–20): Web + real-time — Leaflet / MapLibre / OpenLayers, vector tiles, CesiumJS, WebSockets, change detection. Delivery.
• Track 5 (Weeks 21–29): Production + expert — multi-sensor fusion, ML for raster, SAR, geodesy, AR, cloud-native formats, AWS pipelines, ethics, geospatial APIs. Production scale + responsibility.

The capstone deliverable

Capstone 5: End-to-End Detection Pipeline. A complete production-style pipeline running every layer of the course:

1. Ingest — 10 frames of real GOES-18 ABI Band 7 NetCDF from the NOAA AWS Open Data bucket, spanning a known launch event.
2. Georeference — convert fixed-grid scan angles to lat/lon (Week 15) with parallax correction applied.
3. Detect — convert radiance to brightness temperature, threshold-detect hotspots (Week 14), apply morphological cleaning (Week 20).
4. Cluster — group hotspot pixels across consecutive frames into plume tracks. A real plume appears in 3–5 consecutive frames; isolated single-frame hotspots are noise.
5. Score — apply a simple confidence heuristic: spatial coincidence with a known spaceport (within 50 km), temporal pattern matching (the track rises then falls), brightness profile.
6. Persist — write final detections to PostGIS with proper GIST indexes (Week 6).
7. Serve — expose /detections REST endpoints via FastAPI (Week 29) with OpenAPI docs.
8. Visualize — render detections on a Cesium globe (Week 18) loaded directly from the REST API.

The deliverables

• Public GitHub repo — clear README, setup instructions, license, working code. Anyone with Docker should be able to docker compose up and see it run.
• 5-minute video — walk through the architecture: what each component does, why you made the design choices you did, what would change at 100× scale.
• Detection log on a real launch — sample output JSON showing your pipeline correctly identified one known launch event.

Why 5 minutes

The video constraint is deliberate. Five minutes is enough to explain the architecture and the key design decisions; it's not enough to dwell on every detail. The skill is communication under constraint — a skill every senior engineer needs.

What comes next

You've completed the LaunchDetect Academy. What's the next problem in space GIS? The honest answer: many. A non-exhaustive list:

• Orbital traffic management — as the LEO catalog grows past 100,000 objects, conjunction analysis at scale is unsolved.
• Climate monitoring from GEO — using GOES-R for sub-daily climate variables, not just weather.
• Autonomous Earth observation — onboard ML deciding what to image, when, with what bands.
• Open data infrastructure — keeping STAC catalogs and COG/Zarr archives sustainable as data volumes 10×.
• SAR for climate — InSAR-derived deformation as a climate-change indicator (subsidence, sea-level rise impacts).
• Mars and lunar GIS — coordinate systems, datums, basemap layers for off-Earth bodies.

The instinct you've built — "this is a spatial problem; I know how to set it up rigorously, run it, serve it, verify it" — is the most portable thing in the curriculum. Apply it everywhere.

The capstone

Week 30 is the start of Capstone 5: End-to-End Detection Pipeline, the final credential. The full rubric is on the capstone page; finishing it earns the Certified Space GIS Architect credential — the highest LaunchDetect Academy designation, and a real signal to peers and employers that you can build production-grade space-domain geospatial systems end-to-end.

Ship it. Tag us when you do.