The 30-week curriculum is free. The workshops are where you go from understanding the material to shipping something with it โ in two hours, in a room of twelve, with a working space-GIS practitioner on the call.
Cape Canaveral to Hawaiสปi โ your first space-GIS map
$992-hour cohort
Take what you learned in Weeks 1โ4 and ship a single, publication-quality map: every active orbital launch pad on Earth, color-coded by operator, with the next 24 hours of ISS ground track overlaid. You'll do it live, with a practitioner debugging your geopandas/leafmap code in real time. You leave with a PNG you can share, a GeoJSON you can reuse, and a notebook that runs.
You walk out with
A publication-quality map of every orbital launch pad (your data, your styling)
A GeoJSON file of all 70+ active pads, attributed for reuse
A working Jupyter notebook you can rerun and modify
Capstone Office Hours โ ship your capstone in 90 minutes
$1492-hour cohort
You started a capstone (any of the five) and it's stuck somewhere. Bring it. We unblock you on the call, ship the deliverable, and submit it for cert verification while we're still on screen. Come prepared โ the pre-workshop checklist (sent the day before) is the contract: do the prep, show up on time, and the deliverable ships.
You walk out with
Your capstone deliverable shipped and submitted
A verifiable certificate URL at launchdetect.com/academy/verify/{certId}/
Plume Detector Cohort โ from GOES NetCDF to a labeled detection
$1992-hour cohort
The same thermal-detection pipeline LaunchDetect runs in production, built live by you in two hours. We start from a real GOES-18 NetCDF granule, walk through ABI Channel 7 brightness extraction, build a brightness anomaly detector, and end with a labeled detection plotted on a map โ the actual artifact that lands in a real launch verdict.
You walk out with
A working plume detector running on real GOES-18 data
A labeled detection event (lat, lon, time, confidence)
An xarray pipeline you can extend to GOES-19 or Himawari-9
Insight into where production detectors actually fail
Architect's Roundtable โ design a multi-sensor fusion pipeline
$2992-hour roundtable
Five practitioners in the room, one architecture problem on the whiteboard. We pick a real space-GIS system you're trying to design โ multi-sensor fusion across GOES / Himawari / SAR, a STAC-based archive, a Cesium real-time dashboard โ and architect it together in two hours. You leave with a sketch, a stack, the open questions named, and the names of three people who've shipped your problem.
You walk out with
A production-credible architecture diagram of your system
A short-list of stack choices with the tradeoffs named
The open risks called out before you sink a month into the wrong path
Direct intros to other practitioners working in the area
All sales final. Seats are capped, the practitioner's time is blocked off for you the moment you pay, and we don't oversell to hedge no-shows โ so we don't refund. What we do guarantee: every workshop has a concrete deliverable spec, a pre-cohort prep checklist, and a recorded session you keep forever. If something on our end falls over (we cancel, our instructor is sick, the platform fails), you get a free reschedule into any future cohort or full credit toward another workshop โ but not a refund.
Need to reschedule yourself? Free up to 48 hours before your cohort โ write to academy@launchdetect.com and we'll move you into the next available date. Inside 48 hours your seat is committed.
Next four cohorts
Date (HST)
Workshop
Sat 24 May
WS1Your first space-GIS map โ 10:00 HST
Wed 28 May
WS2Capstone office hours โ 18:00 HST
Sat 7 Jun
WS3Plume detector cohort โ 10:00 HST
Sat 14 Jun
WS4Architect's roundtable โ 10:00 HST
FAQ
How are workshops different from the free curriculum?
The curriculum teaches you concepts; a workshop ships a deliverable. The free Week 1 lab teaches Points, Lines, Polygons. The Workshop 1 cohort uses those primitives to build the actual map you'll show people, in two hours, with someone debugging your code as you go. Curriculum is asynchronous; workshops are live, cohort-paced, and finite-seat so they stay a room.
Do I need to have finished the prerequisite weeks?
Strongly recommended but not enforced. The "Where are you on the curriculum?" recommender above routes you to the workshop that matches your level. The Architect's Roundtable is the exception โ it assumes you're a practitioner already.
What if I miss the live session?
Every workshop is recorded. Registered participants get the recording within 24 hours plus the working notebook, slides, and any artifacts produced. That said: the live cohort is the value. We re-run each workshop monthly so missing one doesn't lock you out.
Can my employer pay for this?
Yes. We invoice on company purchase orders for cohorts of 3+ from the same organization. Email academy@launchdetect.com with your team size and we'll send a quote. Group rates kick in at 5 seats.
Do workshops include a certificate?
Workshops are deliverable-focused, not certificate-focused. Capstone Office Hours is the exception โ it ships the capstone and mints the verifiable certificate during the call. For other workshops you get a participation receipt with the cohort date and deliverable produced; that's portfolio-worthy as a "you built this in two hours" artifact, not a certified credential.
Why the 12-seat cap?
Because at 13 people no one gets unstuck. Below 12 the practitioner has bandwidth to look at every screen at least twice. We've tried larger formats and they degrade into broadcasts. Twelve is the room size where everyone still gets seen.
Are workshops part of LaunchDetect Gold?
No. Gold ($9.99/mo) gates the verifiable certificate URLs at /academy/verify/{certId}/. Workshops are paid separately because the cost is the practitioner's time in a small room, not the platform. Gold subscribers do get $20 off any workshop โ code is in your Gold welcome email.
How do I actually enroll?
Each workshop's "Enroll" button opens Stripe Checkout โ secure card payment, takes 60 seconds. You get a receipt immediately and the calendar invite within 24 hours. Promotion codes (Gold tier subscribers, group rates) can be applied at checkout. All sales final โ see "The deal" above for the reschedule policy. We're a real merchant of record (LaunchDetect Inc.), not a marketplace.