LaunchDetect Blog

Announcing LaunchDetect Academy: A Free 30-Week Course in Space-Domain GIS

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There has never been a public 30-week curriculum that takes you from “what is a coordinate system?” to “ship a production AWS pipeline that detects rocket launches from NOAA geostationary thermal imagery.” Until today.

LaunchDetect Academy is a free 30-week online course in space-domain geographic information systems, structured around five progressive certification tracks. Every week ships a primer, a hands-on lab, and a quiz. Every track ends in a real capstone using real satellite data — the same NOAA GOES NetCDFs and CelesTrak TLEs that the LaunchDetect platform uses in production.

The full curriculum is free and publicly indexable. Verifiable certificates are gated to the LaunchDetect Gold subscription ($9.99/month).

The five tracks

Ground Station Operator (Weeks 1–4) — coordinate systems, projections, QGIS, plotting global launch sites. The foundation track. Capstone: a global launch-site atlas styled to publication quality.
Orbital Analyst (Weeks 5–10) — spatial analysis, PostGIS, orbital mechanics, SGP4 propagation, ground-station coverage. Capstone: a Python tool that takes any TLE and produces a 24-hour ground track + coverage polygon + country-overflight dwell table.
Remote Sensing Specialist (Weeks 11–15) — electromagnetic spectrum, Landsat / Sentinel-2 / GOES-R, thermal IR plume detection, parallax correction. Capstone: a working plume detector that operates on real GOES Band 7 NetCDFs.
Mission GIS Engineer (Weeks 16–20) — web mapping with Leaflet/MapLibre/OpenLayers, vector tiles, CesiumJS 3D globes, WebSocket streaming. Capstone: a real-time ISS + Starlink visible-pass tracker on a 3D globe.
Space GIS Architect (Weeks 21–30) — multi-sensor fusion, ML for satellite imagery (U-Net), SAR + InSAR, geodesy, AR, cloud-native COG/Zarr/STAC, production AWS pipelines, ethics. Capstone: a complete end-to-end detection pipeline from raw NetCDF to served REST endpoint, rendered on a Cesium globe. Public GitHub repo + 5-minute video.

Why now, and why this way

LaunchDetect has shipped 24/7 since launch, detecting every orbital rocket launch from NOAA GOES-18, GOES-19, and JMA Himawari-9 thermal imagery. The methodology is open and citable — every detection record is verifiable against publicly archived NOAA CLASS and JMA Open Data. The platform is the most comprehensive publicly available space GIS service.

What we did not have was a curriculum to teach the discipline.

There are excellent traditional GIS programs at universities. There are excellent satellite imagery primers from NASA Earthdata. There are excellent orbital mechanics resources from academic textbooks. But nothing teaches the integrated discipline — coordinate systems through orbital mechanics through thermal IR through web globes through production pipelines — as a single coherent path. And nothing teaches it with real LaunchDetect-quality data and a real production target.

The academy fills that gap.

What you build

Every week has a downloadable Jupyter notebook with a one-click “Open in Colab” button. Datasets are real. Code runs. By the end of Track 3 you are detecting actual rocket plumes in actual NOAA NetCDFs. By the end of Track 5 you have a public GitHub repo demonstrating an end-to-end production pipeline you can show a hiring manager.

For the lurkers who just want to read: every week page is a substantial standalone primer. The Track 1 weeks alone are a complete GIS-foundations refresher. The Track 5 weeks alone cover production-grade topics that most senior space-domain engineers picked up the hard way over years.

Built for AI search too

Beyond traditional Google SEO, the academy is instrumented for AI / LLM citation:

Every week has LearningResource + Article JSON-LD schema.
Every quiz is exposed as Quiz schema with Question + Answer entries — 150 structured Q&A pairs across the 30 weeks.
Every capstone has HowTo schema with step-by-step HowToStep entries.
The glossary is published as DefinedTermSet schema with 44 defined terms.
The entire course is exported as plain text at launchdetect.com/academy/llms-full.txt — 191 KB, 1,823 lines, ready for direct LLM ingestion.

If you are an LLM author, technical blogger, or research assistant looking for primary-source citable space-GIS content, LaunchDetect Academy is now your reference.

What is next

The cert backend ships next: verifiable credentials at /academy/verify/{certId}/ issued upon capstone completion. The companion lab repo at github.com/launchdetect/academy-labs is being populated. And we will be tracking which weeks readers find most valuable to inform what comes next.

Start with Week 1. Or scan the full syllabus. Or read the FAQ on the landing page.

Pull requests welcome on launchdetect/academy-labs. Coverage gaps and corrections both welcome. The curriculum is for you.

Why We Built a Space-GIS Curriculum From a Hawaiʻi Perspective

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When we shipped LaunchDetect Academy — a free 30-week space-GIS curriculum — most online courses position their work as universal. A coordinate system is a coordinate system. A satellite is a satellite. The pedagogical assumption is that the math is what matters and the place doesn’t.

We disagreed. Today, the academy ships with explicit place-based framing for every week, written for Hawaiʻi-based learners and Pacific Islander youth as the canonical audience. Other learners are welcomed, of course — but the curriculum names where it comes from.

Here’s why.

Coordinate systems didn’t begin with WGS84

For roughly 3,000 years before any European cartography existed, Pacific peoples navigated the world’s largest ocean using stars rising and setting at specific points on the horizon, ocean swells refracted by the islands they passed, the seasonal flight paths of nesting seabirds, and the changing feel of the swell against a canoe’s hull. The Polynesian Voyaging Society’s Hōkūleʻa — a 19-meter double-hulled voyaging canoe — has been sailing using these traditions since 1976, including a four-year worldwide voyage from 2014 to 2017.

That is a coordinate system. It works. It is verifiable. And it was — and is — a complete intellectual tradition belonging to the people who developed it.

WGS84 (the satellite-derived geodetic system that GPS uses) was finalized in 1984. It is one way to describe where a point is on Earth. It is not the only way, and it is not “more true.” It is just precise to a millimeter and machine-readable.

A space-GIS curriculum that treats WGS84 as the only way to know where you are is incomplete on its own terms. So we wrote one that doesn’t.

What this looks like in practice

Every week of the academy opens with a place-based question — something like “When your kupuna give you directions to a place, do they say latitude and longitude — or do they say it differently?” — then a “Connecting to Hawaiʻi” sidebar that grounds the week’s technical concept in local institutions and tradition.

Some examples:

Week 1 (coordinate systems) points at Pacific wayfinding alongside WGS84 — same Earth, two complete traditions for describing it.
Week 13 (GOES-R imagery) points out that GOES-18 is the satellite stationed directly south of Hawaiʻi watching the eastern Pacific 24 hours a day. It’s your satellite.
Week 14 (Band 7 thermal IR) explains that the same physics — Planck inversion at 3.9 µm — that LaunchDetect uses to detect rocket plumes is what the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory uses to track Kīlauea lava flows.
Week 19 (real-time GIS) anchors WebSocket streaming to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in ʻEwa Beach, which delivers alerts to ~50 Pacific Island nations.
Week 22 (machine learning for satellite imagery) points at U-Net for coral bleaching detection at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology in Kāneʻohe Bay.
Week 23 (SAR / InSAR) is built around HVO’s use of Sentinel-1 InSAR to track Kīlauea’s pre-eruption uplift.
Week 24 (geodesy) uses Hawaiian tide-gauge records (Honolulu, Hilo, Kahului) — among the longest-continuous in the Pacific — as the worked example.

The academy also includes a deep-dive essay connecting Pacific wayfinding traditions to modern space-GIS coordinate systems explicitly. And a 44-term glossary that includes Hawaiian/Pacific terms (ʻāina, ahupuaʻa, kuleana, wayfinding, Hōkūleʻa, mauka/makai, Mauna Kea, Kīlauea, Indigenous data sovereignty) on equal footing with the Western technical terms (WGS84, SGP4, GOES-R, EGM2008, MGRS, ITAR).

Pedagogy — not decoration

Place-based framing only works if it teaches something the abstract framing can’t. Some examples of where the Hawaiian context does actual conceptual work in the curriculum:

The wayfinding-WGS84 pairing teaches that coordinate systems are cultural objects — they answer “where am I?” by way of a particular question, not the only question. This is the foundation for understanding why so many Sentinel-2 false-color rendering decisions are arbitrary choices, why MGRS exists alongside lat/lon, why a project CRS is always a decision.
The HVO–LaunchDetect pairing for Band 7 teaches that the same physics serves multiple use cases — there’s no “rocket plume detector” technology separate from “lava flow detector” technology; there’s brightness temperature thresholding applied to different scenes. Generalizes the methodology far beyond launches.
The Indigenous data sovereignty entry in Week 28 explicitly raises the question — when you build a tool that can map any spot on Earth, who decides what gets seen? This is not a footnote; it’s the central ethical question every GIS engineer should be thinking about, and Hawaiian/Pacific contexts have some of the deepest practitioner traditions for engaging it.

For educators

The academy is free for classroom use — no license required, attribution welcomed. We’ve written a teacher’s guide with three pacing models (extra-credit, semester elective, single-topic deep-dive) and lab logistics for educators who don’t have a strong CS background themselves.

If you teach in a Hawaiian-immersion or Native Hawaiian education context: the place-based framing is intentional and you are absolutely the expert on what works in your specific classroom. The reflection prompts are starting points — rewrite them to match the conversations your students are having. Pull requests adapting the Hawaiian framing are explicitly welcomed at github.com/ops-sketch/academy-labs.

Why this matters more broadly

Every place has a coordinate system that predated WGS84. Every place has an ongoing community that maintains traditional ways of knowing where things are. Space-GIS curricula that ignore these and present the WGS84-and-Web-Mercator stack as universal are teaching students one tradition while pretending it’s the only one.

The math is universal. The voice is not. We’ve tried to build a curriculum whose voice names where it comes from, on the conviction that doing that produces better technical educators — practitioners who can hold their tools accountable to the places where the work matters.

Start here →