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.