See every rocket leave Earth. From orbit.
LaunchDetect reads three geostationary weather satellites in real time and tells you when a rocket just left Earth — every pad, every country, every classified mission, every scrub-at-T-zero that still had flame.
Start 7-day free trial → No sales call. Cancel anytime. $3/mo Silver, $10/mo Gold.You know the feeling.
A Falcon 9 is supposed to go up tonight at 02:37 from Vandenberg. You've been refreshing the NASA Spaceflight stream for twenty minutes. The countdown clock hits zero. The stream cuts to static. Weather. Wind. Hold at T-0.
Scrub.
Or — worse — it actually launched. But the camera was on the wrong side. Or the fog came in. Or it was a classified mission and there was no stream at all. You check X an hour later and someone in Lompoc posted a photo of a bright streak in the clouds with 400 upvotes, and that's all you get.
That's the gap. Half the rockets on Earth leave without anyone watching.
Not because people don't care. Because the cameras aren't there.
What if the cameras were always there?
There are three satellites in geostationary orbit right now — GOES-18 and GOES-19 over the Americas, Himawari-9 over the Pacific — that stare at Earth every 60 to 600 seconds, in infrared, looking for heat.
They were built to watch wildfires and hurricanes.
They also see rockets.
When a Falcon 9 lights, the plume is 3,300°C and the size of an office building. It shows up on a thermal pixel the way a flashlight shows up in a dark room. The satellites can't miss it. They never do.
Not the press release. Not the livestream. The heat itself, from orbit, within three to five minutes of the engines lighting. Every pad, every country, every classified mission, every scrub-at-T-zero that still had flame.
You see the rocket's thermal plume on a 3D globe. You see where it was headed by the azimuth of the trail. You see the site it came from before the news wire does.
And when you're done watching the launch, you open the sky view, point your phone up, and there's the ISS in AR overlay, crossing the constellation Lyra at 27,600 km/h — labeled, tracked, with a countdown to when it disappears into Earth's shadow.
That's the product.
What it feels like to use it
Two tiers that matter. One free trial.
Four tiers exist. Free is how you check we're real. Business is for commercial REST API users. The two for you are Silver and Gold.
- 3D globe, event feed, upcoming launch schedule
- Live stream integration when a stream exists
- Real-time launch predictions from our pipeline — we tell you a rocket is coming before the pad camera goes hot
- Detection confidence + thermal imagery — see the actual GOES frame that triggered the alert, the plume in false color, the pixel-level heat signature
- Every active launch site on Earth (Cape Canaveral, Baikonur, Jiuquan, Kourou, Wenchang, Rocket Lab — every pad that's lit up in the last decade)
- Live chat with the launch community during hot windows
- 48-hour rolling data — today's and yesterday's detections, replayable
- Mobile app — iOS and Android. AR Sky View. Recenter-on-me. Widget on your home screen with the next T-0.
- Push notifications — T-10 minutes, T-0, and detected-ignition. You pick what wakes your phone.
- Visible-from-here — tell us where you are, we tell you which of tonight's passes you can actually see from your backyard.
- Everything in Silver — live detection, AR Sky View, push notifications, the home-screen widget
- Your timeline goes infinite. Silver shows you the last 48 hours. Gold shows you everything we've ever caught on thermal. Swipe backward through the mobile app and walk through the last year — every Falcon 9, every Long March 5, every polar-orbit insertion from Vandenberg, every unannounced Chinese lift from Jiuquan we flagged before the official release.
- Search every launch we've ever seen, from your phone. "SpaceX April." "Starship." "Every Russian launch this year." Instant results, thermal frames included, filter by site, rocket, or orbit.
- The widget, backed by history. On Silver, the widget shows what's next. On Gold, the same widget is fed by the full archive behind it — glance at your home screen, tap through, stand inside the history of that pad before the rocket has even lit.
- Outbound webhooks with HMAC signing. Every detection — or any filtered subset — POSTs to your endpoint. Discord, Home Assistant, your own dashboard, a smart bulb that flashes red when something unannounced lights up over Jiuquan.
- Priority support. If a webhook goes quiet or you need help wiring something up, you're at the front of the line.
- Everything in Gold, plus full REST API, API key management, and the exclusive Data Gateway
- Priority support with SLA
- For commercial users plugging LaunchDetect into their own systems
Who this is for
Yes
- You check the launch schedule before you check the weather.
- You have opinions about payload fairing design.
- You remember where you were for STS-107, or CRS-7, or the Starship SN-15 hop.
- You've looked up at a moving dot of light and wanted to know its name.
- You're tired of finding out about things 40 minutes after they happened.
No
- People who think rockets are "cool I guess" once every Super Bowl commercial.
- Commercial users who need REST API access (that's Business — different conversation).
- People who expect us to stream HD video. We don't. We stream truth.
Why $3 for Silver. Why $10 for Gold.
Silver is $3 because the gate has to be low enough that you don't think twice, and high enough that you actually show up when the notification fires. Free users skim. Paying users watch. We built this for watchers. The satellites cost hundreds of millions. The processing pipeline we run on top of them runs on real servers. Three dollars covers your seat. That's it.
Gold is $10 because history is expensive to store and expensive to query, and because at $10 we stop being an app on your phone and start being infrastructure on your phone — the app carries a year of rockets you can scroll through any time, and your webhooks carry LaunchDetect into whatever you're already building. Ten bucks is a sandwich. A year of rockets in your pocket is everything we've ever seen. Pick your sandwich.
The pitch in three lines.
Silver — you'll see every rocket leave Earth before the news does, on your phone, in your pocket. $3/month.
Gold — you'll carry a year of launches on your home screen and pipe every new one into anything you build. $10/month.
Both tiers — 7-day free trial, cancel anytime, no sales call.