Space Apps Challenge 2018

Come Launch With Me! is a project we made to inform the public about rocket launches around the world and throughout history. Our current data set has 1383 data records from Yuri Gagarin's first flight in 1962 to future launches going years into the future set to launch from many locations across the globe.

Our main feature is the interactive globe in the center of our page. The pings on the globe when it first loads are the launch sites of the next twenty five planned launches globally. You can click near one of the pings on the map to give you a list of launch sites near the mouse event. If you look at more details for the launch site, a list of all past and future launches from that site are listed. To the right of our globe is a countdown to the next launch. It is programmed to go to the next launch in the data set automatically. In a few days after Lotos-S1's launch date has passed, the countdown will adjust to the launch after that. To the left of the globe are two text fields. By entering a start date and an end date in the corresponding field, you will update the globe to show pings from launches in that time period. Below the globe is a field containing all of the information about the next planned launch, including the mission's name and description, launch date/time, the rocket name and builder, and a link to google maps for directions to the site. The menu bar at the top allows you to look at a list of all future launches and all launch sites, with the launch sites having a search feature.

There were a few features we had to scrap because of time constraints or lack of data. The original plan included a neural net built with Tensorflow/Keras to predict the probability that a launch would get scrubbed based on weather forecasts. Unfortunately, we could not gather enough data on scrubbed launches to make an accurate prediction. We also failed to implement a search feature for specific rockets to be launched and pages for some of the more famous rockets (Falcon 9, Saturn V, etc.) with information about them and a picture. We also have the restriction of not being able to scrape information from every available source to create a more robust data set. However, we feel that the almost 1400 launches over the last almost 60 years is enough to show a proof of concept for this project.

We hope that this website may share our love of space and rockets with at least one person out there and get them just as addicted to watching rocket launches as we are.

Resources used:
Django Framework
Amazon AWS
Planetary.js

Github:

https://github.com/adamsong/SpaceApps2018

Website URL:

http://comelaunchwith.me/launches/