Starting on June 12, 2025, the NASA Spot the Station website will no longer provide ISS sighting information, per a message recently sent out. This means no information on sighting opportunities provided on the website, nor will users subscribed via the website receive email or text notifications. Instead anyone interested in this kind of information will have to download the mobile app for iOS or Android.
Obviously this has people, like [Keith Cowing] over at Nasa Watch, rather disappointed, due to how the website has been this easy to use resource that anyone could access, even without access to a smart phone. Although the assumption is often made that everyone has their own personal iOS or Android powered glass slab with them, one can think of communal settings where an internet café is the sole form of internet access. There is also the consideration that for children a website like this would be much easier to access. They would now see this opportunity vanish.
With smart phone apps hardly a replacement for a website of this type, it’s easy to see how the app-ification of the WWW continues, at the cost of us users.
I didn’t even know this was a thing. I usually use the ISS Live Now app
Which may be why it’s discontinued, low traffic?
the iss and more: heavens-above.com
I have the app!
There’s still plenty of other websites that will spot the ISS and more, eg n2yo, heavens-above, isstracker, astroviewer etc.
Yes it’s a shame they’re closing their own website, but there’s plenty of other alternatives that are sufficiently well established and known.
This totally baffles me. I have often used the web site. Certainly the web site must be much less expensive than an app (for multiple platforms) to host and maintain!? Example of enshittification; why necessitate installation of an app?
The spot the station web site is incredibly helpful. Seeing the station passing overhead is deeply touching to most people. Humans in space, just a few hundred miles away, and you can often see them orbiting with your own eyes at sunrise or sunset.
Let’s ensure kids can’t look this information up from an official government site with their locked down enshittified school laptops.
” Seeing the station passing overhead is deeply touching to most people. ”
I wouldn’t use the word most. Most would we used for people that could care less that its overhead.
Could care less?
So they do care at least a little bit?
I was going to say the same thing saying someone could care less is frankly idiotic.
The use of “enshittification” twice makes the article just tripe and IMO unfit for publication in Hackaday.
NASA is being responsible for shutting down websites that are supported by taxpayer dollars IF those sites are no longer providing major value for the public OR if better resources are available from private sources OR existing products.
AI: Several starmap apps can show the International Space Station (ISS) in real-time, including Stellarium Mobile, NASA’s Spot the Station app, and Heavens-Above. These apps use your phone’s GPS to calculate sighting opportunities and some also offer augmented reality features to help you locate the ISS in the sky.
Educational Organizations wishing to utilize smartphones for starmap apps should consider requesting used/orphaned units from the community for repurposing… My grandson and I use 2 old Android devices to take outside for this purpose and while several years old, they work perfectly for this use as WiFi is all that is required to set them up.
“NASA is being [..]” more and more unimportant. Its best days are over.
International partners do start to loose faith and respect for NASA.
It’s just a matter of time until that agency folds.
Such actions as this one just show how small its horizon has become.
Does the heavens-above satellite tracking website rely on this NASA website as a data source? If not it can continue to function just as before and lets you easily type in your lat and long then get predictions of ISS passes in the next few weeks.
“everyone has their own personal iOS or Android powered glass slab with them,” … When I retire it will ‘rarely’ be with me. Not going to be a slave to the phone… Only reason I have one now is my company requires it (for on-call purposes), bought it, and is supporting it.
Sad to see sites disappear. But it happens. Got a lot of non-working bookmarks now.
Excellent and very wise desire.
But why you are ready to be a slave of online services and web browser? Install, say, gpredict on your computer with browser and you will get much more, with more information and in much better quality than on that NASA web page.
“gpredict”
There’s also PREDICT, which is still current and runs on MS-DOS, as well.
It’s in use by professionals, too.
https://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/predict.html
There are other websites that will give accurate real time information on ISS passes. Heavens-Above and N2YO are two of them. Even better if you’re just trying to avoid a mobile app is a free desktop program called Gpredict.
There is still https://www.heavens-above.com/ for all space stuff visibility prediction needs.
Relax, everyone! The computer NASA kludged together to provide ISS email updates will live on as spare parts for a Newark Air Traffic Control system.
Luckily there are other websites which can accomplish this simple task:
https://www.astroviewer.net/iss/en/observation.php
To those saying ‘relax there are other websites’. Where do you think those websites get their info from, wishing it into existence? Lets look at the bottom of Astroviewer for an example:
“Background image and orbital data by NASA”
So depending on how far the looting goes at NASA even the other sites may go dark.
Celestrak has 2-element info, too.
I do use STS Orbit + on MS-DOS to track ISS. Works like a charm.
(The computer also has ethernet and I’m also able to use a DOS FTP program to download new files.)
Before anyone screams “outdated!”, the classic program is somewhat sophisticated. It even was used in space.
Which other program can claim that? Also, it simulates mission control of the 90s.. :)
Hi, I think that the other space agencies have their sources, too. ESA, CSA, JAXA..
They all have a need to monitor orbits, kind of.
Also, there’s still CNSA/CMSA, NASA’s successor(s). ;)
What I think is sad is how NASA seemingly degrades/stagnates for years.
The agency merely is a shadow of its former self or so it seems.
Shutting down public information services like this hurts its reputation, no matter if it has much users or not. It’s about the principle.
You nolonger can take it serious, if even the most basic services are put on ice.
That’s if an agency or business has no landline, no fax or e-mail address.
It makes everything look unserious, unprofessional, untrustworthy.
In what form and from where is the originating raw data that provides the location pulled from? Or is it not needed anymore because of trajectory projections or something and just calculated because they are accurate?
Honest question.
The United States Air Force (now US Space Force, operating as the Combined Space Operations Center under US Space command) Collects most of the orbit data and makes it publicly available through Space-Track.org. Other organizations also track objects.
The TLEs, especially for low earth orbit, have a very limited useful lifetime: perturbations from Earth’s equatorial bulge and other mass distributions, plus the moon and sun all add up, compounded by the variable drag from our atmosphere that depends on the state of the sun. Some objects (ISS, Starlinks, many others) also actively control and modify their orbit, so a TLE is useless to predict anything after that.
Orbit predictions for LEO objects can be good for a week or more, but rapidly get worse from there. You can’t expect a month-old TLE to be accurate.
Thank you for the explanation. I’m trying to understand space-track.org’s role v.s. what spaceforce.mil folks manage.
But more precise in this case, my question to the populus is now: does the ISS, specifically, provide raw tracking in a way that is standardized for any and all who want to query it? Is NASA eliminating a service or is it eliminating purely an interface? I’m not sure where the ios and android apps get their data vs the NASA-Spot site.
To be more blunt, IDGAF about an interface. If free/accurate alternatives do exist in the www domain then who cares. I’m worried about access to RAW data being omitted or taken away or pay-walled. I think that is what others should be concerned about too.
To the author: the use case of someone in an internet cafe only having www and no mobile device is laughably weak. And if you are using a PC (OS agnostic) you are probably doing more productive things with that data than just viewing its location on a website.
The concern being web vs app is weak and a shallow concern. You should provide where to get the pull the raw data as an alternative to that site. That’s the hack-a-day way. Cater to those who can create with the raw data instead of passing along info and starting a modality conversation.
In my line of business, we download fresh TLEs regularly for the objects we need to track.
For orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
Good replacement: https://isstracker.pl/en
I have no idea how busy it is or was, I do know I had subscribed for years and starting a bunch of years ago they would say I had to renew and that process never worked, so I found a contact and they would manually add me. I am not sure if it was broken just for me, as the address I have them was a popular commercial one. It sort of reminds me of a place I worked where management thought it would be a great idea to get a couple of (unpaid..) summer interns to do some real world coding on things no one in the place wanted to be involved it. Of course they worked pretty well when it had keepers. It used a few off site resources that it got in under the free plans. Sadly and not surprisingly that market segment had a lot of shake out and the places they used went away or got transitioned into newer places as the old ones were taken off line. A few years down the road, without a keeper and without owning all the pieces those projects were in very unhappy shape and of course no one on the tech side had a clue about them. This sort of feels like that. It also feels like a rip off as getting the couple messages a month was all I ever asked of nasa and now they are stopping even that little bit of returning something to the tax payers. I got the phone app. It looks slick, but and it comes with a gigantic but, it is a phone app. I use my phone the one day every two weeks or so I have to drive someplace. I live in an area with very spotty cell service and the data service is even worse. And I tend to keep my phone in airplane mode to keep ad’s out of the one silly game I play on it. I am not real happy with this move.