By using any service provided by The Space Devs, you agree to the following terms. These apply, but are not limited, to the data provided through the Launch Library 2 API and the Spaceflight News API.
You are free to use the data in any way, shape, or form, and share what you create with it. Please refrain from forwarding it without adding value. Due to the large amount of manual labor involved, we cannot however guarantee a 100% accuracy of all the information provided.
Attribution is not mandatory, but is encouraged and appreciated. It helps us avoid circular data sourcing and makes it easier to reach us in case changes are required.
The Space Devs (TSD) is a nonprofit managed by a group of space enthusiast developers and librarians working on APIs to improve public knowledge and accessibility of spaceflight information. It was created in 2020 by core staff members of Space Launch Now, the Spaceflight News API and the original Launch Library API with the following objectives:
- Maintain and promote the Launch Library 2 and Spaceflight News APIs.
- Integrate with third-party APIs and services (TSD partners).
- Unite its users into a community of space enthusiast developers (TSD users).
The Space Devs is not affiliated with any space agencies or spaceflight companies.
Registered in France, it is managed fully online by a core staff team of developers and librarians involved in the project foundation in 2020 and its predecessors as staff members of the original Launch Library and Space Launch Now APIs.
A crucial management goal is to ensure that the APIs are and remain financially sustainable in the long-term, while remaining free to use. This is what the original Launch Library API failed to achieve and the reason this goal is of utmost importance for Launch Library 2, and The Space Devs in general. It comes with implications on access rates explained in more details here.
As a nonprofit, The Space Devs is not a company aiming to make profit. Its only purpose is to provide up-to-date data through APIs accessible for free while also covering its expenses.
100% of its funding comes from the community through Patreon subscriptions and Paypal donations. The Patreon subscriptions are also a way to access the Launch Library 2 API at higher rates than at the free tier. More details here.
The Space Devs currently handles and provides two APIs first-hand:
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Launch Library 2 (LL2) : Launch Library 2 is a REST API for rocket launch data. As the official successor of the original Launch Library API, which it replaced in 2020, it keeps its core features whilst also including everything the broader Space Launch Now API had to offer. The result is a large database delivering a more complete experience for each rocket launch and space event. Since 2021, all orbital rocket launches since Sputnik-1 in 1957 are included in the database.
A complete list of features and documentation links are available on the TSD website here. A dedicated FAQ is available here.
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Spaceflight News API (SNAPI) : The Spaceflight News API is a REST API that provides space news articles, which are automatically detected. These are then manually linked to relevant Launch Library 2
launchandeventobjects, allowing for related-news sections on launch and event pages or view launch and view event links on news articles.A complete list of features and documentation links are available on the TSD website here. A dedicated FAQ is available here.
Two other APIs are provided by TSD partners :
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Launch Dashboard API (LDAPI) : The Launch Dashboard API is an Open Source REST API of rocket launch telemetry. All the data is acquired through optical character recognition (OCR) of launch webcasts. The data is then processed by a physics simulator, filtered to remove anomalies and annotated before becoming available to API requests.
More information about the API and can be found on the GitHub repository here.
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Flight Club API : The Flight Club API is a REST API providing access to flight club data and calculators.
You can find more information about Flight Club here and the API documentation here.
Both Launch Library 2 and the Spaceflight News API are free to use.
However, server costs still need to be covered by TSD. For this purpose and to avoid abuse, access to Launch Library 2, our most popular and therefore most expensive API, is limited to 15 calls per hour. During development, a development API is available with no rate limiting but stale data (more info here). If you want higher rates, to refresh data more often close to launches or to support a larger project, it is possible to increase this limit by using an API key (see how to acquire one here and how to use it here).
Whether you need higher rates than the free tier or not, we heavily encourage you to cache the output on your side and avoid having user clients query TSD APIs directly.
There are three founding partners of The Space Devs : Space Launch Now, Go4Liftoff, and the Spaceflight News API. The first two were the main actors of the foundation of The Space Devs when it was created to carry over the Launch Library torch. The third and final one, which was then already a close partner of the two others, became part of The Space Devs at its foundation by making SNAPI a TSD API.
Other TSD partners satisfy one or more of the following requirements:
- Provide an API or service that integrates LL2 and/or SNAPI IDs into their own data to allow for easy cross-linking.
- Provide a custom service to TSD built according to TSD-defined needs.
Current TSD partners are listed on the TSD website here.
To qualify as a potential TSD partner, you need to meet at least one of the requirements listed above.
If you think you do, please contact our staff to discuss a potential partnership.
Verified TSD users are services, projects or entities that actively use data provided by TSD APIs. They are listed on the users page of the TSD website here.
To be considered a verified TSD user and added to the users page of the TSD website
here, send a message with the required format in
the #users channel (see the
pinned message) of the
TSD Discord server, or contact our staff directly.
There are two main roles in the TSD team: developers maintain and improve the infrastructure of TSD APIs and services, while librarians maintain the data.
The core staff members of The Space Devs are developers and librarians part of the project since its foundation in 2020. They were all previously staff members of Space Launch Now or the original Launch Library API.
Other staff members are new librarians who have joined the project since 2020 to help with the ever-increasing workload associated with the data.
The TSD team usually sends proposals to people deemed to be a helpful addition to the team when a need for additional staff is felt. If you think you can fit a role and would like to join the TSD team, please contact our staff.
Note that the TSD team is not always looking for new staff members. So your application might not be considered for a long time.
There are two main ways to contact the TSD staff:
- On the Discord server.
- By email to support@thespacedevs.com.
Additionally, you can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.