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Work · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to ISS in Real Time – 25 Years Aboard the International Space Station

Today my collaborator and I are releasing issinrealtime.org, a multimedia project that plays back every day onboard the ISS. Feedback welcomed. Here's an article that was just released about it: https://www.collectspace.com/news/news-102725a-iss-in-real-t... I also wrote a "making of" post about it here: https://benfeist.com/posts/iss-in-real-time/

ISS in Real Time is a multimedia project that recreates and plays back daily life aboard the International Space Station across its 25-year history. The site is designed for space enthusiasts, educators, and anyone… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1MD
  2. 2

    This is a little hobby project that I hope you enjoy. You can see where the International Space Station is now, with live HD video from NASA, on a realistic 3D globe. The positions of the sun and moon are also accurate, though distances aren't to scale. The clouds are also near-realtime; I span that out into a separate project at https://clouds.matteason.co.uk, where the cloud images I create from EUMETSAT data are freely available. I've got more features almost ready to go, like the ability to turn off all UI, toggleable clouds and turning off the day/night cycle I'd love for…

    2024 · iss.matteason.co.uk · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Send your video into space on a time capsule in a satellite

    2017 · its alternatives →

  4. 4IM

    I made this site using R3F (https://github.com/pmndrs/react-three-fiber), a React renderer for 3JS (https://threejs.org/). The celestial bodies are Three.JS meshes. I used loaders (namely 'useLoader' from R3F and 'GLTFLoader' from 3JS) to import 3D models, such as International Space Station. More on loading models in R3F: https://docs.pmnd.rs/react-three-fiber/tutorials/loading-mod... I've future plans for this side project. It would be great to hear from the HN community before diving into them. Enjoy! P.S: Getting an empty…

    2022 · spaceinbrowser.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    Spacetime▲240

    Help your distributed team coordinate across time zones 🌎

    2016 · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    A home for all space lovers.

    2020 · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Track the International Space Station location in realtime

    2022 · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Google Translate for engineers working with motion

    2017 · google.github.io · its alternatives →

  9. 9
    SatNow▲71

    Your one-stop app for tracking the ISS!

    2020 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Watch time unfold and witness 40 years of planetary change

    2021 · earth.google.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11GI

    Just for fun and self education, I've built this over a weekend to teach myself why orbits exist, not just show planets going around. Something that was never clearly explain to me in school. It opens with a guided tour that builds the idea up step by step: two bodies and the equal/opposite force, inertia (the Sun is removed and Earth just drifts straight), then "an orbit is falling and continuously missing," cosmic velocities with a little rocket, Voyager 1 & 2's real gravity assists (the clock runs the actual 1977–1989 dates so the planets orbit into their grand-tour alignment and the…

    Jun 2026 · qunabu.github.io · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Real-time ISS tracking, passes, and live space video

    Jun 2026 · zhongmeng-tech-web.web.app · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Look down on earth & listen to astronauts live from the ISS

    2016 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    🛰️🚀A list of awesome space-related packages and resources maintained by The Orbital Index - orbitalindex/awesome-space

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15
    Orbit▲83

    Fun, flexible, visual time tracking.

    2018 · its alternatives →

  16. 16
    Shuttle▲73

    Where space geeks hang out

    2021 · shuttle-lyart.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    International Space Station Tracker on an ESP32 CYD (Cheap Yellow Display) costing $20. Live update over Wifi, touchscreen, backlight power management. Cheap and interesting classroom STEM project. Fully open source.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18IB

    I built this because measuring my age in years felt boring—I wanted to see the kilometers. The first version only used Earth's orbital speed (~30km/s), but the number moved too slowly. To get the "existential dread" feeling, I switched to using the Milky Way's velocity relative to the CMB (~600km/s). The math takes some liberties (using scalar sum instead of vector) to make the speed feel "fast," but it gets the point across. Under the hood, it's a single HTML file with zero dependencies. No React, no build step. The main challenge was the canvas starfield—I had to pre-allocate the…

    Jan 2026 · cosmic-odometer.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    This is a service I've built to provide equirectangular cloud maps of the whole Earth, updated every 3 hours, for free. It's based on infrared and visible light data from EUMETSAT, processed to enhance the clouds and try to reduce the impact of surface temperatures on the final image. I built it because it's surprisingly hard to find these kinds of images in a format that's useful to developers and hobbyists. I was building a 3D ISS tracker and wanted to include live clouds but couldn't find anything good, so I got sidetracked, and here we are.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Yes, the urine tank on the International Space Station. In real time, I might add! This uses the official live telemetry stream from Lightstreamer, although – at least at the moment – it doesn't eg. check what the signal status is so telemetry might be down altogether and you'd never know. Maybe in v0.2. Native menu bar application, so it doesn't require running a copy of Chromium and Node to show you two emojis and a percentage. I got the idea for this when somebody linked to https://iss-mimic.github.io/Mimic/ joking about how we can see in real time how full the urine…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Track the ISS live — get notified when it flies over you

    Jun 2026 · spacehub-nu.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    A live connection with the International Space Station

    2015 · loworbit.co · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Live tracking of the International Space Station and its orbital neighbours, including the Cosmos 1408 debris.

    May 2026 · psand.net · its alternatives →

  24. 24WP

    This was my recent weekend project, aimed at teaching me JavaScript, a bit of HTML5, and (mostly) WebGL. The orbital data are from NASA JPL. I was inspired in part by this Flash app: http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/orrery_2011_bce.swf, but wanted to do something in 3D. Coming from the games-dev world, this is my first introduction to web coding. The UI is jquery. I mostly used http://learningwebgl.com/blog for the 3D stuff. Being WebGL, it will work mostly on Chrome, Firefox 4 Beta. Forget about IE. I needed to figure out how to render text to the WebGL canvas - I…

    2011 · solar-system-explorer.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →