SkyWalx: Padside
Credits
Updated 6 November 2026
Launch data
Launch times, status, windows, weather odds, boosters, landings, mission timelines and webcast links. thespacedevs.com. Their pictures, logos and mission patches are not shown.
The Sun
The Sun's place over the pad, after Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, as in NOAA's Solar Calculator. Worked out on your device.
The 3D launch area and the film
The rocket, the pad and the liftoff film are SkyWalx's own, built by script in Blender and rendered with Cycles. They are illustrations: true to a Falcon 9's proportions, with no logos, wordmarks, flags or livery, and not a survey of any real pad.
The sky and the light
The sky and the Sun's light are worked out from the air itself: Earth's air, haze and ozone over a round planet, with light scattered many times, after Sébastien Hillaire, A Scalable and Production Ready Sky and Atmosphere Rendering Technique (EGSR 2020), and Eric Bruneton, Precomputed Atmospheric Scattering (2008, 2017). Written by SkyWalx, on your device. The clouds and the pad's floodlights are illustrations, not the pad's weather or its real lights.
Names
SpaceX, Falcon 9, Starship and the names of pads, boosters, droneships and missions are named only as facts about a launch. SkyWalx is not connected with, or endorsed by, SpaceX, NASA, the US Space Force or The Space Devs.
Software
- three.js (MIT): the 3D drawing, its physical sky and its meshopt decoder.
- React and React Router (MIT), Vite (MIT), Tailwind CSS (MIT).
- Poppins, Karla and Old Standard TT (SIL Open Font License), served from this site.
- Blender (GPL): used to build the models and render the film; nothing of it is in this site.
- glTF-Transform (MIT): used to compress the 3D model.