About

What this is built on

FAIRWAY is a conjunction-screening instrument for low Earth orbit, built on data that is free for anyone to access. It is a working tool and a design case study for the kind of decision interface NASA, JPL, and SpaceX teams use every day.

The idea

Orbit is a shared commons, and it is getting crowded. Operators now face the hold-or-move decision often: spend fuel and interrupt service to dodge, or hold and accept the pass. FAIRWAY treats that as a calm triage problem, not a cockpit emergency. Its signature element, the Clearance Caliper ?, renders the question literally: how much room is left against the line you care about.

Who it is for

Satellite operators and analysts who want a fast read on their fleet's close approaches, and journalists, educators, and the curious public who want to see the congestion of orbit honestly, without a paywall or an account.

Built on public data

Orbital elements come from CelesTrak, an independent nonprofit (501(c)(3)) that publishes General Perturbations data freely. FAIRWAY reads it in the modern OMM format ?, caches it, and screens in your browser rather than re-fetching, so it stays inside CelesTrak's resource limits. Frugality with a shared resource is part of the point. Space-Track and NASA's open APIs can enrich the picture as optional, clearly-cited additions, but the core tool is never gated behind them.

Honest by construction

Every figure traces to a real fetched value or a documented computation. Nothing is invented to fill a gap. Each value carries its source and the epoch of the data it came from, sample data is labelled, and the scope boundary stays visible: this screens geometry, it does not compute a probability of collision ?, and it takes no automated action. The honesty is structural, not a footnote.

Accessibility

FAIRWAY is built to WCAG 2.1 AA: legible contrast, full keyboard operation, visible focus, and motion that respects your reduced-motion setting. Risk is never carried by colour alone; it always reads by colour, icon, label, and position together. A public instrument should work for everyone who needs it.

How it runs

The marketing and reference pages are static HTML for speed and search engines; the live console and map run client-side, propagating orbits with SGP4 in a background thread. No server holds your queries, and no key is needed for the core CelesTrak path.

Attribution

Orbital data courtesy of CelesTrak. Coastline geometry from Natural Earth via the world-atlas dataset. Where Space-Track or NASA open APIs are used, they are cited in place.

Read how the screening works, or open the console.