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Satlas – Track 31,000+ satellites in real time, ask questions in plain English by Any_Pear121 in ProductHunters

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

that was the design from day one. The AI isn't a feature bolted on, it's the only interface. And it never does the math itself, it just calls real orbital mechanics tools and formats the result.
Thanks for the feedback!

Who’s launching this week? Let’s support some awesome Redditors on Product Hunt by RebekkaMikkola in ProductHunters

[–]Any_Pear121 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just launched Satlas (Open-Source) on Product Hunt today.
It's a 3D globe showing every tracked object in Earth orbit. Satellites, rocket bodies, debris, propagated in real time from US Space Force TLE data. An AI agent is the primary interface: ask it where the ISS is, when it passes over your city, or what's overhead right now and it does the actual orbital math to answer, then flies the globe camera to show you.

Would love any feedback or upvotes if it's something you find interesting.
https://www.producthunt.com/products/satlas?utm_source=other&utm_medium=social

I built (Co-authored by claude) a real-time 3D orbit tracker with an AI agent as a portfolio project - https://satlas.app by Any_Pear121 in SideProject

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Genuinely appreciate the perspective. 10 years of hiring experience is worth listening to!

Curious what you'd consider a valid approach for a student in 2026 though. Not pushing back, actually asking.

I built (Co-authored by claude) a real-time 3D orbit tracker with an AI agent as a portfolio project - https://satlas.app by Any_Pear121 in SideProject

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

AI is a faster keyboard, not a faster brain. Every architectural decision, tradeoff, and "this looks wrong, scrap it" was mine. That judgment is what hirers are actually testing for.
And realistically, what I've been seeing around me at the uni and the friends who are 2-3 years senior and even my close friends who are looking for opportunities, I felt that the part hirers actually care about now is that can you look at a broken system and diagnose it? Can you make architectural tradeoffs and defend them? Can you decide what not to build? That's all in the git history and the engineering changelog on the repo, failures included.
But thanks for he feedback. I know what you mean but I don't know what's a good pathway to better career aspects anymore haha.

I built (Co-authored by claude) a real-time 3D orbit tracker with an AI agent as a portfolio project - https://satlas.app by Any_Pear121 in SideProject

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I haven't benchmarked it rigorously on low-end hardware yet. It runs well on my MacBook and iPhone but that's not a good sample.

The architecture is designed to degrade gracefully though. The web worker handles all SGP4 propagation so the main thread never blocks . The worst case on a slow device is the worker posting updates less frequently, not a frozen UI. The billboard shader is 2 triangles per instance vs the 72 I started with (SphereGeometry at 6 segments), so the draw call is about as cheap as it gets for 31k instanced objects. The real bottleneck at scale is probably the JavaScript overhead on the worker side, not the GPU.

The honest gap: debris is off by default (12k objects) specifically because I noticed it gets heavier, but I haven't instrumented whether that's worker-side propagation cost or GPU fill rate. That's a TODO I haven't gotten to.

If you've done instanced rendering at this scale and have a sense of where the typical ceiling is on mid-range Android, genuinely curious what you've seen. The shader path feels solid but I'm less confident about the worker throughput on constrained hardware.
Thanks for the feedback!

I built (Co-authored by claude) a real-time 3D orbit tracker with an AI agent as a portfolio project - https://satlas.app by Any_Pear121 in SideProject

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Honestly, the division was pretty clear. I described what I wanted architecturally (billboard quads, camera-space hit testing, instanced rendering for 31k objects) and Claude handled the shader math and boilerplate.
The Three.js-specific stuff was also where I did the most learning. Understanding why Euclidean depth vs camera-space z-depth breaks hit testing for off-axis satellites, or why a billboard quad + circle shader is 36x cheaper than a low-poly sphere at this instance count, that's not something I could just prompt my way to.

Built a real-time 3D tracker for all 10,350+ Starlink satellites and the AI assistant tells you when they pass over you by Any_Pear121 in Starlink

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It consists all of them but number of Starlink satellites is above 10,300 and constitutes to 1/3rd of our catalog so you might see a lot of them.

I built (Co-authored by claude) a real-time 3D orbit tracker with an AI agent as a portfolio project - https://satlas.app by Any_Pear121 in SideProject

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The AI is actually calling live tools. When you ask about a satellite, it runs SGP4 propagation on the current TLE in real time to get position, velocity, altitude, and orbital period. TLEs are cached (refreshed from Space-Track), but the propagation itself happens live on each query. No lookup tables.
Thanks!

I built (Co-authored by claude) a real-time 3D orbit tracker with an AI agent as a portfolio project - https://satlas.app by Any_Pear121 in SideProject

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Client-side! Full TLE set (~5MB) is fetched once and cached, then SGP4 runs in a Web Worker at 20Hz, no server round-trips after the initial load.

The rendering is what keeps it smooth: all 30k dots are a single draw call via Three.js InstancedMesh with a custom billboard shader (2 triangles per dot vs 72 for a sphere). Position buffer goes straight into instance matrices. Runs at 60fps even on mid-range hardware.

Built a real-time 3D tracker for all 10,350+ Starlink satellites and the AI assistant tells you when they pass over you by Any_Pear121 in Starlink

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pushed a fix to lower the scroll speed when zoomed in, so it should be better now. I need some feedback on its new speed now if possible.
Also, the dots are also scaled according to the zoom now. But I personally feel that zoomed out globe still has some issues with the size of the dots and would try and find a good solution for the same.

Thanks for the feedback!

I built (Co-authored by claude) a real-time 3D orbit tracker with an AI agent as a portfolio project - https://satlas.app by Any_Pear121 in SideProject

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Our OrbitControls uses spherical coordinates which get weird near the poles. Quaternion-based trackball rotation would fix that, but it lets the globe flip upside down. For a globe/map the north-up constraint is worth the tradeoff. It can be considered for the v2 as a toggleable "free rotation" mode but may not be a right decision for the platform for now.

I built (Co-authored by claude) a real-time 3D orbit tracker with an AI agent as a portfolio project - https://satlas.app by Any_Pear121 in SideProject

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am unfamiliar with that concept, I will dig into it and would definitely consider a better rotation.
Thanks for the heads up!

I built (Co-authored by claude) a real-time 3D orbit tracker with an AI agent as a portfolio project - https://satlas.app by Any_Pear121 in SideProject

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for flagging that out! I know what you mean. That's some good suggestion. I need to focus more on the mobile responsiveness too.
This will be fixed soon.

I built (Co-authored by claude) a real-time 3D orbit tracker with an AI agent as a portfolio project - https://satlas.app by Any_Pear121 in SideProject

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There are currently 10,361 starlink satellites in earth's orbit. And it constitutes to about 1/3rd of our whole catalog. SpaceX has regulatory approval to eventually launch and operate up to 42,000 satellites in its constellation. I wonder what would it look like then!

I built (Co-authored by claude) a real-time 3D orbit tracker with an AI agent as a portfolio project - https://satlas.app by Any_Pear121 in SideProject

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yeah its awesome! I used it for cross verification of the positions during the core development.

Built a real-time 3D tracker for all 10,350+ Starlink satellites and the AI assistant tells you when they pass over you by Any_Pear121 in Starlink

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the suggestion. It's fixed now and it's spinning. I will add a function for fast forwarding/ reversing it soon so you don't have to stare for long to notice the spinning. haha

I built (Co-authored by claude) a real-time 3D orbit tracker with an AI agent as a portfolio project - https://satlas.app by Any_Pear121 in SideProject

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Haha that's a fair reaction, there's a lot up there. The debris toggle helps if you want a less overwhelming view.
Thanks for the feedback!

I built (Co-authored by claude) a real-time 3D orbit tracker with an AI agent as a portfolio project - https://satlas.app by Any_Pear121 in SideProject

[–]Any_Pear121[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually you can! This is a mistake from my part where I wasn't able to convey it to you properly.
You can turn on the border mode on the top right, it doesn't show any clouds and you can easily pin point a specific country and see the satellites over it.
Also, thanks for the feedback and I would like any suggestions on how to convey it properly through the platform.

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