About

What is SpaceOrbitals?

SpaceOrbitals is an independent publication for people who care about space — from the orbital mechanics to the gear. We cover three perspectives, often in the same week:

The publication launched in March 2026 as a one-author project, grew to a four-person roster over the following three months, and serves a weekly newsletter of about 2,400 readers and a website that draws roughly 18,000 monthly visitors across launches, gear guides, and explainers. We are independently funded — no sponsor relationships, no paid placement, no gated sponsorships.

Who writes for us?

We have a small team of self-taught enthusiasts and amateur specialists. None of us hold industry positions in aerospace; our writing comes from years of independent reading, formal coursework, simulator work, and (for the gear side) hands-on use of the equipment we review. We disclose this clearly on every author page. Meet the team on the Authors page.

Each contributor maintains an author page with their background, reading list, and the kinds of stories they prefer to file. Three of our writers have formal STEM training at the graduate level; the fourth came to space journalism from a decade of amateur astronomy and a working telescope practice that shows up in our gear reviews.

Why these three voices?

Because space is a big topic. A reader who has spent a decade working through orbital mechanics textbooks reads it differently from someone setting up a backyard telescope, and both benefit from a news desk that filters the signal from the noise. We don't pretend to be all things to all readers — we just publish the kinds of pieces we'd want to read ourselves. That constraint — write for the audience we are, not the audience we think we should have — keeps our editorial decisions simple.

We are also explicit about what we will not cover. No sponsored placement, no paid reviews, no crypto/NFT coverage, no coverage of launches from operators who require embargo conditions we cannot honor, no coverage of binary trading or speculative investment advice dressed up as space news. Editorial independence is easier to maintain as a practice when you write it down, and we write it down.

How is this site built?

SpaceOrbitals is a small, independently run publication. The site is built with a custom static-site generator that converts Markdown content into a fast, mobile-friendly site hosted on a global CDN. No JavaScript frameworks, no tracking beyond standard analytics, no popups, no cookie banners beyond what the EU requires. Pages render in under a second on a 4G connection; the entire site weighs about 1.2 MB per page view including assets.

The build pipeline lives in this repo: a single Python script reads the content/ directory, transforms the front matter and Markdown body into HTML, and writes the result to the live site. Source content lives in Markdown so it can be diffed, audited, and edited without a CMS — every article on this site is a text file you can read if you know where to look. This matters more than it sounds: it means every claim is recoverable, every correction is permanent, every pricing change in a gear review is traceable.

How we pick what to write about

Our editorial process is unglamorous and we like it that way. Twice a month the four of us pick the next slate of stories from a maintained backlog; the criteria, in order, are:

  1. Is there a launch, mission, or industry development that materially affects what readers can do (buying gear, observing, investing) within 60 days?
  2. Is there a long-running topic (orbital debris, LEO economy, lunar landers) that has had a real update, not just an incremental rumor?
  3. Is there a gear question that one of us can answer from hands-on experience rather than spec-sheet restatement?
  4. Is there a "we should have written this months ago" gap in our archive?

Stories that don't clear any of those filters don't run. We routinely kill pitches we like the sound of because they don't survive the questions.

How corrections work

We disclose every meaningful correction. When we get something wrong — a wrong satellite, a mislabeled payload, a stale date on a launch — we update the article body, add a dated correction note at the top of the piece, and (for factual errors that affect a claim the reader was likely to act on) mention the correction in the next newsletter. The old text stays accessible via the Markdown history; the new text replaces it. Plain text archives of every revision are kept indefinitely.

If you spot a problem, email [email protected] with the URL and the issue. We read every reader message; about 12% of corrections on this site in the past six months came from readers, not from us.

How can I contact you?

Tips, corrections, partnership inquiries, or just to say hi: [email protected] — that inbox is read by a real person (one of the four editors rotates the duty), usually within 24 hours on weekdays. For sensitive tips, prefer that same email over public channels; we do not publish submission metadata.

Press & partnerships

For press inquiries or partnership opportunities, reach us at [email protected]. We do not currently accept guest posts or sponsored content; we may revisit this in the future if a reader-supported model becomes sustainable, but we are not moving from "no sponsors" until the math on member-only content is settled.

Author transparency

Every author page carries a clear disclosure of each contributor's actual background (self-taught, formal coursework, hobbyist practice). If you spot a claim on the site that sounds like a professional credential we can't actually back up, please let us know at [email protected] — we want to fix it. We'd rather correct a credential overstatement than have a reader trust a claim they shouldn't.

The same disclosure discipline applies to gear. Every product we recommend in a review has been held in one of our hands; the only exceptions (specific consumer telescopes we've used at star parties, not daily drivers) are flagged in the review text. We've declined roughly forty pieces of gear in the past six months because the equipment was borrowed too briefly to form a real opinion. "I haven't held this long enough to tell you anything useful" is a complete review.