Platform
For a candidate launch site and a target orbit, resolves exactly which launch azimuths reach it — real spherical trigonometry, not a rule of thumb — then screens the resolved corridor against known shipping lanes, air corridors, built-up land and ports, enriched with recent traffic density. Every signal drawn on the real site, every result exportable as a branded PDF report.
Exact spherical trigonometry
cos(i) = cos(lat) · sin(Az), solved for both azimuth roots within the site's permitted corridor — LEO against a target inclination, SSO derived from altitude through first-order J2 nodal precession, or GEO's near-equatorial case. When nothing in the corridor reaches it directly, the nearest achievable inclination and its plane-change delta-v penalty are reported instead of a flat no.
A target inclination generally has two azimuth solutions, not one — both resolved and checked against the site's actual permitted corridor, so a real direct-ascent option is never missed because only the first root was considered.
Not directly achievable still reports a number: a single-impulse upper-bound estimate for LEO, or a combined circularization-plus-plane-change burn at GTO apogee for GEO — against a custom launcher library's own LEO/SSO/GTO payload figures.
Structural safety screen
A live AIS vessel count only answers "is a ship there right now." The question that actually matters for siting is structural: does the resolved corridor cross a known shipping lane or air corridor at all. Every signal below is drawn on the real site, colour- and style-coded by severity so adjacent layers never blur together.
Global Major/Middle/Minor shipping-lane center-lines tested against the resolved ray — the primary maritime signal, with a best-effort live AIS vessel count alongside it as a secondary, supplementary note.
Live OpenAIP airspace data — CTR, TMA, ATZ and en-route Airway types together, so a site next to a major airport's own control zone is caught, not just the en-route corridors between navigation fixes.
The resolved ray sampled every 10 km against ESA WorldCover's own published land-cover classification — a structural "does this corridor cross built-up land" check, not a census figure.
Launch Site Explorer · results window, map legend and branded report, all in sync
Ports & recent traffic
A self-hosted PostGIS store — the NGA World Port Index, Global Fishing Watch's anchorage database and Marine Regions' territorial-waters boundaries — resolves the nearest port or anchorage to the corridor, closing the gap a global shipping-lane dataset alone leaves at port-level approach distances. Two dynamic layers enrich it further, each degrading cleanly when not configured rather than blocking the rest of the screen. SatView never bundles, sells or redistributes this third-party data itself — it only provides the means to connect to each source, on your own credentials where one is required.
Recent port calls and import/export volumes for the nearest matched port — a public, keyless data source, no account or key to configure.
Recent vessel-presence density — all vessel types, not just fishing — across the site's whole display corridor, from your own GFW account. A recent-history figure, not a live feed. Powered by Global Fishing Watch.
The same branded PDF export as the rest of the platform — a map snapshot, every site's full feasibility and safety-screen detail, and every shipping lane or nearby port listed individually, not just the worst case.
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