Space Atlas

How this atlas is made

Space Atlas is an independent guide to the American space program. It is not affiliated with NASA or with any company it describes.

The words

Most of what is written about the program already exists, in good prose, in public documents: NASA’s mission and reference pages, its history books, press kits and blogs; the audits of NASA’s Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office; reports of the Congressional Research Service; pages of NOAA, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Space Force. Works of the U.S. government are in the public domain, and the atlas uses their words closely — trimmed, reordered and joined into one narrative, with short connecting sentences where the originals do not meet.

Material from companies and the press is copyrighted. It is summarized in the atlas’s own words and credited, with direct quotation only where the exact words matter.

Every paragraph that rests on a source carries a small number. Hover over it to see the source; click it to jump to the full list at the end of the story. The source library collects every document the atlas uses, for readers who want the originals.

Dates and status

Each story says when it was last checked. The program changes quickly — launch dates move, contracts are restructured, budgets are proposed and rejected — so status claims are always dated, and the atlas separates what has been demonstrated from what is planned and what is only proposed. The current edition reflects the program as of October 1, 2026.

Photographs and film

Photographs and footage come from NASA’s Image and Video Library and other public-domain government collections, credited where they appear. Where only a company has pictures of its own hardware — a lunar lander’s cabin, a robotic lander on the Moon — the atlas uses images the company supplied to NASA for public release, credited to the company. No image in the atlas is generated by AI.

The 3D machines

Rockets and spacecraft that NASA has not published as 3D models — Falcon 9, Starship, the Space Launch System, Orion’s interior, New Glenn, Blue Moon and others — were built for the atlas from published dimensions and checked against photographs. They are faithful in proportion and in the parts a reader would look at, but they are illustrations, not engineering drawings: details that are not public are simplified.

Other models are NASA’s own public-domain 3D models and scans, including the Smithsonian’s scan of the Apollo 11 command module.

The Earth and Moon in the space map use NASA’s Blue Marble and Black Marble imagery (NASA Earth Observatory) and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s color and elevation maps (NASA Scientific Visualization Studio). Distances and sizes on the map are to scale.

Model credits