LeoLabs Space Platform: live LEO visualization and conjunction search

What it is

LeoLabs is a commercial space-situational-awareness company founded in 2016 in Menlo Park, California. It runs its own network of ground radars rather than relying on government catalogues: twelve radar facilities across seven sites, in Alaska, Texas and Arizona in the United States, in New Zealand, Costa Rica, Australia, Argentina and the Azores. Together they track more than 23,000 objects in low Earth orbit, down to about 10 cm, and feed a catalogue that the company sells to constellation operators, insurers and government agencies. In September 2026 LeoLabs also unveiled Scout, a mobile phased-array radar it now sells directly to allied governments.

The Space Platform visualization is the public face of that catalogue: a browser application that renders the tracked population in 3D around the Earth. It opens without an account; the deeper features (conjunction reports, alerts, collections, API access) sit behind a commercial licence.

What you can do with it

• Catalog search: find a satellite by name or NORAD id and see its current orbit, altitude and inclination; the view can be filtered to a constellation, which is the fastest way to see how Starlink's shells or OneWeb's twelve polar planes are actually laid out.
• Today's conjunctions: a list of the close approaches LeoLabs predicts for the day, with miss distance and probability of collision. It is the same conjunction analysis product operators pay for, shown at a coarser level.
• Launch tracking: newly launched objects are picked up by the radars within hours, before they appear in public element sets, which is useful for confirming a Starlink or Amazon Leo batch reached its parking orbit.
• Tracking and monitoring, collections: watchlists for a fleet, with alerting; commercial tier.

Who it is for

For an enterprise buyer or a reseller, LeoLabs is not an everyday tool, but it answers questions that come up in due diligence: how crowded is the shell a provider flies in, how often does a constellation manoeuvre, what happened to a satellite a customer read about. For integrators who advise on multi-orbit designs, it is the reference for space traffic management and debris risk. Analysts covering the LEO operators use it to sanity-check announcements against what is physically in orbit.

How to use it

1. Open the visualization and let the catalogue load (a few seconds on a laptop; the globe is WebGL).
2. Type a satellite name (for instance a Starlink or OneWeb designation) in Catalog Search, or pick a constellation to highlight its objects.
3. Open Today's Conjunctions and sort by miss distance to see the day's closest approaches; click one to see both objects and the time of closest approach.
4. For a fleet, create a collection and enable alerts; this is where the paid tier starts.

Limits

The free view shows positions and a subset of conjunction data; it does not expose LeoLabs' covariance or manoeuvre history, and it says nothing about the radio side of a constellation (beams, frequencies, capacity). For orbital element sets you can download and process yourself, use CelesTrak; for a lighter real-time map of Starlink specifically, satellitemap.space.

Related

Definitions: space situational awareness, collision avoidance manoeuvre, Kessler syndrome. Directories: LEO providers, Starlink providers, OneWeb providers.