Spacex-api: Upcoming launches data source

[philipengberg]

Can I ask who is responsible for keeping the upcoming launch data up to date, and where we get this data from?

I'm primarily curious since the data of SpaceXNow seems to be much more complete 🤔

[jakewmeyer]

Handful of us work on it. The data comes from tweets, reddit posts, and the upcoming launch manifest on the r/SpaceX subreddit wiki.

Generally up to this point we've only added the ones with semi-hard dates, since the ones farther out change pretty often. I'm okay with adding the rest of the upcoming manifest, but not much data is available. The majority of the data isn't available until 3-5ish days out from the launch date.

Maybe we can have a cutoff date? Adding launches a year in advance? That would allow more launches to fill the upcoming list, while still keeping it reasonably up to date.

SpaceXNow has 22 upcoming launches, up to a year out. Not sure where Bradley is getting the missions patches from, might be making them himself. Mission patches generally aren't available until the week of the launch.

[jakewmeyer]

Another issue with adding launches far in advance is getting the proper date format correct. In order to have a valid date, we need to know the day at the very least.

[philipengberg]

Yeah, SpaceXNow seems to have the ability to just have NET October 2018 🤔 So you could either just add an optional new property like

"tentative_launch_date_utc": "2018-10-01T00:00:00.000Z"

but that wouldn't tell you the level of precision known, so you could also go all in with a micro object:

"launch_date": {
    "launch_date_unix": 1143239400,
    "launch_date_utc": "2018-10-01T00:00:00.000Z",
    "launch_date_local": "2018-10-01T00:00:00+12:00",
    "is_tentative": true,
    "tentative_max_precision": "hour"|"day"|"month"|"year" #optional
}

[jakewmeyer]

This works for me. Adding this shortly 👍

[jakewmeyer]

@philipengberg Added to all launches. Hope this helps 👍

[philipengberg]

Wonderful 😍

[philipengberg]

So does this mean that we'll now try to expand the upcoming launch data? 🙂

[jakewmeyer]

Yes!

Another thing to consider is that a good amount of the future launches on the manifest only list the quarter or half the launch occurs in, not just the year.

[jakewmeyer]

The launch manifest usually has the most up to date information possible, so I've been writing a parser for this.

Once we have the launch added, it checks this page every 10 min, and updates times and dates accordingly. Should cut down on database maintenance levels.

[philipengberg]

Holy smokes that's awesome 😃Regarding the precision, we can just add quarter and half to

"tentative_max_precision": "hour"|"day"|"month"|"quarter"|"half"|"year"

[jakewmeyer]

excellent 👍

[jakewmeyer]

Update script also automatically sets the precision based on the times listed. Also planning on keeping all upcoming launches as tentative up until the moment of launch, since it could change at any time up to that point.

[philipengberg]

Good point 👍 Awesome job 💪

[jakewmeyer]

Upcoming launches for the next year have been added