Watch the next launch, in 3D

This simulator picks the next real orbital launch from the launch tracker, builds the actual vehicle, and pins the launch site at the real pad's coordinates on a low-poly Earth with real coastlines, lit by the sun's real position at launch time (a night launch happens at night). The ascent follows real telemetry: Falcon 9 flights use per-second altitude, velocity and downrange data archived from actual webcasts, and other families use curves reconstructed from published webcast figures. The launch heading is computed from the mission's real target orbit, pad latitude and Earth's rotation, stages and fairing halves separate at the vehicle's real event times, a Falcon 9 first stage flies back to its droneship landing downrange, and after orbit insertion the vehicle keeps coasting around the planet. It counts down to the real liftoff time, and you can preview the ascent any time with the button above. Scroll (or pinch) to zoom, click and drag to orbit around the vehicle, double-click to reset the view, and try the True scale button to see the flight at the planet's real proportions. Once the first stage separates, a Follow booster button lets you ride along to the droneship landing. The little green flight engineer watching from the corner is our tribute to Kerbal Space Program; he gets nervous at Max-Q.

Honest note on "live": there is no free public source of real-time rocket telemetry, so the flight you see is a faithful reconstruction (real past-flight data, synced to the real countdown), not a mirror of the rocket's actual position. Event times are each family's typical values and can differ from a specific mission by a few seconds. Launch status (go, hold, scrub, success, failure) is polled from the tracker and can lag reality by minutes.