Space Mission Control: A Zero-Backend Browser Suite for Sun-to-Satellite Space-Weather Situational Awareness

Abstract

Public space-weather and satellite-catalogue data are freely available, yet remain largely inaccessible to non-specialists: the telemetry is technical, the formats are brittle, and the operational meaning is rarely stated in plain language. This paper presents Space Mission Control, a suite of three self-contained, single-file web dashboards wrapped in a tab shell, which together reconstruct one causal chain — what the Sun is doing, what that does to the near-Earth space environment, and which orbiting objects feel the effect. Tab 1 monitors solar X-ray activity, NOAA R/S/G impact scales, and ten-channel NASA SDO imagery; Tab 2 converts live NOAA indices (Kp, F10.7, Dst, solar wind) into per-altitude-band orbital-drag impact through an empirical thermospheric-density model and a what-if calculator; Tab 3 propagates a deliberately sampled ~670-object CelesTrak catalogue with SGP4 on an interactive globe, including live three-dimensional proximity context around any selected object. All computation is client-side JavaScript; there is no backend, build step, account, or API key. We describe the architecture, the design principle of honest degradation under network blocking, practitioner lessons from migrating to CelesTrak's current gp.php API and rate-limit policy, and a case study of the August 8–15, 2026 geomagnetic-storm week. The suite is deployed as a static site and released under the MIT licence.