Terms of Service

OrbitalWiki reconciles public satellite data into a searchable, source-backed catalog with a read-only developer API. The current sources are CelesTrak orbital elements, GCAT launch records by Jonathan McDowell, and Wikidata metadata. It is provided for research, discovery, software prototyping, and source review.

The Service is early-access software. Features, data, endpoints, and availability can change or be withdrawn at any time without notice. Treat everything you see as provisional, and verify anything important against the original sources.

OrbitalWiki is not a conjunction-assessment, collision-avoidance, maneuver-planning, or any other safety-of-life or operational system. You must not use it for spacecraft operations, collision avoidance, or any decision where inaccuracy could cause harm or loss. We provide no warranty of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any operational purpose.

Some features, including API keys, require an account. You must give accurate registration details, keep your password and API keys secret, and tell us promptly if you believe either has been exposed. You are responsible for everything done through your account or with your keys, including by anyone you give access to, whether or not you authorised it.

One account per person or organisation. If you need to separate environments, create multiple keys on the single account rather than multiple accounts; keys share the account’s quota by design. If your genuine use needs more capacity than the free tier allows, ask us or take a paid plan. We would much rather raise your limit than have you work around it.

You must meet the minimum age described in the Privacy Policy. If you use the Service for an employer, client, or other organisation, you confirm you are authorised to accept these Terms on its behalf.

You agree not to:

• use the Service for any unlawful purpose or in breach of any third-party rights;
• attempt to gain unauthorized access to our systems, data, or other users’ data;
• probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Service, or defeat any authentication or security measure, except with our prior written permission;
• interfere with the Service’s operation or degrade it for other users, including by denial-of-service, flooding, or deliberately expensive query patterns;
• scrape or redistribute the data in a way that breaks the upstream source terms below;
• resell, sublicense, or rent access to the Service, or use it to build or operate a substantially similar competing catalog or API, without a written agreement with us;
• upload or submit anything unlawful, infringing, deliberately misleading, or containing malware;
• misrepresent the data’s accuracy or imply our endorsement of your use.

If you submit content for review (such as a mission or a developer-showcase entry) or create public content (such as a published collection, saved query, or data story), you confirm you have the right to share it, that it is accurate to the best of your knowledge and properly sourced, and that it is not unlawful, misleading, or infringing. Submissions are not published until a person has reviewed them, and we may review, edit, decline, or remove any submission or public content at our discretion.

Plans carry a daily request quota and a per-second burst limit. Those limits are the price of free access: they exist so one heavy user cannot degrade the Service or exhaust the upstream sources we depend on. Reaching a limit returns HTTP 429; it is not an error to route around.

You must not take any step, alone or with others, designed to obtain more free capacity than your plan allows or to continue after a limit, suspension, or revocation. Without limiting the general rule, that includes:

• creating or using more than one account, including through additional, alternate, alias, relay, forwarded, plus-tagged, or disposable email addresses, to obtain additional quota;
• registering accounts for other people, or asking or paying others to register accounts, so their quota can be pooled for your use;
• sharing, selling, publishing, trading, or borrowing API keys, or using a key issued to anyone else;
• distributing requests across multiple accounts, keys, machines, IP addresses, or users to stay under a per-account or per-key limit while exceeding it in aggregate;
• using proxies, VPNs, residential proxy networks, cloud or hosting IP ranges, IP rotation, or similar techniques to evade per-IP controls or to disguise the origin of your requests;
• spoofing, clearing, randomising, or otherwise defeating the device or browser signals we use to detect repeat signups;
• automating account creation or key creation, or using scripts, bots, or headless browsers to register;
• retrying, looping, or re-issuing requests after a 429 in a way that keeps load on the Service rather than backing off;
• creating a new account after we have suspended, restricted, or terminated a previous one;
• using free-tier access for commercial products, paid services, client deliverables, or organisation workflows, which require a paid plan or a separate written agreement;
• systematically downloading, mirroring, or caching the catalog in order to rebuild a substantial part of it outside the Service, or to avoid metered access.

Ordinary, good-faith use is welcome, including caching responses sensibly, retrying with exponential backoff, and running a personal project alongside a work evaluation. If you are unsure whether something is allowed, ask before you build it.

To enforce these limits we record, at key creation, the IP address and a device fingerprint, together with per-key usage counts and rate-limit events, and we may compare those signals across accounts to identify one person operating several. This is described, with its legal basis, in the Privacy Policy.

Automated clients are allowed within your plan’s limits. If you run one, send a descriptive User-Agent that identifies your project and a way to reach you, honour HTTP 429 and any Retry-After header with real backoff, and prefer the API over scraping the HTML pages. Crawlers must respect robots.txt. We may block clients that ignore these expectations, even if they stay inside a numeric limit.

Where a breach is minor or looks accidental we will normally throttle first and contact you. For serious or repeated breaches, or where we reasonably believe there is a risk to the Service, our upstream sources, or other users, we may without prior notice revoke keys, reduce limits, suspend or terminate accounts, remove content, and refuse future signups. Where a suspension is capable of being resolved we will say what is needed to lift it.

You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time from your account settings. Termination does not affect any refund right described below, and the sections that by their nature should survive (intellectual property, disclaimers, liability, indemnity, governing law) survive it.

The Service carries no uptime commitment and no service-level agreement. We may change, suspend, or withdraw features, endpoints, response shapes, and limits, and we may take the Service down for maintenance. Where a change would break existing integrations we will try to give reasonable notice, but during the prototype phase you should not build anything you cannot afford to have break. Support is best-effort by email.

The underlying data comes from third-party sources that keep their own licenses and attribution requirements, including CelesTrak and GCAT. You are responsible for honoring those upstream terms, including any required attribution, whenever you reuse data obtained through OrbitalWiki. OrbitalWiki does not claim blanket redistribution rights for third-party data; our licence and paid plans cannot grant rights we do not hold.

The selection, arrangement, provenance model, and presentation of the catalog, together with the OrbitalWiki name and branding, belong to us or our licensors. The email address you submit remains yours; you grant us permission to process it only as described in the Privacy Policy. Content you submit or publish through the Service (missions, developer-showcase entries, collections, saved queries, or data stories) remains yours; you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide licence to store, review, display, and distribute it as part of the Service, and to keep aggregate or anonymised records of it.

If you send us feedback, bug reports, or suggestions, you allow us to use them without restriction or payment. We are not obliged to act on them, and doing so creates no obligation to you.

API access is read-only and requires an account API key unless we explicitly enable a temporary public prototype mode. Keys are account-scoped: multiple keys can separate local, staging, and production use, but they share the account’s daily quota and do not multiply capacity.

What each plan lets you do with the responses is as follows.

• Free. Personal, educational, research, evaluation, and non-commercial prototype use. Not for commercial products, paid services, client deliverables, or organization workflows.
• Builder. Commercial use inside your own product, service, or organization, including work you are paid for. You may show the data to your own users as part of what you have built. You may not hand the data on as data: no bulk redistribution, no reselling it, no republishing it as a dataset, feed, or API of your own.
• Business. Everything Builder allows, and you may additionally redistribute OrbitalWiki responses to third parties, including inside a dataset, feed, or API you operate. Attribution to OrbitalWiki is required wherever you do.
• Enterprise. Anything beyond the above is a separate written agreement.

None of this displaces the upstream sources. Redistribution still requires compliance with each upstream source’s own terms, and where they conflict with this section, they win: a paid plan is permission from us, and we cannot grant rights we do not hold (see section 10). Nothing here is a claim of ownership over the underlying facts. Free, Builder, and Business plans return HTTP 429 at the configured limit; they do not create automatic overage charges.

Paid plans, when available, are sold as recurring subscriptions. Unless the checkout page states otherwise, changes, renewals, cancellations, taxes, receipts, and payment processing are handled by Lemon Squeezy, our payment provider and merchant of record; your purchase of a paid plan is a transaction with Lemon Squeezy as the seller of record, subject to its terms. You can cancel at any time: cancellation stops future renewals and you keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for. If you are not satisfied, you may request a full refund within 14 days of your purchase; outside that window we do not provide prorated refunds for the unused part of a paid period unless required by law. During the prototype phase we may pause purchases, change packaging, suspend abusive usage, or revoke keys that bypass limits, security controls, or upstream source terms.

We may change plan pricing and included limits. For an existing paid subscription, a price increase takes effect at the next renewal after we have told you, and you can cancel before then. If we terminate a paid account for reasons other than your breach of these Terms, we will refund the unused part of the period you have already paid for.

The Service runs on third-party infrastructure, including hosting, database, email delivery, and payment providers listed in the Privacy Policy. Those providers act under their own terms, and an outage or change at any of them can affect the Service. Links to third-party sites are offered for convenience; we do not control or endorse them.

You confirm you are not located in, and will not use the Service on behalf of anyone located in, a country or territory subject to comprehensive EU or other applicable sanctions, and that you are not on an applicable restricted-party list. You must comply with applicable export control and sanctions law in your use of the Service and any data obtained through it.

To the extent permitted by law, and other than where you are acting as a consumer, you will cover our reasonable losses, damages, and costs arising from your breach of these Terms, your misuse of the Service, or content you submit or publish through it.

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement, to the fullest extent permitted by law. Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded under applicable law, including mandatory consumer rights.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, or consequential loss, or for any loss arising from your reliance on the data for operational or safety-critical decisions. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited under applicable law.

Where liability can be limited, our total liability for all claims relating to the Service in any twelve-month period is capped at the greater of the amount you paid us for the Service in that period and EUR 100. Free use of the Service is provided without charge, and our exposure for it is limited accordingly.

Our handling of personal data is described in the Privacy Policy, and our use of cookies in the Cookie Policy. By using the Service you acknowledge those documents.

We are not liable for failure or delay caused by something outside our reasonable control, including infrastructure or network outages, provider failures, changes to or withdrawal of an upstream data source, power or internet failure, industrial action, or acts of government.

If any provision is held unenforceable, it is limited or removed to the minimum extent needed and the rest stays in force. Not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them to a successor of the project, for example if OrbitalWiki is later operated by a company we form or is transferred as part of the business. These Terms, with the Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, and any licence terms shown for the data, are the entire agreement between us about the Service and replace earlier understandings. Nothing here creates a partnership, employment, or agency relationship, and no one other than you and us has rights under these Terms.

We may update these Terms as the prototype evolves. Material changes will be reflected by the date above, and where the change materially affects your rights we will make reasonable efforts to tell account holders by email or an in-product notice before it takes effect. Continued use after an update means you accept the revised Terms; if you do not accept them, stop using the Service and, for a paid plan, cancel before the change takes effect.

These Terms are governed by the laws of Belgium, where the OrbitalWiki operator is established, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. The courts of Belgium have jurisdiction, and any mandatory consumer-protection rights in your country of residence are unaffected: if you are a consumer resident in the EU, you may also bring proceedings in the courts of your country of residence.

Before starting formal proceedings, please contact us so we can try to resolve the matter directly. Most issues, including a suspended account, are faster to fix by email.

Questions about these Terms can be sent to hello@orbitalwiki.com.