CelesTrak Orbit Data Portal

The front door to one of the longest-running orbital data holdings in existence. CelesTrak, the nonprofit operated by Dr. T.S. Kelso, concentrates everything it publishes behind one entry point: NORAD General Perturbations (GP) element sets including the Supplemental GP sets, the Online Satellite Catalog (SATCAT) with its Boxscore summaries, SOCRATES Plus conjunction assessment reports, Earth Orientation Parameters, space weather, GPS constellation notices, and special-event coverage of breakups and reentries.

The scale is the story. As of the August 2026 review the catalog held 70,355 objects — 19,894 payloads and 14,975 debris pieces per the Boxscore — with about 35,000 carrying current GP orbital elements, sorted into roughly 60 named interest groups: active geosynchronous, the GEO protected zone, Intelsat, SES, Eutelsat, Telesat, Starlink, OneWeb, Qianfan, Kuiper, Iridium NEXT, Orbcomm, GNSS constellations, weather satellites, cubesats and more. The ledger reaches back to Sputnik 1 on 1957-10-04, NORAD catalog number 2.

In Datadory's catalog of 1,744 datasets across 159 viable industries, this record scores 9/10 for quality and sits among 24 cataloged building-products datasets, cross-listed to aerospace & defense and cable & satellite. It is the orbital backbone of that set: transponder and channel directories tell you who beams what where, and this tells you where everything actually is — and where it has been since 1957.

Get a sample of this dataset

Two row shapes land in a delivery, because the portal holds two kinds of ledgers — orbital state and catalog identity:

# GP element set - one row per object per epoch (values pinned to real records)
OBJECT_NAME=ISS (ZARYA)    NORAD_CAT_ID=25544   CLASSIFICATION_TYPE=U
OBJECT_ID=1998-067A        EPOCH=2026-08-21T03:30:31.926240
INCLINATION=51.6331 deg    MEAN_MOTION=15.49544542 rev/day

# SATCAT - one row per object ever catalogued, back to 1957
NORAD_CAT_ID=1  SL-1 R/B    type=R/B  launched=1957-10-04  decayed=1957-12-01  owner=CIS
NORAD_CAT_ID=2  SPUTNIK 1   type=PAY  launched=1957-10-04  decayed=1958-01-03  period=96.1 min
NORAD_CAT_ID=3  SPUTNIK 2   type=PAY  launched=1957-11-03  decayed=1958-04-14  rcs=0.08 m^2

Catalog numbers 1 through 3 are the first three objects humanity ever put into orbit — a rocket body and two payloads, every one of them decayed within months. They sit in the same table as last week's Starlink deployment, which is precisely the point: the temporal-depth claim is not a marketing line, it is rows 1, 2 and 3.

The element-set block is the physics — six classical elements plus epoch place an object in space and time, and mean_motion alone sorts the population into low, medium and geosynchronous regimes. The catalog block is the biography: launch site, owner country, radar cross-section, and the decay date that closes an object's file when it comes down.

The portal is an umbrella, so schemas arrive per family rather than merged into one wide row. Datadory delivers them joined: catalog identity rides along with every element set, and conjunction reports key on the same NORAD_CAT_ID, so one identifier joins orbital state, biography and risk events:

• Identity — NORAD_CAT_ID (the catalog number), OBJECT_NAME and the international OBJECT_ID designator (1998-067A for the ISS) recur in every family.
• Element-set fields — EPOCH, INCLINATION, RA_OF_ASC_NODE, ECCENTRICITY, ARG_OF_PERICENTER, MEAN_ANOMALY, MEAN_MOTION with its derivatives, and the BSTAR drag term, defined per the OMM convention rather than guesswork.
• Catalog-lifecycle fields — OBJECT_TYPE (payload, rocket body, debris, unknown), OPS_STATUS_CODE, OWNER, LAUNCH_DATE, LAUNCH_SITE, DECAY_DATE, PERIOD, APOGEE, PERIGEE and RCS.

Auxiliary families — Earth Orientation Parameters, space-weather indices, GPS almanac and notice data — carry their own dictionaries and fold under additional fields on request rather than being promised in the base table. Ask for them with your sample and they arrive joined on the same object keys.

• Geography: Global by construction — every tracked Earth-orbiting object regardless of launching state or operator, with OWNER codes (US, CIS, PRC, IRID, SES, EUTE and others) letting you slice the population by country or organization without any extra join.
• Temporal: Current orbital state sits on top of a ledger reaching back to Sputnik 1 on 1957-10-04. Decay dates close out objects that have come down, so lifecycles are complete rather than truncated at the present.
• Granularity: Four record types under one roof — per-object-per-epoch element sets, one-row-per-object catalog records, conjunction event reports, and auxiliary orientation and space-weather series.

Scale follows from that grain. A headline of 70,355 objects sounds modest next to tabular business data, but the unit of analysis is the object-epoch pair, and objects aloft for decades carry thousands of observations each. The catalog-biography layer, meanwhile, is compact enough to load in one pass — the full SATCAT runs about 6.4 MB — which makes whole-history queries a single operation instead of a pagination project.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Name the fields and the cadence when you request the sample — pushed to storage, served over an endpoint, or synced straight into your database. Formats travel unchanged across channels: TLE and 3LE/2LE text, CCSDS OMM XML, KVN, JSON and CSV. The sample ships first either way, so you can check element sets against objects you already track before anything recurring starts. Changing cadence later is a settings conversation, not a re-integration.

An orbital umbrella earns its keep in specific jobs:

• Satellite operators and broadcast engineers — screen the GEO protected zone around their own slot neighborhoods and watch neighbors' station-keeping behaviour from the outside.
• Competitive intelligence and product teams — constellation deployment becomes data rather than press releases: count Starlink, OneWeb, Qianfan and Kuiper objects by named group and watch deployments and deorbit campaigns accumulate week over week.
• Investors and quants — launches and decays form activity series for aerospace supply chains and satcom capacity models, keyed to the same identifiers the rest of the catalog uses.
• Insurers and risk modelers — debris population, radar cross-sections and decay histories feed collision-exposure and reentry-risk work without standing up an SSA pipeline.
• Data scientists — a keyed, per-object corpus with decades of history suits propagation studies, anomaly detection and debris-growth forecasting.
• Journalists and academics — citable primary records under nonprofit custody, reaching back to the first artificial satellite, instead of third-party mirrors.

The common thread: everyone needs to know where things actually are, not where a filing says they should be.

Provenance note — the underlying catalog is maintained by Dr. T.S. Kelso's CelesTrak, a nonprofit whose mission statement commits it to making space data available to the community; Datadory adds the join layer and delivery, not the measurements.

Completeness note — object counts differ by scope, not contradiction: 70,355 catalogued in SATCAT, roughly 35,000 of those carrying current GP elements, 19,894 payloads plus 14,975 debris in the Boxscore. Quote the scope with the number.

Reading note — these are general perturbations mean element sets, fitted for the standard propagator rather than raw precision ephemerides, and the catalog number format changed on 2026-07-11 when object 100000 (“Saramago”) was assigned — legacy five-digit TLE form cannot represent newer objects, so six-digit-aware parsing stopped being optional.

Where to go next — pair the orbital backbone with Space-Track for the government-side view of the same objects, UCS Satellite Database for operator and payload attributes, N2YO for live tracking lookups, and SatIndex for the transponder layer riding on top. Ranked context lives on the best building products datasets and best cable & satellite datasets pages.