Humans are going back to the Moon for the first time in 50+ years. I wanted to watch where the spacecraft is in real time, like you can track a flight on FlightRadar24. Couldn't find anything like that, so I built one over a weekend.
The Earth, Moon, and trajectory are all procedurally rendered. No stock images. The flight path follows NASA's published Artemis II mission profile.
Actual telemetry. Not a simulation.
The position you see on screen is computed from real trajectory data published by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL maintains the HORIZONS system, which is the same database professional astronomers and mission planners have used for decades to get precise ephemeris data for any object in the solar system. This tracker pulls Orion's state vectors directly from that API and interpolates the live position from them.
That means the spacecraft's current distance from Earth, velocity, and position in the 3D scene aren't guesses or pre-animated paths. They're derived from actual mission telemetry, updated continuously as the mission progresses. When the crew performs a burn or trajectory correction maneuver, the numbers reflect that.
A lot of "mission tracker" sites show a canned animation that plays out on a fixed schedule regardless of what's actually happening. This one doesn't. If Orion is 280,000 km from Earth right now, that's what the dashboard shows. Not an estimate, not a pre-coded flight plan.
Disclaimer
Not affiliated with NASA, CSA, or ESA. This is a fan project for educational and entertainment purposes. Trajectory data is based on NASA's public mission profile. For official info, visit nasa.gov/artemis-ii.