About this site
Tracking the missions that are actually going somewhere.
Low Earth Orbit — roughly 2,000 kilometers above the surface — is where most of what we launch ends up. Weather satellites, communications constellations, the International Space Station, thousands of commercial spacecraft. It is busy, useful, and though every rocket launch is amazing and very cool to watch - their missions have become increasingly routine. Rockets reach LEO the way cargo ships reach port.
Beyond that boundary, things get different. Distance becomes measured in millions of kilometers. Travel times stretch into months and years. There is no resupply, no rescue, and no margin for error. The missions that cross that line are the ones making first contact with new worlds, returning samples that have never touched Earth's atmosphere, and sending back images of places no human eye has ever seen directly.
That is the boundary Beyond LEO tracks. Not because LEO missions don't matter — they do — but because the missions past it are rarer, harder, and carrying questions that have never been answered before.
Beyond LEO is a mission tracking and editorial site. Every mission beyond Low Earth Orbit, whether its an active mission, a planned mission or a completed mission gets its own page. We give you the spacecraft details, current location, distance from Earth, and a running log of updates as discoveries and milestones are reported. The dashboard gives a single-screen view of everything currently flying, sorted by most recent activity.
The goal is to be useful to two kinds of readers at once. If you follow space news casually and want to know what's out there right now and why it matters, this is written for you. If you already know the difference between a flyby and an orbital insertion and want the specifics, the mission pages link out to primary sources — NASA mission pages, JPL updates, ESA briefings, and peer-reviewed findings — so the detail is always one click away.
The editorial approach is accuracy first. Distances are approximate and updated periodically. Mission status reflects the most recently confirmed reporting. Planned missions are only listed once a launch date is confirmed — no speculative timelines, no "expected sometime in the 2030s."
Mission information is drawn from NASA, ESA, JAXA, and other agency primary sources. Update headlines and summaries reference the original reporting — agency press releases, mission blogs, and published science results. Where a finding comes from a peer-reviewed paper, that paper is linked directly.
This is not an automated feed. Updates are researched and entered manually, which means there is a human editorial judgment applied to every entry — what is confirmed, what is preliminary, and what is still being analyzed. That also means updates happen on a realistic cadence rather than in real time. Missions are checked regularly; the dashboard reflects the current state of confirmed knowledge, not the latest unverified social media post from a mission team account.
Spacecraft currently operating beyond LEO — returning science, returning images, or maintaining contact with Earth from deep space.
Missions with confirmed launch dates and funded programs. No concept studies, no proposals, no wishful thinking.
Missions that have occured in the past and were launched beyond low earth orbit. Beginning back when it all started in the 1950s to current.