Cosmos

Space data is fascinating but spread across technical sources — NASA's archive, launch schedules, planetary datasets — each with its own format. The aim was to present it in one approachable, good-looking dashboard.

Three sections, three data sources, one consistent layout: Today in Space, Launches and Planets, reachable from a sidebar that collapses into a mobile menu.

A deep-space dark theme built with Tailwind CSS, with soft gradients and glowing accents. The featured launch gets a large card with its status, date, time, location and a countdown; the rest sit in a grid beneath.

On phones the sidebar slides in over an overlay and closes when you pick a section.

Plain JavaScript with async/await. NASA's APOD API powers Today in Space, with a date picker to load any day's picture and a link to the full-resolution image. The Space Devs' Launch Library 2 provides upcoming launches, and the Solar System OpenData API provides the planets, with links to Wikipedia for further reading.

Planet details, key facts and a side-by-side comparison of all eight planets are generated from the same data.

The challenge was handling three independent APIs that can each be slow, rate-limited or temporarily unavailable — NASA's public key in particular is rate-limited — without the whole dashboard breaking.

Each section manages its own loader, content and error panel, wrapped in try/catch, so one failing source never blanks the others; the picture section resets to a placeholder while loading and explains the problem if a request fails.

Tailwind's compiled CSS keeps the stylesheet small, and each section fetches its data independently so the first one appears without waiting for the rest.

A dashboard that makes real space data easy and enjoyable to explore, on desktop and mobile. It is live on GitHub Pages.