Rocket Launch Scraper (Launch Library 2)

Scrape upcoming and past rocket launches — rocket, provider, mission, orbit, launch pad, coordinates, country, NET date, launch window and status — as clean JSON, CSV or Excel. No API key, no login, no proxy required.

This Apify Actor pulls structured launch data from the public Launch Library 2 API by The Space Devs, the same dataset that powers most launch-tracking apps and space news sites. Every launch becomes one flat dataset row you can export straight into a spreadsheet, a database, a calendar feed or an LLM pipeline.

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What you get

Field	Description
id	Launch Library UUID for the launch
name	Full launch name, e.g. Falcon 9 Block 5 | NROL-95
status	Human status, e.g. Go for Launch, Launch Successful, To Be Determined
status_abbrev	Short status code, e.g. Go, Success, TBD
net	NET (No Earlier Than) launch datetime, ISO-8601 UTC
window_start / window_end	Launch window bounds, ISO-8601 UTC
provider	Launch service provider, e.g. SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Arianespace
provider_type	Commercial, Government, etc.
rocket	Rocket configuration full name, e.g. Falcon 9 Block 5, Starship V3
rocket_family	Rocket family, e.g. Falcon, Long March, Electron
mission	Mission name, e.g. Starlink Group 17-51
mission_type	Communications, Earth Science, Test Flight, …
mission_description	Mission summary (capped at 3,000 characters)
orbit	Target orbit, e.g. Low Earth Orbit, Sun-Synchronous Orbit, GTO
pad	Launch pad name, e.g. Space Launch Complex 40
pad_latitude / pad_longitude	Pad coordinates as floats — ready for mapping
location	Spaceport, e.g. Cape Canaveral SFS, FL, USA
country	Country code of the launch site, e.g. USA, CHN, NZL
webcast_live	Whether a live webcast is currently running
probability	Weather/launch probability in percent (when published)
fail_reason	Failure explanation for past launches that did not succeed
image	Rocket/mission image URL
source	Always launchlibrary
scraped_at	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp of the run

All fields are nullable — the upstream API leaves many of them empty for early-planning launches, and the Actor maps them to null instead of failing.

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Input

{
  "mode": "upcoming",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Input	Type	Default	Notes
mode	select — upcoming / previous	upcoming	upcoming = scheduled launches, soonest first. previous = launches that already happened, most recent first (including failures with fail_reason).
maxItems	integer (1–500)	50	Maximum launches to return. Fetched in pages of up to 100 with a polite delay between pages.

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Example output

{
  "id": "beac6ac1-97dd-4eb2-912c-8b4d4d15cd4e",
  "name": "Falcon 9 Block 5 | NROL-95",
  "status": "Go for Launch",
  "status_abbrev": "Go",
  "net": "2026-07-30T07:09:00+00:00",
  "window_start": "2026-07-30T07:09:00+00:00",
  "window_end": "2026-07-30T11:09:00+00:00",
  "provider": "SpaceX",
  "provider_type": "Commercial",
  "rocket": "Falcon 9 Block 5",
  "rocket_family": "Falcon",
  "mission": "NROL-95",
  "mission_type": "Government/Top Secret",
  "mission_description": "A classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office.",
  "orbit": "Low Earth Orbit",
  "pad": "Space Launch Complex 40",
  "pad_latitude": 28.56194122,
  "pad_longitude": -80.57735736,
  "location": "Cape Canaveral SFS, FL, USA",
  "country": "USA",
  "webcast_live": false,
  "probability": 80,
  "fail_reason": null,
  "image": "https://thespacedevs-prod.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/media/images/falcon2520925_image_20221115115934.jpeg",
  "source": "launchlibrary",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T01:52:32.465907+00:00"
}

---

Use cases

• Space news — auto-generate "launches this week" roundups, breaking-launch alerts and post-launch success/failure reports without hand-copying schedules.
• Launch calendars — feed net, window_start and window_end into an iCal feed, a Google Calendar sync or a countdown widget that stays accurate as dates slip.
• Aerospace research — build datasets on cadence per provider, per rocket family, per country or per orbit; analyse launch-failure rates over time with status and fail_reason.
• Apps — power a launch-tracker mobile app, a Discord/Slack bot, a Home Assistant dashboard or a map of active spaceports using pad_latitude / pad_longitude.

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Pricing

Roughly $0.5 per 1,000 launches on Apify's pay-per-event style compute. The Actor runs on 512 MB and one API request returns up to 100 launches, so typical runs finish in seconds and cost fractions of a cent.

Free-tier rate limits (read this)

The Launch Library 2 API is free and needs no key, but the anonymous tier is rate limited to roughly 15 requests per hour per IP. This Actor is built to stay inside that budget:

• page size is maxed out (100 launches per request) so fewer requests are needed,
• a polite delay is inserted between pages,
• HTTP 429 responses trigger exponential backoff and honour Retry-After.

Practical guidance: keep maxItems at 100 or below for routine runs, and don't schedule the Actor more often than every few minutes. If the limit is hit before any data arrives, the run fails loudly with a clear message so you can simply retry later.

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FAQ

Do I need an API key or account? No. The Launch Library 2 API is fully public.

How fresh is the data? The Space Devs update launch records continuously; net dates shift as providers reschedule, so re-run before publishing anything time-sensitive.

Why is orbit sometimes Unknown? Many Chinese and classified launches have no published target orbit until after liftoff. The field mirrors upstream honestly rather than guessing.

Can I get more than 500 launches? maxItems is capped at 500 to protect the free-tier quota. Run the Actor several times with different mode values, or space out runs, to build a larger archive.

Is scraping this legal? Yes — this is a public, documented, key-less API intended for third-party use. Please credit The Space Devs when you publish derived data.

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Related Actors

• Spaceflight News Scraper — space news articles, blogs and reports
• NASA NEO Scraper — near-Earth objects and close-approach data
• NASA Images Scraper — NASA image and video library
• OpenSky Flights Scraper — live aircraft positions and flight tracks

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Development

python -m src.main          # run locally
python tests/test_smoke.py  # offline smoke tests

Data source: Launch Library 2 by The Space Devs.