About
What ORBIT is, what you are actually buying, and how to get something taken down.
ORBIT is a satire. You are buying a logo placement on a website. You do not own, control, or have any relationship with any real spacecraft. Satellite names and orbital data are public information from Celestrak/NORAD. Not affiliated with SpaceX, NASA, ESA, or any operator. Satellite names are used nominatively to identify public catalog objects; no operator logos or marks appear here.
The premise: real satellites, paid simulated orbits. Your bid sets an altitude. Lower is bigger, brighter, ranked higher — and closer to reentry. Stop paying and physics resumes. Below 120 km your placement ends the way the real ground track says it ends: burned, cratered, or in the water. Craters are permanent. The whirlpool is not survivable forever. Eight named launch sites sit on the same Earth as website placements — a pin on a real satellite photograph of the site, not the real pad, and never an operator mark. The rules are published in full below and never involve chance.
terms of placement
- · You are purchasing an advertising placement: a page, a flight record, and whatever ending it earns.
- · Placements are non-refundable and have a variable, physics-simulated display duration shown before payment.
- · A placement is not an asset, a security, or anything with resale value. There are no prizes, odds, or cash-outs.
- · Uploaded logos, names, links and epitaphs are reviewed before display and may be rejected with a refund.
- · Launch-window drag multipliers are printed on every affected price before you pay.
privacy
We store: your email (sign-in codes, receipts, the alerts you can mute per-kind from any mail footer), your placement content, public click counts, and rate-limit counters derived from IP addresses. Payments are processed by a merchant of record; card details never touch this site. No ad trackers.
abuse · dmca · contact
Something on the board that shouldn't be? Rights holder with a takedown? Write orbit@barney.so. Placements violating the review rules are removed and refunded.
data & instruments
Orbital elements: CelesTrak (public TLE catalog). The CLASSIFIED tier — payloads the public catalogue withholds — uses elements from the amateur observer network (Seesat-L, published by Mike McCants); those positions are approximate and every card and dossier in that tier says so. Coastlines and place names: Natural Earth (public domain). Propagation: SGP4. The SIM layer — paid altitudes, ×500 time, the whirlpool — is ours, stamped wherever it appears.
The rules
Where the simulation follows reality it says so. Where it diverges it stamps SIM. Every number below is read from the code that runs it.
where the sim follows reality
- · Every satellite is real: positions propagate from the public Celestrak/NORAD catalog (SGP4). The CLASSIFIED tier is the exception in one respect — its elements come from amateur observers (Seesat-L / McCants), so its positions are approximate and it is stamped as such.
- · Inclination decides where you can crash. High-inclination tracks cross more land — that is why land exposure is printed before you pay.
- · Apparent brightness goes as 1/r². Lower really is brighter. This is literally why astronomers are angry.
- · Point Nemo (-48.88°, -123.39°) is the real spacecraft cemetery. Mir is down there.
- · GEO satellites at 35,786 km feel no atmosphere and never decay. Real physics, free immortality.
where it deliberately diverges — the sim layer
BID → ALTITUDE: alt = 1200 − 1020·ln(bid+1)/ln(20001) · $10 → 953 km · $200 → 654 km
DECAY: d(alt)/dt = −75·(180/alt)² km/day — deterministic, no dice. · $10 lives ≈ 119 d · $200 ≈ 38 d untended
REENTRY at 120 km. IMPACT = the real ground track at the stored reentry time. Computed when your orbit last changed, frozen, and resolved byte-for-byte. A late server can never move your crater. SIM RULE, not a prediction.
INTERVENTION WINDOW CLOSES T−10:00 — after that the ending is committed. Payments already in flight still count until resolution.
LAUNCH WINDOW: drag ×3 for 7 days when solar max is declared; bids below 350 km close. Printed on every price.
WHIRLPOOL: splashdowns enter ring 7; drift inward every 48 h; ring 0 is deletion.
FATE CLASS: stamped on the hull at auction listing, printed on the dossier, and unchangeable by any purchase. CRATERS follows the ending table below. LANDS survives to a permanent monument at the stored impact point (at sea if the track says sea). STAYS is a parked GEO slot: it does not reenter. The hull stays over Earth and does not take a flying seat. LANDS+TOW survives the same way, and if it comes down at sea a tug takes it to the nearest real port at 3.4 kn: the purchase covers 60% of the crossing, the rest is bought by the mile ($4 per 100 nm, and never more than $48 in total — no ocean is further than 2,800 nm from a port on our list). Running out is a hold, never a deletion — the hull floats, but the gyre widens the gap while it waits. Reaching port is recorded as PORTED — a permanent monument raised at that named port — and the hull returns to the block. The distance is the great circle from the splashdown pin to the nearest port on our list, fixed the moment she hits the water; nobody sets it by hand. Ashore, a LANDS+TOW hull is simply a monument where it stopped. Deterministic, disclosed before you bid — never a draw.
OWNERSHIP: a bid is a purchase. The first purchase of a listed hull claims it on the spot — the buyer's name, logo and link go on it (Earth, the ride, the biography) and the price sets the altitude. Any later purchase above the standing price takes the hull over the moment it lands: the name changes, the orbit and the clock do not, and nothing is refunded — what was paid bought the time it was theirs. The hull keeps a public ledger of every owner. Owners are public; the price is public.
THE BLOCK: a listing window of at least 6 h — closes are spaced an hour apart, so a fresh block runs 6 to 11 h and one window closes every hour after. A purchase in the final 5:00 keeps the lot on the block +5:00 (capped). When the window closes the hull leaves the front page under its owner's name and stays takeable from its own page until the flight ends.
SEASON BOARD: 2 d. Rank 1 is the lowest living hull claimed in the current window. The clock rolling drops last season's names off the list — those hulls keep flying on Earth until they burn.
the ending table — exhaustive, exactly as coded
| BURIAL | SHIELD | FLOATS | GROUND | ENDING |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | — | LAND | BURNED |
| — | — | — | WATER | BURNED |
| — | YES | — | LAND | CRATERED |
| — | YES | — | WATER | SANK |
| — | YES | YES | LAND | CRATERED |
| — | YES | YES | WATER | WHIRLPOOL |
| YES | — | — | LAND | BURIED |
| YES | — | — | WATER | BURIED |
Burial guarantees the seafloor beside Mir. No shield burns regardless of ground. Craters are permanent. Compute it yourself.
fate-class overrides — also exactly as coded
| CLASS | GROUND | ENDING |
|---|---|---|
| CRATERS | EITHER | the table above, unchanged |
| LANDS | LAND | LANDED · permanent monument at the impact point |
| LANDS | WATER | LANDED · permanent record, rests at sea |
| FLAGSHIP (LANDS) | EITHER | LANDED · always on land: if the track at reentry is over water the pin walks forward along the same track to the first coast it crosses — fixed and shown on the dossier from the moment it is claimed |
| LANDS + TOW | LAND | LANDED · monument where she stopped; no crossing |
| LANDS + TOW | WATER | TOWING → PORTED · she makes the port under tow and a permanent monument is raised at that named port; the hull then returns to the block. Out of miles is a hold, never an ending. |
| STAYS | NONE | PARKED · GEO does not reenter. The hull stays over Earth; the name on it is a 90-day slot. |