Close-ups of Earth, the Sun and Mars. Space weather. Deeper mission coverage when the landings start. What is planned, what is not, and the one rule none of it is allowed to break.
Mars Deck works today. This is what is planned on top of it — written as plans, because that is what they are. Nothing below is a promise with a date on it.
The deck shows the system. The next step is being able to fly into it: zoom past the map and onto a single body.
Earth first, because half of it already exists — the sky view has carried an orthographic globe with a true day/night terminator since the beginning, waiting for someone to spin it. Then the Sun. Then Mars, when there is a reason to look at Mars every day.
All of it hand-drawn in our own visual language rather than wrapped in downloaded textures, because nothing here being a texture download is a large part of what makes it ours.
Solar activity is the one live feed that genuinely belongs on this deck. It is Sun content and Earth content simultaneously, it changes on a timescale where "live" means something, and it affects things this audience actually cares about — including every satellite in low orbit.
NOAA publishes it openly. That is the plan.
⚠️ Terrestrial weather is the one thing we will not build. It needs a live commercial feed, it is a different product, and it would not be ours.
When crewed missions to Mars begin in earnest, the deck becomes the obvious place to follow them — a transfer arc drawn on a live map is a far better answer to "where are they right now" than any press release.
That is a when, not an if we can be bothered. The engine already draws solved trajectories; a real mission is one more trajectory.
Every one of these adds something the deck does not currently need: a network connection.
So the rule, written down before any of it is built:
The map stays computed and works offline. Always.
Anything that fetches gets its own proxy on our server, caches to a flat file, and degrades to "last known, at this timestamp" when the upstream is down. A dead API must never be able to break the map.
That constraint is not a nice-to-have. It is the reason the deck loads instantly, the reason it cannot be rate-limited, and the reason it will still work in ten years when whatever we were fetching from has been retired.
We would rather ship less than break it.
Mars Deck computes every position on this page from orbital mechanics, live in your browser. Free, no ads, no account.
Open the deck →