Standards
How we make our numbers
Last reviewed September 26, 2026
Every computed number on SpaceNexus, in one place: what it measures, how it is made, where the inputs come from and how often it changes. Where a feature has its own full method page, we link to it. If anything here does not match what you see on the site, that is an error: tell us and we will fix it.
Money never changes data
We sell advertising, sponsorships and labelled partner articles. None of it can change a score, ranking, tracker, data table, search order or fact-check.
- Every paid item is labelled in words before the content: Advertisement, Sponsored, Partner content, Featured, Presented by, or Paid employer post on SpaceNexus. The Enhanced listing (paid) label retired with the product on 7 October 2026 (none was ever sold), and nothing paid appears on a company profile.
- Stock pages, Markets Daily, rankings, report cards, the Moon tracker, monthly reports and charts are sponsor-free: nothing paid renders on them.
- Every paid or partner link carries rel="sponsored". Partner articles stay out of the news feed order, site search, RSS feeds, the news sitemap and every AI-drafted product.
- A test suite fails the build if a data module reads a paid table or field, if any list is ordered by a sponsor field, or if a paid surface is missing its label.
- Sources
- The rules live in one module that every paid surface imports.
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- Checked on every build by the guard tests.
Space Score
A 0 to 1000 composite score for space companies, built from five pillars of measured data.
- Five pillars and weights: Scale 30%, Government space demand 20%, Capital access 15%, Momentum 15%, Flight record 20%.
- Each metric becomes a percentile rank among the companies measured on it; a pillar is the mean of its metrics; the score is 10 times the weighted mean of the pillars that apply.
- Pillars that do not apply to a company are dropped and the weights re-normalised. A company is ranked only with data in at least two pillars covering at least half of its applicable weight.
- Scores from before 2026-09-23 (methodology v1) are never compared with current (v2) scores.
- Sources
- Company profiles, federal awards, funding rounds, job postings and the launch record in our own database.
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- Inputs recomputed at most daily; a snapshot is stored every day at 02:10 UTC.
Rankings: Space Score Top 25 and Fastest-Hiring
Dated editions: the quarterly Space Score Top 25 and the monthly fastest-hiring companies.
- Top 25: the 25 highest-scoring ranked companies, ties broken on data coverage and then name. The current quarter updates daily and freezes when the quarter ends.
- Fastest-hiring: the net change in open roles between each company's first and last daily snapshot in the month, for companies with at least 5 open roles at month end and at least 2 snapshots.
- Rank movement is shown only against a previous edition made under the same method.
- Sources
- Space Score snapshots and daily job-count snapshots.
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- Top 25 daily until the quarter closes; fastest-hiring once per month.
Pure-Play Index
The day's average move of listed space companies, with defense primes and diversified groups left out.
- Members: every tracked company with a ticker that is not defunct and has a daily move quoted in the last 4 days, minus companies classed as primes. Each listing gets one vote.
- The index is the equal-weighted mean of the members' daily percentage moves, rounded to two decimals. No number is shown with fewer than 5 members.
- On 24 September 2026 foreign listings were added and diversified aerospace groups removed; the page states the change.
- It is a close index: each US trading day, after the 4 pm New York close, the sync stores every member's move for that session, and every page dates the index by the session it describes (for example "Fri 25 Sep close"). It does not move during the session; between closes it shows the last close. A foreign listing counts by its own latest session.
- A listing whose exchange did not trade that day, or that stopped trading, keeps its earlier move with its earlier date instead of being counted again, so it drops out after 4 days.
- If two or more US sessions close without a new reading, the page says the index is out of date and our monitoring flags it.
- Sources
- Yahoo Finance quotes: each session's closing move, stored after the US close. (The prices on the space stocks page are delayed intraday quotes from the same source; the index is not.)
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- Weekdays at 21:30 UTC, after the US close.
Funding rounds and the funding tracker
Every private space funding round we can source, and the totals built from them.
- Rounds arrive four ways: a nightly sweep of SEC Form D filings; press-reported rounds read from our news feeds and company newsrooms; rounds a claimed company reports itself; and rounds an editor enters by hand.
- A press-reported round publishes on its own only when its deterministic confidence score is 0.75 or higher with nothing held; otherwise it waits for review, and a daily check reads each held round against its source.
- On the tracker, "Self-reported" means the company reported the round itself; other rounds show the source they cite. Neither label means we independently confirmed the round.
- Headline totals count completed private rounds into space companies only. IPOs, public offerings, secondaries, debt, grants and acquisitions are reported beside them as separate lines. Undisclosed amounts stay blank and are never estimated.
- Companies raising now are listed on their own page and never added to the totals. A quarter's edition freezes 4 days after the quarter closes and is only changed by a printed correction.
- On a listed company's profile (from 7 October 2026) the funding figure is "Raised privately before listing": the stated amounts on its private funding rounds dated before it listed. IPO and SPAC proceeds, offerings, debt (including convertible notes and SAFEs that did not convert into a priced round; notes that converted into a priced round count inside that round), tender offers and grants are not added in, and there is no figure until the listing date is recorded. For a company that is not listed (from 7 October 2026) the figure is "Raised privately": the stated amounts on all its published private funding rounds, with the same exclusions plus state capital, owner funding and acquisitions, and "No private round on record" when there is none. Profile figures count every company, including defense companies; the funding tracker's totals count space companies only.
- Sources
- SEC EDGAR Form D, publishers' reporting, company newsrooms, company self-reports and editor entry.
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- Form D nightly at 04:20 UTC; press reports hourly; newsrooms every 6 hours.
Launch schedule and outcomes
Every upcoming launch, its countdown, and how each flight ended.
- Every 15 minutes we read the upcoming launches and events from Launch Library 2 and update each launch by its Launch Library id.
- Outcomes (success, failure, partial failure) come from Launch Library 2's status for recent launches, read in the same run, because a launch leaves the upcoming feed at liftoff. The outcome is never taken from a model.
- An upcoming launch that disappears from the feed is marked scrubbed only after the outcome pass has run.
- Sources
- Launch Library 2 (The Space Devs).
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- Every 15 minutes.
Launch slips
A ledger of every time a tracked launch date moved, recorded as it happened.
- On every launch sync, if a launch's date moves by more than a minute, the old and new dates are written to the ledger before the old one is overwritten.
- Moves of one launch on the same UTC day are combined into one row. Positive sizes are slips later; negative sizes moved earlier.
- Each move is classified by how precisely both dates were known. A slip means both dates were known to the day or better and the launch moved a day or more later; a day or more earlier is a pull-in, and a move of under a day either way is an adjustment.
- A placeholder date (a launch listed only as "NET 2026" or "NET Q4") rolling to another placeholder, firming into a real date, or loosening back into one is recorded but never counted as a slip. Only real slips count toward delays and provider figures.
- Recording began on 29 August 2026. Launch Library 2 keeps no revision history, so earlier moves cannot be backfilled. Provider figures appear only after 25 real slips.
- Sources
- Our own record of Launch Library 2 date changes.
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- Every 15 minutes, with each launch sync.
Launch Cadence Index
Launches flown this year against the same date last year, by provider and country.
- Counts launches that flew (completed or failed, with a named rocket) from 1 January last year. Scrubs are not attempts.
- Both years are cut at the same UTC day. Success rate is full successes divided by attempts; a partial failure counts as an attempt but not a success.
- The full-year projection is the year-to-date count divided by the day of the year, times 365.
- Sources
- Launch Library 2 launch records in our database, backfilled to January 2025.
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- Recomputed at most hourly.
Jobs counts
The number of open space jobs and the employers behind them.
- Roles are read from employers' own public applicant-tracking boards (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday and others), from USAJOBS, and from roles posted on SpaceNexus directly.
- At defense primes and other mixed employers, only roles whose title names space work are kept.
- A posting closes when it is gone after a complete read of its board. A failed read never removes jobs; a board that keeps failing has its listings expired after 7 days.
- The headline counts active postings and the distinct companies behind them. The same company, title and location from a second source is skipped.
- Sources
- Employer applicant-tracking boards, USAJOBS and direct postings.
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- Daily: boards at 06:30 UTC, Workday boards at 06:50, USAJOBS at 07:05.
Hiring Index and hiring trends
How space hiring is moving, month by month and week by week.
- Each day at 07:45 UTC we store every company's count of active jobs, plus site-wide totals. History begins 13 August 2026.
- The monthly index reports active postings at month end, new postings dated in the month, and movers among companies with at least 5 open roles. A same-employer panel keeps coverage changes from moving the index.
- Hiring trends compare each company's latest count with its count about 30 days earlier, for companies with at least 5 active jobs. A company with no earlier count is left out rather than shown as zero.
- When a company's counting rule changes, its series restarts on that date.
- Sources
- Daily snapshots of our jobs data.
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- Snapshots daily; the index monthly.
Satellite passes and the satellite map
When the ISS and other satellites cross your sky, and whether you can see them.
- Orbital elements come from CelesTrak in OMM format (the old two-line format ran out of 5-digit catalogue numbers on 11 July 2026).
- Positions are propagated with SGP4 (satellite.js), the standard model the elements are made for, including the drag term. Checked against Heavens-Above for 31 visible ISS passes on 26 to 29 September 2026: start, highest point and end within 5 seconds and height within half a degree, except that our darkness rule can start a twilight pass a few minutes later than Heavens-Above does. Pass times are shown only a few days ahead, because they drift as the elements age.
- A pass counts as visible when, at some point while it is 10 degrees or more above your horizon, the Sun is at least 6 degrees below your horizon and the satellite is in sunlight (outside Earth's shadow). The whole pass is sampled, and the times and heights shown are for the part you can see. Brightness is estimated from distance and the angle of sunlight. Elements older than 30 days are treated as stale.
- Sources
- CelesTrak general-perturbations elements.
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- Elements cached up to 6 hours; pass alerts checked every 10 minutes.
Space weather and aurora
Kp index, solar wind, flare outlook and aurora forecast.
- Kp, real-time solar wind, the 3-day flare probability outlook and the aurora model come from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. The flare log adds NASA DONKI and GOES X-ray data.
- We store the NOAA data and show it as published; we do not model it ourselves.
- Sources
- NOAA SWPC, NASA DONKI, GOES.
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- NOAA data every 30 minutes; the flare log every 6 hours.
Race to the Moon tracker
Who leads on demonstrated lunar milestones: the United States or China.
- Two goals, a crewed landing and a permanent presence, each with an 8-rung ladder of milestones. Credit is the sum of rung levels, all weighted equally.
- A rung that needs several elements scores its weakest one. A lead of one full rung or more reads as a lead; less reads as level.
- There is no composite score out of 100. A separate projection uses each programme's own history of announced versus actual dates.
- Sources
- The SpaceNexus lunar mission database, with the evidence for each rung listed on the method page.
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- Revalidated hourly; the method version is printed on the tracker.
Promise Ledger
Dated public commitments about spaceflight by agencies, companies and executives, with the exact words, the primary source, the deadline and the outcome, scored by the same rules for everyone.
- An entry is a dated public commitment about spaceflight (a launch, first flight, landing, station, constellation deployment, crewed milestone or launch cadence) by a space agency, a company or a named executive.
- Every entry has the exact words, the date they were said, who said them and their role, and a link to the primary source: the speaker's own post, video (with a timestamp), release, filing or transcript. A paraphrase or a news report of what someone said is not enough; those candidates are left out.
- The same rules apply to every agency, company and person. Entries are listed by deadline, never by who made them or how they turned out.
- The date said is the date printed on the source. Posts on X and Telegram are dated in UTC. A dead page is linked through an archived copy of the same dated page.
- What is included:
- Each programme milestone enters the ledger at its earliest dated public commitment we can find in a primary source, for governments and companies alike. Later dated commitments for the same milestone are shown on that one entry as a revision chain, oldest first, rather than as separate entries.
- This first release is a selection, not a census. A short record is not a complete record: an organisation with few entries has not been checked less kindly, only less often. Verified entries are never dropped to balance the counts; balance comes from applying this rule to everyone.
- Statuses:
- Pending: the deadline has not passed.
- Met: it happened on or before the deadline.
- Met late: it happened after the deadline; the row says how many days after.
- Missed: the deadline passed without it, confirmed by a person against a source.
- Came due, not met (awaiting confirmation): set automatically the day after a pending deadline passes, until a person checks the outcome. It is counted on its own, never folded into missed.
- Revised: the date or the quantity was moved before it came due, by a qualifying revision. The revision is quoted from its own source, and the latest date in the chain is scored the same way as any other.
- Withdrawn: the goal was dropped publicly, or the programme was cancelled, with a source.
- Condition not met: the words named a specific, checkable external condition (for example, "following a successful flight") that did not happen. It is not counted as missed.
- Not scored (a ceiling, not a target): the words set a ceiling ("up to 100 flights"), so falling short of it is not scored as missed.
- Revisions:
- A revision counts if it comes from the speaker or, through an official dated channel, from the organisation they spoke for or a co-signatory. Undated pages dated only by an archive capture never qualify. A revision must be public before the deadline day.
- A launch scrub on the day is an outcome, not a revision: the launch is scored against the original date (met late when it lifts off later), as in the Launch Ledger's 24-hour rule.
- A later statement that repeats the date, or narrows it within the same period, is a restatement, not a revision: the original is still scored against its own date.
- For a revised entry, lateness is measured against the latest date in the chain, never against a superseded date.
- Deadlines:
- Each deadline is recorded as stated and normalised to the latest day the words allow, so every speaker gets the same benefit of the doubt.
- Close calls go to the speaker: where the words, the dates or the outcome can fairly be read two ways, we score the reading more favourable to the person or organisation that made the commitment. This applies to companies, agencies and governments alike.
- An exact date: that day (UTC).
- A month: its last day.
- A quarter: its last day, by the organisation's own fiscal calendar where it says fiscal (JAXA and ISRO fiscal years end on March 31).
- "First half" or "early" a year: June 30. "Second half", "late", "end of", "by" or "in" a year: December 31. "Mid" a year: September 30.
- A year ("in 2026", "by 2026", "around 2026", "2026"): December 31 of that year. A fiscal year: its last day by the organisation's own calendar (March 31 for JAXA and ISRO).
- A northern season: spring June 30, summer September 30, fall December 31.
- "In N months" or "in N years": the date said plus N, rounded up to the end of that month.
- A named launch window: the last day of the window as published by an authoritative source.
- "No earlier than" dates are targets: they are normalised the same way, marked NET on the row, and worded as a target.
- Wording is recorded as a commitment ("will"), a target ("targeting", "plan", "expect", "no earlier than") or a possibility ("as early as", "could"), and shown next to the status. All three are scored the same way.
- Conditions:
- Only a specific, checkable external condition counts as a condition. Standard readiness caveats ("pending completion of test, certification and readiness activities") are not conditions: those entries are scored like any other.
- What counts as met, by kind of claim:
- Launch: The named mission lifts off. A launch that lifts off counts even if the mission is later lost; the row says what happened.
- First flight: The vehicle makes its first lift-off attempt. The row says whether it reached its planned orbit or trajectory.
- Reaching orbit: The vehicle or spacecraft reaches orbit. A lift-off that does not reach orbit is not enough.
- Landing: The lander makes a soft landing on the body. A spacecraft lost before touchdown does not count; a landing in an unplanned attitude is described exactly.
- Crewed milestone: The stated crewed event happens with crew aboard (for example, crew launch or crew arrival, as the quote says).
- Station or module: The station or module lifts off.
- Constellation deployment: The stated number of satellites is launched or in orbit, as the quote says, by the operator's own count or Jonathan McDowell's.
- Service start: The operator announces that the stated service is available to customers.
- Launch cadence: The number of lift-offs in the stated period reaches the stated number, counted from an authoritative launch list.
- Each organisation and person page shows plain counts of its entries by status, with a legend. There is no grade, score, honesty rating or ranking, and pages are listed alphabetically.
- An organisation's counts include statements by its people. The counts use the status of each entry's original commitment; the latest date in its chain is shown beside it.
- Anyone can report an error or submit a dated commitment we have missed, with its primary source, through the correction form. Organisations and their representatives use the same form and the same standard of evidence.
- An organisation's own public response about an entry, dated and sourced, is shown on the entry.
- Confirmed changes to an entry's quote, date or outcome are listed on the corrections page with the date.
- No sponsor, advertiser or partner can add, remove, reorder, annotate or preview an entry. The pages carry no advertising or sponsored content, and a test fails the build if they do.
- Sources
- The speakers' own posts, videos, releases, filings and transcripts for the words; agency and company releases or established space news outlets for the outcomes. Each row links both.
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- Statuses are re-checked by hand against sources; the page is rebuilt hourly so a deadline that passes shows as come due the next day.
Recurring releases
Named, dated data releases on a fixed calendar.
- Series: Most Active Space Investors (quarterly), Launch Cadence and Slip Report (monthly), Supply-Chain Concentration (quarterly), Hiring Index (monthly), Space Score Top 25 (quarterly), Federal Space Awards (quarterly) and Space Insider Activity (monthly).
- A release never publishes an unfinished period, except the Top 25, which updates daily until its quarter closes. Editions computed after the fact are labelled as such.
- Releases are computed from our database. No model writes them.
- Sources
- Our own funding, launch, supply-chain, jobs, award and filing data.
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- Checked daily at 05:10 UTC; each series publishes on its own calendar.
AI-drafted content, and how it is labelled
Some analysis is drafted by AI. It is always labelled, and it never draws on paid content.
- AI insights carry the byline "SpaceNexus Desk" and the label "AI-drafted, fact-checked". A second model pass checks each draft against its sources; drafts with major problems are held for the editor.
- Mission debriefs are labelled AI-drafted. Their outcome comes from Launch Library 2, never from the model.
- The weekday morning email and the lunar weekly label their AI-drafted parts; the Friday email labels every piece SpaceNexus Desk or SpaceNexus Data. The morning email falls back to publishers' own headlines when its fact-check fails.
- Data releases, rankings and the Space Score are computed. No model writes them, and their byline says so.
- SpaceNexus Daily, the daily video briefing, is labelled "AI-generated briefing, AI voice" on its page and in its structured data. A model writes the script only from the day's SpaceNexus records; code checks every number, date and time against those records; two other models, one of them searching the web, try to disprove every claim. It publishes when every claim passes both, or when an editor reviews and approves the flagged items, which the page then says.
- Advertising, sponsor messages and partner articles are excluded from every AI input.
- Sources
- Anthropic Claude models, working from the news and data each piece cites.
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- AI insights are selected daily; other products follow their own schedules.
Curated assessments
A few pages are assessed by hand rather than computed, and say so.
- Company report cards are a curated dataset graded by hand; the page shows the quarter they were assessed.
- The sustainability scorecard grades operators by hand in five categories of 0 to 20 points from public records.
- Treat both as editorial judgement, not as measurements. They are separate from the Space Score.
- Sources
- Public filings and reports named on each page.
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- Updated by hand; each page carries its assessment date.
Corrections
When a number or a sentence is wrong, we fix it and say so, with a date.
- Anyone can report an error with the corrections form or the link on an article.
- Material corrections are listed with the date, what was wrong and what the page says now.
- Sources
- Reader reports and our own checks.
- Refresh
- As corrections are made.