v3.5.0 — Automatic Data

The launch data no longer comes from each visitor's browser, and there is nothing to press to update it.

Launch Library allows roughly 15 requests an hour per caller. Every visitor calling it directly ran that out quickly, which caused the partial lists, the provider-feed warnings and the outright failures after a tab had been closed for a while.

A workflow now runs twice an hour, fetches every upcoming launch, and commits the result as plain JSON. The dashboard loads that from its own origin, so no visitor makes a launch API request and no one can be rate limited. Because it runs on a schedule instead of per visitor, it pages each feed until exhausted and retries a feed that fails, so the list is complete instead of partial.

The page refreshes itself every 30 minutes and when you return to a backgrounded tab. Both ends skip work when nothing changed: an unchanged file comes back as a 304 with no data transferred, and the workflow commits nothing when the data is identical.

Removed the Refresh data button and Reload live data. The hero now shows where the window stands, for example "Updated 6 minutes ago. Next update in 24 minutes".

Reloading the page no longer costs an API request. Before this, every reload spent two or three against a budget of fifteen an hour, so it was possible to be rate limited before finishing the first visit.

Fixes

• The dashboard showing NASA missions and nothing else. When the provider feed failed, the NASA feed was all that answered, and that got rendered as the full list and saved to the cache, so every later visit started NASA-only. A one-feed result is now never cached and never replaces a more complete list.

Demo data is now Debug data and lives at the bottom of the page next to the credits.

Built by DawsonCodes.