Orbinauts publishes News: Articles on what happens in Earth orbit, on rocket flights from Earth and to the spacecraft sent beyond it. This page says who publishes them, how each one is sourced, reviewed and corrected, and how to report a mistake.
Who publishes News
Orbinauts is an independent site run by one engineer in Germany who spent 15 years in the space industry, as a software architect, verification manager and team lead on satellite programmes. That engineer is the editor of News.
Independence
Orbinauts is affiliated with no operator, agency or company it reports on.
The editor's past work in the space industry includes programmes News may report on. They hold no stake in any of them, and Articles about them follow the same sourcing and review as every other.
Sources
Every Article is written from primary sources: the operators' and agencies' own announcements, documents and data, and the public orbit catalogues. They are listed under the Article, under Sources. Where a fact comes from another outlet's reporting rather than from the party itself, the Article says whose report it is.
Where an Article gives a figure of its own, such as a satellite's height or the distance between two, it comes from the same public orbit records as the rest of the site and carries the same uncertainty, set out in How it works.
Pictures
Every Article opens with a picture, and its caption says what it is: a photograph or an operator's own image, credited to its author and linked to where it comes from; a Satellite's card from our map; a chart drawn from our own data; or an illustration, which its caption calls one.
Review
The editor reviews and approves every Article before it is published.
Corrections
When an Article stated a fact wrongly (a time, a figure, a name, a claim), it is corrected in place, in every language it is published in. A line at its foot, just above its sources, says when it was corrected and what changed, from what to what: “Corrected on” with the date and the time in UTC, one line for each Correction, oldest first. Its Updated date moves to the latest Correction.
A typo, a dead link replaced or a clearer wording is fixed without a line and moves no date. What happens after an Article is published (a launch that slips, a result that comes in) is no Correction: it goes into a new Article, and the published one stays as it was.
Contact
To report a mistake or ask about an Article, use the contact page or write to hello@orbinauts.com.