I Built a Real-Time Space Debris Tracker in a Single HTML File

There are over 27,000 tracked objects orbiting Earth right now. Defunct satellites, spent rocket stages, and millions of fragments from collisions and anti-satellite tests — all hurtling through Low Earth Orbit at speeds of up to 7.8 km/s. A fleck of paint at that velocity hits with the force of a thrown brick. I wanted to visualise this. Not with a static infographic, but with a live, interactive tool that pulled real data, did real orbital maths, and let you click on individual objects and see exactly where they are right now. The result is Nano Debris — a fully self-contained space debris monitoring dashboard in a single index.html file. No framework, no build step, no backend. Just HTML, CSS, vanilla JavaScript, and one CDN library. This is the story of how it works, with a particular focus on the part that fascinated me most: teaching a web browser to do orbital mechanics. What Even Is a TLE? Before writing a line of code, I had to understand the data format the entire space track