I Built a SpaceX Launch Tracker in 50 Lines of Python (No API Key Needed)

Last month my kid asked me: "When is the next SpaceX rocket launching?" I checked 3 websites. Different dates. Different payload names. Confusing countdown timers. So I did what any developer would do — I built my own tracker. 50 lines. No API key. Free forever. The API Nobody Talks About The SpaceX REST API is completely free, requires no authentication, and returns beautifully structured JSON about every launch since 2006. No rate limits published (be reasonable). No signup. Just requests.get() and go. The Code import requests from datetime import datetime def get_next_launch (): r = requests . get ( " https://api.spacexdata.com/v5/launches/next " ) launch = r . json () name = launch [ " name " ] date = datetime . fromisoformat ( launch [ " date_utc " ]. replace ( " Z " , " +00:00 " )) days_until = ( date - datetime . now ( date . tzinfo )). days print ( f " Next Launch: { name } " ) print ( f " Date: { date . strftime ( " %B %d, %Y at %H : % M UTC " ) } " ) print ( f " { days_until