Editorial standards

Sourcing

Two kinds of thing get published here: what IGW saw and filmed itself, and what a named public source published. There is no third kind.

• IGW's own coverage is marked as IGW's, and IGW's footage is watermarked.

• Anything read from a public source is rendered at that source's precision and carries its own read time.

• Where a source is the issuing authority for a thing, that authority is the source used, even when a secondary source is easier to read. The FAA is the authority for a flight restriction; the City of Starbase is the authority for closing State Highway 4.

• News written by other publishers is presented as theirs, with their name and their publication time, and links out to them.

Verification

• A figure is published only if a source publishes it. Nothing is rounded up, interpolated or filled in to make a page look complete.

• Precision is never added. A launch known only to the month is shown to the month, and gets no countdown.

• Anything derived says that it is derived: a propagated orbital position, or a machine-readable interval built from a date a source wrote in words.

• Provenance is recorded in the page itself, in attributes that name the source, the state and the version of the code that wrote it. A stale value there is treated as a factual error, not a cosmetic one.

• A section that contradicts its own provenance record fails the standing audit and stops the build.

Corrections

When something published here is wrong, IGW fixes it and then says so. A correction is not a quiet edit: the log records what was shown, what was right, when it was published and when it was fixed.

Typos, layout changes and better wording are not corrections and are not logged. A change to something the site asserted as fact is.

Artificial intelligence

IGW uses AI-assisted tooling to build and maintain this site: to write and review code, to measure pages, and to draft text, under human direction and human review. Being straightforward about that is better than the alternative.

What that does not extend to matters more:

• No published figure comes from a model. Every number, time, altitude and boundary is read from a named source by code that does the reading. A model is never asked what a value is.

• No image or film published as IGW's coverage is generated. IGW's footage and photography are recorded in the field.

• AI is not used to write anything presented as first-hand observation.

Independence, conflicts and sponsorship

IGW is an independent company. It is not owned by, funded by or affiliated with any launch provider, space agency or government, and it films what it chooses to film.

IGW licenses its footage and photography and sells goods through its own shop. Neither buys coverage. Nothing on this site is written, filmed or ranked because someone paid for it, and if that ever changes for a particular piece, that piece will say so at the top of itself rather than in a policy page.

There is no advertising on this site. Google AdSense was removed on 4 September 2026 and nothing replaced it. Links to other publishers earn IGW nothing.

What the labels mean

Data on this site carries a label saying how it is known. The labels are not decoration and they are not interchangeable.

• Official. Published by the issuing authority for that thing, and reproduced as it was issued.

• IGW confirmed. IGW saw it, filmed it or verified it directly.

• Reported. A named publisher reported it and IGW is passing it on with the attribution. IGW has not independently confirmed it.

• Observed. Seen or measured from a public observation, including IGW's own, and not confirmed by the operator.

• Propagated. A position or track advanced from a published element set. An estimate, never telemetry.

• Calculated. Derived by IGW from published values by a stated method, such as a closure window resolved onto a time zone the source did not give.

• Developing. The situation is moving and the value on the page may change within minutes.

• Stale. The last successful read is older than the tolerance for that section, and what you are seeing is the previous snapshot.

• Unavailable. The source did not provide usable data. The affected area remains empty.

Who is responsible

IGW is a small company. The person responsible for what is published here is reachable through the contact page, and a correction is answered by a person rather than by a form.