About this project

I got the idea for this project when I discovered my father's interest in watching space launches, and I was not aware that he finds astronomy interesting just the way I do.

This made me curious that are there any detailed outlets where people can refer to upcoming launches, then I found out that all of the content present on the internet is majorly published for the English speaking audience.

This was pretty shocking, knowing that India is the most populous country in the world, and there are so many students graduating as engineers each year, yet we do not have any project like this? Anyone could have come up with this idea because its not a *eureka* project, translation already exists, but no one utilized it to provide it yet?

As of now, I am earning nothing from this project (facing loss, ironically), this project is purely made out of the intent to diversify access to knowledge and make space related stuff more accessible to people, so that they can enjoy watching space launches just like I do :P

Tech stack of the project

The front end, backend and the scripting, all has been done in python. My initial idea was to scrape all the space agency sites, and display their data at one place, with the translated versions of the content. But, to my rescue, I discovered TheSpaceDevs, an API providing all the data I needed, at one place and in a clean format. (again, not sponsored... their data is free to access with a rate limit).

Then I spent atleast 2-3 months perfecting json parsing and getting a rough idea of how the pipeline would work. For translation, I found a great (VERY GREAT) open source tool released by IIT Madras, named IndicTrans2. And it was a tough journey setting it up, with the fact that I had no prior experience with ML and its related development env. It supports translation of 24 languages, and the backend script runs daily on my laptop to translate the content to 24 languages. (Painstakingly long because I dont have a dedicated GPU and I didn't bother enough to buy a dedicated vps for a script which runs once, daily). The fact that the translation runs "in-house" makes this project way cooler.

I also wrote a few public gists to save the torment others would face in setting up the tool.

Sorry I deviated from the title: Script: fetches API, saves a copy, sends it to the translation stack, the translation completes, then the launch object and its translations getting pushed to different mongo db collections (used mongodb for the first time, I love it.) The frontend is Flask, using Jinja templates and a little bit of JS to prettify the website.

Future expansion?

Probably.
The parent API has a LOT of endpoints to cover and its a task I cannot do alone while also managing other things.
If I get enough requests from people to get access to the data as an API service, also assuming that I have the financial/hardware capacity to do so, I definitely see myself doing that. Currently the translation stack runs on my laptop and my laptop turns into a desperate drone trying to fly with 1 propeller.

Team

Frontend developer - Kishlay Kisu
Backend developer - Kishlay Kisu
Scripting - Kishlay Kisu
UI design - Kishlay Kisu
Graphic Illustrations - Kishlay Kisu
Data - TheSpaceDevs API

(mic drop)