Shadowbroker: A Unified API for Tracking Everything That Flies
Ever needed to track an aircraft or satellite and found yourself jumping between different databases, APIs, and obscure government websites? It’s a common headache. What if you had a single, clean interface to query data on everything from commercial flights and private jets to classified spy satellites? That’s the itch Shadowbroker aims to scratch.
It’s a developer tool that abstracts away the complexity of various flight and space object tracking sources. Instead of learning a dozen different systems, you get one coherent API. Whether you're building a dashboard, analyzing patterns, or just satisfying your own curiosity, it consolidates the data pipeline.
What It Does
Shadowbroker is essentially an aggregation and normalization layer. It pulls data from public sources like ADS-B exchange for aircraft, Space-Track for satellites, and potentially other feeds, then serves it up through a unified GraphQL interface. You don't need to worry about where the data comes from; you just query for what you want—be it a tail number, a satellite catalog ID, or objects over a specific location.
Why It's Cool
The clever part is in the abstraction. Tracking data comes in wildly different formats and protocols. Shadowbroker handles the messy ingestion—parsing satellite TLEs, following aircraft state vectors, filtering for notable objects (like the infamous "doomsday plane" or Elon Musk's jet)—and gives you clean, typed objects back.
For developers, the GraphQL API is a huge win. You can request exactly the fields you need in a single query, combining data types that are normally siloed. Want to see all objects, both airborne and orbital, currently over the North Atlantic? That becomes a feasible query, not a multi-source data engineering task.
It’s also built with transparency and extensibility in mind. The code is there for you to see which sources are being tapped and how they’re being normalized. You can self-host it, add new data providers, or tailor it to focus on specific types of tracking that interest you.
How to Try It
The quickest way to see it in action is to check out the GitHub repository. The README provides setup instructions for running it locally.
- Clone the repo:
git clone https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker.git - Follow the setup guide to configure your environment and API keys for the upstream data sources.
- Spin up the service and point your GraphQL client (like Insomnia or GraphiQL) to the local endpoint.
The repo is the main hub for now, so head over there to get the latest on deployment, configuration, and the current schema.
Final Thoughts
As a concept, Shadowbroker is a powerful utility for developers working in logistics, data journalism, aerospace, or even building public-interest transparency tools. It turns a fragmented research task into a straightforward API integration. While responsibly using this data is important (remember, not all that flies wants to be tracked), the technical approach of creating a single pane of glass for disparate telemetry streams is genuinely useful. It’s the kind of project that simplifies a complex domain just enough to let you build something interesting on top of it.
Follow us for more interesting projects: @githubprojects
Repository: https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker