Every photograph on this site is a real, licensed image, and it is credited. Most credits sit under the image itself: launch-site and vehicle photographs carry their source and licence on the page where the photograph appears. This page covers the images that have nowhere of their own to sit — the photographs behind the site’s pages and the ones used in the orbital views.
Page backgrounds
Milky Way over Earth’s limb — the photograph behind the headline on the home page and on About. Taken from the International Space Station on 23 August 2025 (NASA image ISS073E0516005). Credit: NASA/JAXA. Public domain, as a work of the United States government. Source: NASA, “Milky Way Views”. Used cropped and resized, and darkened slightly so the text over it stays legible; the original is unaltered at the link above.
The orbital view on leg detail pages
Each leg detail page can draw the route as a rotating model of the Earth. The images it draws on are real photographs.
Earth surface — “Blue Marble: Next Generation + Topography and Bathymetry”, December 2004. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory / Reto Stöckli. Public domain, as a work of the United States government. Used resized and cut into tiles so the model can load them in parallel. The cloud-free version is deliberate: the model turns continuously and does not depict any particular day, so baking in one day’s cloud cover would misstate what it shows.
Star field — the same NASA/JAXA International Space Station photograph credited under Page backgrounds above, here as the backdrop behind the model rather than behind text.
The Sun — photographed by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, 19 August 2010. Credit: NASA / SDO / AIA. Public domain, as a work of the United States government. Archived on Wikimedia Commons. Used resized and cropped square. Not currently displayed: the Sun is hidden while the destination-orbit geometry is being tuned. It is credited here because the photograph is in place and returns with it.
Photographs credited where they appear
Vehicle and launch-site photographs are not listed here. Each one is credited under the image on the vehicle or launch-site page that shows it, which is the credit of record for that photograph. A vehicle with no properly licensed photograph is shown without one rather than with a substitute.
Original artwork
The diagrams on this site — the orbital schematic in the home page headline, the capacity gauge, the step and status marks — are original vector artwork drawn for CharterSpace.IO. They are not photographs and are not presented as any real vehicle, site or mission.
Licensing and corrections
Every image above is public domain or CC0, which means none of them legally requires a credit. We show one anyway, on the same principle the figures on a listing follow: it should always be possible to check where something came from. Sources are verified on the file’s own licence page before an image is used, not inherited from a site’s general reputation.
If you hold rights in an image on this site and think it is credited wrongly or used wrongly, tell us and we will correct or remove it.