FAQ
SpaceDew is a dashboard that tracks humanity's progress toward becoming a spacefaring civilization. It monitors 50 companies across 12 sectors of the space economy, each with a conviction score computed from the site's own feeds where they exist, the four sub-scores behind it, and the date of the inputs. SpaceDew is built for long-term believers in the multiplanetary thesis.
SpaceDew's one number for how far humanity has climbed toward living on Mars, on a 100-point scale, like the Doomsday Clock pointed the other way. It is the weight of the rungs already climbed on a published ladder of 28 milestones: the weights are editorial and open to argument, the statuses are dated, sourced facts, and the number moves only when a rung flips, a few times a year, with every move recorded on the scorecard. It is 34 today. Never 100 until Mars.
The Dew Pulse is the number of launches that have reached orbit, anywhere in the world, so far this calendar year, measured against the whole of the year before. It sits beside the Dew Point as the heartbeat under the ladder: the Dew Point says how far we have climbed and moves when a milestone falls; the Pulse says how fast the world is getting to orbit and climbs whenever something does, starting again at zero every January 1. It is counted from Launch Library and refreshed every six hours. Suborbital flights are not counted. The full counting rules are on the Methodology page, and the feed is public at spacedew.com/data/launches.json (field flown.thisYear.successes), so anyone can check it.
Yes. Everything on SpaceDew is free: every article, every score, every company page. There is no premium tier and no paywall. If you want to support the project, follow @boggleriley on X and share the pages you find useful.
No. SpaceDew is not financial advice and should not be treated as such. Nothing on this platform constitutes a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Always do your own research and consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions. SpaceDew is an educational and informational tool built for enthusiasts of the space economy.
Honestly, per surface. Stock quotes are real and refresh every 15 minutes during US market hours; the header shows how old the feed is while it is fresh and the quote date once it is not. File Zero stories publish from the research engine: a space story most mornings, the other desks about weekly. The Morning Dew brief is built each morning from the site's own feeds. The signal feed is curated by hand from dated, linked sources. Conviction scores are computed from a monthly snapshot of those feeds (each company page shows the four sub-scores, the evidence and the snapshot date); a company with nothing to measure keeps a reviewed editorial score and says so. Signals and velocity are editorial judgments, dated and recorded on the scorecard when they change.
File Zero is SpaceDew's declassified desk. It runs three kinds of story. Space comes from the agencies' own record of missions and programs. Unidentified comes from the government's files and testimony on unidentified anomalous phenomena. Revealed covers aircraft, spacecraft and missiles that were secret, or are newly announced, and are now on the record.
Why unidentified objects? Because "unidentified" has a track record. A history the CIA published in 1997 says that, by its officials' later estimates, more than half of the UFO reports of the late 1950s and the 1960s were sightings of its own U-2 and A-12 reconnaissance flights, and that the Air Force gave the public misleading explanations to protect the program. Researchers dispute that figure, and it is the CIA's, not ours. The F-117 stealth fighter flew for about seven years before the Air Force acknowledged it in November 1988. So one serious reading of an unexplained object is technology that has not been declassified yet, and that is a space and defense story.
What about the stranger claims? In 2023 a former intelligence officer testified under oath to a House committee about a program, which he said he had been told of, to recover craft of unknown origin. Senators of both parties proposed a law to open the government's records. In 2024 the Pentagon's office for these cases reported that it had found no evidence of such a program. File Zero reports each of those as what it is: who said it, where, and whether it was under oath. We do not claim to know the answer.
How a story is sourced. Every story starts from one of four kinds of official record and carries its label: Archive record, Sworn testimony, Congressional record or Agency release. The label says where the document comes from. It does not say the event in it happened. Most government files on this subject are reports from witnesses, so we write "an Air Force file from 1952 records that", not "this happened". A story with no such source does not run.
File Zero feeds no number on this site. The Dew Point moves only when a rung on the published ladder flips, the Dew Pulse counts launches that reached orbit, and a conviction score is computed from the Feed, insider filings, company fundamentals and the launch record. A File Zero story reaches a score only if it enters the Feed as a sourced signal, the way any other story would. The full rule is on the methodology page.
Polymaths are companies that operate across three or more of the 12 SpaceDew sectors. There are currently 7 Polymaths: SpaceX, Tesla, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Amazon, Redwire Space. Polymaths tend to have higher conviction scores because their cross-sector integration creates compounding advantages in a nascent industry.
SpaceDew tracks three civilization phases. Phase 1 (Earth Infrastructure) covers companies building the ground-based systems that enable expansion. Phase 2 (Orbital & Lunar) includes Moon operations, orbital stations, and the cislunar economy. Phase 3 (Mars & Deep Space) encompasses interplanetary transport and Mars settlement. Most companies currently operate in Phase 1, with several reaching into Phase 2.