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Open Notify

Where is the ISS right now? A beloved API in decline.

🔭 Science & SpaceHEALTHYchecked 7h ago
AUTH NONECORS ✓AGENT ✓HTTPS ✗COMMERCIAL ?

Open Notify reports the live position of the International Space Station and who is in space. A classroom classic for a decade — but it is a single volunteer-run box, HTTP-only, and our checks show error rates climbing for weeks. Status: DYING. We list honest replacements below; consider wheretheiss.at.

73HOW IT'S SCORED ⓘ
Docs ↗
Status badge · for your READMEshipapis health badge: 73 · healthy
Uptime history
71.6%90 days
65.0%30 days
241P50 · ms
4298P95 · ms
operationalpartialdownno data
Response time · last 48 checks
Fastest 51 ms, slowest 4297 ms, most recent 141 ms.
Live response samplecaptured by our last successful check
GET http://api.open-notify.org/iss-now.json

{
  "message": "success",
  "iss_position": {
    "latitude": "-12.4021",
    "longitude": "43.5591"
  },
  "timestamp": 1751595300
}
Call itcurl · fetch · python
curl "http://api.open-notify.org/iss-now.json"
const res = await fetch("http://api.open-notify.org/iss-now.json");
const data = await res.json();
console.log(data);
import requests

res = requests.get("http://api.open-notify.org/iss-now.json")
print(res.json())

BROWSER CALLS BLOCKED (NO CORS/HTTPS) — USE THE CURL SNIPPET

Endpoints · 2HealthyFULL DOCS ↗
Monitored path responding — GET /iss-now.json241 mschecked 7h ago
GET/iss-now.jsonPROBED

Where is the ISS right now? A beloved API in decline.

GET/iss-now.json?limit=5

Paginated variant with limit parameter.

Machine-readable spec

We probe a documented GET and expect 2xx JSON — full uptime and health score. Export includes every documented route below.

Response-shape history

Stable. No schema drift observed since monitoring began — the response shape has not changed under our checks.

Open Notify: common questions

Is Open Notify free to use?

Yes — Open Notify is a free science & space API. Free tier: Unlimited (volunteer-run). Whether the free tier allows commercial use is unclear — check the provider docs.

Does Open Notify need an API key?

No — Open Notify needs no API key or signup. You can call it straight away; rate limits still apply (Please be gentle).

Can I call Open Notify from the browser?

Not directly — Open Notify doesn't send browser-friendly CORS headers, so call it from a server or proxy instead. Copy the curl or Python snippet on this page to get started.

Is Open Notify up right now?

As of our last scheduled check, Open Notify is healthy with 71.6% uptime over 90 days and a 241 ms median response. We re-probe it every sweep — the status badge and uptime chart above always show the latest.