The Spaceflight News API was created as a solution for my problem when I wanted to develop an app for Spaceflight News: many (great!) news sites with different APIs.

To make it easier for myself, I began a project that would aggregate metadata from those news sites and publish them through an API. Since there are others that might benefit from this API, I decided make the API publicly available.

There are great apps out on the internet, that are connected to services like https://thespacedevs.com. By making this API available to everyone, I hope to open new doors for the developers of these apps.

The documentation is generated from the code, and can be found at https://api.spaceflightnewsapi.net/v4/documentation.

In July 2020, Launch Library 2.0 was released, within the new The Space Devs API group. I've joined this group as a partner developer, and started finalizing SNAPI 2.0.

Version 2.0 of SNAPI is a rewrite of the entire API using Strapi as a backend, with custom endpoints written by me. SNAPI 2 sets the stage for new features to come and focuses on bringing the existing features to the new format.

In the Spring of 2021, Strapi announced that they would retire support for MongoDB. Since SNAPI was using MongoDB as the database, this had quite a big impact. Version 3 of the API is exactly the same as version 2 (in terms of the response), except the IDs. These changed from ObjectIDs (strings) to integers.

In 2023 SNAPI V4 launched, completely re-written in Python (Django) for various reasons. Using proven libraries, this version is focussed on long-term stability and maintainability.

Starting from version 2, we now have Launch Library 2 API integration. This way you can easily get news related to a specific launch. A nice to have if you want to have a "related news/launches" section in your app!

For a list of users, please visit the users page. On the profile page of TheSpaceDevs organisation, you'll also find a simple showcase of the API.