TERMS OF SERVICE
1. Overview & Non-Commercial License Grant
These terms govern your use of this website and of the Barycenter API, the ephemeris service operated by Wandering Astronaut LLC. Throughout this document, "Wandering Astronaut" refers to the company and "the API" refers to the Barycenter API.
Wandering Astronaut grants you a revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to access and use the Barycenter API free of charge solely for Non-Commercial Purposes, subject to the terms and rate limits outlined below.
2. Defining Non-Commercial vs. Commercial Use
Qualifying Non-Commercial Use (Free):
- Personal hobby projects and passion builds.
- Open-source software released under a permissive or copyleft licence (MIT, Apache 2.0, GPL, or similar) that is not itself monetized.
- Academic and classroom work, unfunded student projects, and educational workshops.
- Publicly accessible educational tools and portfolios where no fees, ads, or monetization models exist.
- Initial R&D and capability testing, by an organization below the commercial threshold, before deploying in a commercial environment.
Commercial Use (Paid License Required) — you must operate under a Commercial License if any of the following apply:
- Your organization generates over $50K in annual revenue, or has secured over $50K in capital funding.
- Your project is backed by an institutional grant, funded educational research, or is a government project.
- You integrate the API into proprietary, closed-source software that you distribute, sell, or operate as a service for third parties — including internal enterprise tools, mission operations dashboards, and aerospace contractor tooling.
Commercial Licensing: If your use case qualifies as commercial, you must obtain a Commercial API Key. Contact contact@wanderingastronaut.com to arrange a commercial subscription or custom deployment tier.
3. Fair Use, Rate Limits, and System Integrity
- Free Tier Rate Limits: Free accounts are subject to rolling token bucket and throughput limits. Wandering Astronaut reserves the right to throttle or suspend keys that bypass rate limits.
- Daily Request Allowance: Each tier carries a maximum number of API requests per day. Current allowances are published on the pricing page.
- Per-Request Sample Limit: Every ephemeris and rotation request is capped at a maximum number of samples, set by your tier. A request exceeding that cap is rejected with an HTTP 413 response identifying the minimum step size that would satisfy the limit. Current caps are published on the pricing page.
- Prohibited Behavior: You may not attempt to reverse-engineer API endpoints, systematically scrape and bulk-mirror underlying SPICE datasets, or resell access to the raw API responses.
- Account Sharing: Free API tokens are issued per individual developer or project and may not be pooled or redistributed across multiple unrelated organizations.
4. Attribution
For non-commercial public web deployments using Star-Taker or the Barycenter API, reasonable attribution is appreciated (e.g., "Ephemeris data powered by Wandering Astronaut" in the project footer or documentation).
5. Disclaimer of Warranties & Liability
The API and all ephemeris, orientation, and orbital state datasets are provided "AS IS" without warranties of any kind. Wandering Astronaut makes no guarantees regarding dataset uptime, precision, or availability.
Critical Systems Notice: The API is intended for visualization, modeling, and research. It is not certified for primary real-time flight navigation, critical orbital safety operations, or life-critical aerospace systems.
6. Termination & Policy Updates
Wandering Astronaut reserves the right to modify rate limits, update dataset bounds, or revoke API access for any key found to be in violation of these non-commercial terms.
