An EDA on Space Missions since 1957

3 min readMar 20, 2021

Space exploration is the use of space technology to explore outer space. The physical exploration of space is carried out by unmanned robotic space probes and human spaceflight. Astronomers with telescopes also conduct space exploration. The early era of space exploration known as the “Space Race”, was dominated by the Soviet Union and the United States.

The launch of the first human-made object to orbit Earth, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1, on 4 October 1957, and the first Moon landing by the American Apollo 11 mission on 20 July 1969 are often taken as landmarks for this initial period. Milestones in this period include, the first living being in orbit in 1957, the first human spaceflight (Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1) in 1961, the first spacewalk (by Alexei Leonov) on 18 March 1965, the first automatic landing on another celestial body in 1966, and the launch of the first space station (Salyut 1) in 1971.

In this analysis, I would be producing interactive charts for data visualization and understanding on space missions since 1957.

I first import relevant industries in my notebook.

#importing required librariesimport pandas as pdimport numpy as npimport matplotlib.pyplot as pltimport seaborn as sns

Then I import the dataset, this dataset was scraped from https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/past/?page=1 and includes all the space missions since the beginning of Space Race (1957).

#importing datasetdata = pd.read_csv('Space_Corrected.csv')

I print the first five rows to get a view of my data.

I perform data preprocessing by dropping the first two columns and creating a new column ‘Datetime’ from the ‘Datum’ column by converting it to a datetime object. I also extracted the ‘Year’ column and the created the Country column from the ‘Location’.

#dropping the first two columnsdata= data.drop(['Unnamed: 0','Unnamed: 0.1'],axis=1)#convert the Datum column to a datetime objectdata['DateTime'] = pd.to_datetime(data['Datum'])# Extract the launch yeardata['Year'] = data['DateTime'].apply(lambda datetime: datetime.year)# Extract the country of launchdata["Country"] = data["Location"].apply(lambda location: location.split(", ")[-1])

General Information about the dataset is shown below

Using the seaborn countplot method and the plot method in pandas. The following visualizations were created.

The number of launches per year from 1957 to 2020. 1971,2020 and 1977 have been the years with the highest rocket launches with 119, 117 and 114 launches in these years.