Humanity's space missions (1957-2020)
Since 1957, different organisations around the world have launched hundreds of space missions, both within our solar system and beyond.
This visualization includes all the space missions since the beginning of Space Race (1957), and presents a detailed mission analysis, allowing you to track the activity volume and success rate of major space companies over time.
The number of missions from the US and the Soviet Union during the 1960s-1990s reveal the geo-political nature of space exploration.
The Bubble size represents the number of launches by that company in that year, with bigger bubble size corresponding to a larger number of launches.
There's a colour spectrum from Red to Blue, where Blue represents highest success rate (between 80-100%), and Red represents highest failure rates (between 0-20%).
This chart visualises the political atmosphere duirng the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union competed to show supremacy in technological innovation, through space missions and breakthrough discoveries.
Another common trend seen is that a lot of companies had very low success rates when they first started, but as they progressed, they saw steady success in space missions.