Growing up, my dad worked at the Kennedy Space Center, so it should be no surprise that I have always had an interest in space travel and exploration. This ArcGIS StoryMap highlights and explores data derived from astrophysicist Jonathan C McDowell’s website, Jonathan’s Space Report, and includes every attempted rocket launch to orbit around the world between 1957 and 2020.
The majority of the time I spent on this project was simply processing, formatting, researching, and supplementing Jonathan’s impressive dataset with the additional information I needed to create a suitable GIS layer capable of teasing out the specific story and visuals I wanted to show. A very boring process to describe, to be honest—so I’ll spare you the details—but nevertheless it was the most difficult and time consuming part of the project.
The second most time consuming part was researching and writing up a brief history of the thirty-six individual launch sites included in the story. Some places like Cape Canaveral or Baikonur have such a rich history that it was difficult to distill it all down into a mere 100 words, while other places have so little information available that it was challenging to write anything at all.
The StoryMap’s monochrome design was something I settled on after several more colorful iterations. This included an initial concept where the top of the StoryMap would be the nose of a rocket, and as you scrolled down, it would mimic panning down the body of a rocket until you reached the engines at the end of the story. I wasn’t able to get that concept to a place I was happy with, but I did carry over the idea of tall, vertically oriented graphics into the timeline/bar chart of total launches. I’m very pleased with the final monochrome look, however, which was inspired by some of the early computer displays you might have found during the height of the space race. It was both challenging and exciting to try and show everything with such a limited color palette of just full black or full white, with no grayscale gradients in between.
The graphics were all created using Inkscape, though the circular polar area charts started in p5.js. Each of the thirty-six rocket and vehicle silhouettes (and more that went unused) were made using the best side-profile diagram or image of the vehicle I could find. I tried to choose a rocket for each site that was noteworthy in some way, usually the most iconic or most prolific vehicle that launched there. The animated charts were made with Flourish, and it was a bit of a learning process getting them to fully adhere to the black and white theme.
The project was featured by the Esri StoryMaps team as one of the favorite community StoryMaps of 2021.
While the StoryMap can be enjoyed on mobile, it is best experienced on larger displays in full screen.