Space Mission Analysis

6 min readMar 22, 2021

Space missions started in1957 when the Soviet Union, officially known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) launched Sputnik-1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. Since then, different countries have had missions to the moon and missions that have gone beyond the limits of our solar system.

In this article, I have attempted to understand how the number of launches has moved over time for various countries, their success rate per country, the overall number of launches per year, current status of the rocket by countries.

Data Source

This dataset was scraped from Rocket Launch Manifest (nextspaceflight.com) and includes all the space missions from the beginning of Space Race (1957) to August 2020.

Data Preparation/Cleaning

The necessary libraries needed for this analysis were imported and the CSV file was read using pandas.

You can check out the code on GitHub

The first 5 rows:

There are 4324 rows and 7 columns in the data. Each row corresponds to a mission.
I renamed the columns with ambiguous names for easy identification and dropped columns that were redundant (columns 1 and 2).

The column details :

Company Name- Name of the space company
Location — Location of the launch
Date & Time — date and time of the launch
Rocket Name — Name of the rocket
Rocket Status — Current status of the rocket
Mission Cost — Cost of the mission in million $
Mission Status — Status of the mission

Using the .isnull() function, it was observed that the cost of the mission column has about 80% null values. This is relatively high and to avoid bias, I did not include this column in my analysis.

Next, I extracted the year from the date & time column using the pd.to_datetime function. This was done to enable me to visualize the trend of rocket launches over the years.

The Country was also extracted from the location column. The location column gives the location from which the rocket was launched.

DATA VISUALIZATION

1. Trend of launches over the years

We can see the quick increase from the beginning in 1957 into the ’70s. This was the period of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The conflict was based around the ideological and geopolitical struggle for global influence by the two powers which was expressed via indirect means such as the space race.

By the late ’70s, there’s a decline in space missions which was the period when the Apollo Lunar program ended and thus limited space exploration to low-earth orbit. From 1978 to 2012 there is a relatively flat descending period then a new raise since 2012.

2. Mission status

About 90% of all missions were successful with a failure rate of about 8%. Prelaunch failure was rare (0.1%) followed by partial failure. This high success rate is an indication that the space mission is here to stay. We shall further visualize the distribution of this number by country.

3. Rocket status

About 4,500 rockets have been launched since 1957 and among that only 19% is still active while a whopping 81% has been retired. We shall further see which countries currently have active missions

4. Top 10 countries

The top 10 countries in the space race by the number of launches carried out by them is given above. Russia takes the lead followed closely by the USA. However as will be seen in the next section, these countries (USA and Russia) are not currently leading.

5. Trend of launches by country

The beginning of space exploration is dominated by two blocs, the USA on one side and the Soviet Union represented by the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan on the other side. This corroborates with the earlier statement made about the cold war era. Although the Soviet Union was the first to launch a rocket, the USA led the first years of the race before they were overtaken by the Soviet Union up till the late 1980s. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1990 led to the low participation of Russia and Kazakhstan.

From the ’70s till date, we can see some countries participating in the space race. Countries such as:

Japan during the '70s
France during the '80s
China, in the middle '80s
India during the 2000 years
and most recently Iran

However, the number of countries involved in space missions is on the low side and as of August 2020, China is seen to take the lead in the number of launches.

6. Mission status by country

Most of the space missions launched in most of the countries are successful with few failures.

7. Rocket status by country

Observations:

1. Russia leads in the number of launches since space mission inception. However, out of its 1395 launches, only about 3% (36 rockets) are still active. 97% are retired and as seen in the trends over the years, fewer rockets are being launched by them. This begs the question, why?

2. the USA which follows closely behind has a total of 1344 launches with only 15%(208 rockets) of it being active.

3. However, China is seen to have the most number of active launches, which is 83% of its total launch(268). This corroborates with the graph of the trends over the years which shows China as the major player in space mission in recent times. Little wonder China is referred to as the Global technology leader

4. Other countries such as France, Japan, and India also have a significant number of active rockets when compared to their total space missions.