Who Won the Space Race

Rawllings
3 min readSep 18, 2021

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An Analysis of the global trajectory of space missions since 1957.

Data source: nextspaceflight.com

Keys Issues

-Introduction(Space Race since 1957)

-The Success of the Global Space Race

-Who is Currently Winning The Race

-The cost over the Years

-Conclusion(What’s Happening now)

LIMITATIONS

This Data Set was sourced from nextspaceflight.com. It is Primarily third-party data. However, there is little doubt about the integrity of the data.

Some aspects such as the;

-Usefulness of each mission to each country are not equally taken into consideration for users to understand the country who actually made the most out of the race. The focus here is mainly on the number of actual missions for each country.

Introduction

The Space Race since 1953

What was(is) it?

The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between two Cold War adversaries, the Soviet Union (USSR), now Russia and the United States (USA), to achieve superior spaceflight capability. It had its origins in the ballistic missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations following World War II.

The Success of the Global Space missions

The Success!

The Global Space race has since much success throughout the years with about 4325 missions from 1953 to 2020 only 339 have been a failure. 3877 missions have been successful.Well done humanity!

Successful and failed space missions.

Who’s winning?

Who’s winning the space race.

The Space race was originally between two countries USA(The United States of America) and the USSR(Russia). Out of 4325 missions, Russia currently 1395 and the USA with 1344. Seems like Russia is winning so far.

Other Efforts

Out of 4325 missions, other countries such as France, India, China, Japan and Brazil etc. Have equally sent missions to space. This include a total of 1584.

The Cost Over the Years

Since 1957 the average cost of the race has significantly dropped.

What’s happening now

The space Race has shown a big success for all nations of the world. However the number of missions since 1976 have seen a steady decline. However since 2017 the rate has increase and this is very promising.

Missions Vs decades

Missions vs Decades

Conclusions

Russia currently wins the race However, the space effort really slowed down over the years but it’s recently picking up at a very promising rate possibly due to the recent developments in new spaceship technology other than cost reduction. The decline in the space efforts may have been as a result of the end of the cold war. However it’s current rise may be explained by the liberalization of the space economy, hence the innovation and incentive to explore space for money.

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