About

SpaceXplorer is a study of 4,630 orbital launch attempts flown between 1957 and 2022. It asks how the rate, the reliability and the ownership of spaceflight changed across 65 years, and whether an unsupervised model can recover the eras of the space age from nothing but the names given to missions and rockets. The work follows the KDD process end to end, from selection through to interpretation, and every figure published here is generated from the notebook rather than transcribed by hand.

It was built by Renato Gusani as the final year project for a BSc (Hons) in Data Science at the School of Computing, National College of Ireland. The analysis is written in Python with pandas, plotly and gensim. The site is a static Jekyll build with no client side JavaScript beyond a single line that sets the year in the footer, and the charts are pre rendered SVG, so the whole thing loads in well under a second.