How to get to space

Hey, Ivan here 👋! I work on developing visualizations at Datawrapper.

A few days ago an orbital rocket was launched from mainland Europe for the very first time. The Spectrum rocket launched from Andøya Spaceport in Norway, but lost control after several seconds and crashed into the sea. Although unsuccessful, the launch attempt provided valuable data and the aerospace company behind the launch is hoping to continue its space rocket program on European soil.

Reading about this got me thinking — where are all the other orbital launch sites located around the world? And which sites have seen the most launches?

My colleagues already wrote weekly charts looking at objects from space falling down to Earth and objects from Earth that end up in our orbit. So to complete the cycle, let's take a look at the sites on Earth that launch the rockets that take the objects into space.

These launch sites are generally located as close to the equator as possible, as this takes optimum advantage of the Earth's substantial rotational speed. In this regard the Andøya Spaceport is an outlier — it's the northernmost stationary orbital launch site in the world!

Here are the steps I took to make this map:

• Used data from Space Stats.

• Wrote a script to aggregate data into the correct format for locator map markers.

• Wrote a script to generate mini column charts, which can be seen when hovering/tapping on the markers.

• Uploaded the markers using the Datawrapper API.

I hope you enjoyed exploring orbital launch sites around the world as much as I did. We'll see you next week!