When I came across a dataset about spacewalks at the International Space Station, I knew I had to use it for Makeover Monday, especially because there were so many awesome vizzes from a previous NASA dataset about solar eclipses.
Here is the original viz:
What works well:
- It’s a simple stacked bar chart showing the number of spacewalks in different spacesuits
- Good use of color
- Concise title
- Sorted in chronological order
- Summaries for each nation are posted on either side
What could be improved:
- It would help to have more context: what does it mean to have a spacewalk in a Russian or US Spacesuit? I am pretty sure that not all of the astronauts included in the additional data are Russian or US Americans, so what are the rules behind the spacewalk nationality thing?
- The background image is very distracting
- What defines a spacewalk? Again, more context would be great
- The gridlines aren’t necessary
- The summary labels could have much larger numbers to make them stand out more
- Rotating the year labels to be horizontal would make them much easier to read
What I focused on:
- My intention was to visualize space buddies, those astronauts and cosmonauts who frequently went out on spacewalks together (sounds romantic, right?).
- I couldn’t figure it out in the time I had available this week so I settled for a simple bar chart and added a bit of detail for 2007.
- Space stuff fascinates me and there is a plethora of information online about all these missions, I might come back to this dataset at another point.
