The timeline is intended to visualise the history of space travel. I created it to help me better understand the space race and subsequent space station operations.
The graph shows missions, space travellers and the spacecraft within which they travelled. These three concepts together create a composite line on the graph: coloured bands represent spacecraft and the black lines the space travellers.
The horizontal axis is time with days being marked by gridlines. The time axis is not continuous as some days are very busy. These days are stretched to accomodate all of the activity creating the impression that more time has passed that was in fact the case. The vertical axis represents the distance travelled from earth. The coloured horizontal bands each represent a different orbit as follows starting at the bottom:
Use the scroll bar immediately beneath the graph image to scroll right through time.
Hovering the mouse over a spacecraft of space traveller will cause a name to appear immediately below the graph.
Clicking on a spacecraft or space traveller will open a small pannel below the graph. This panel represents the state of the mission at the chosen time and lists all of the spacecraft and space travellers involved and each link to the most relevant Wikipedia page. To the right of the panel are buttons that open the next or previous misson panel for each mission, spacecraft and space traveller.
The intended scope covers all missions to have reached at least 100km in altitude where:
The graph is not yet entirely satisfactory and is sometimes confusing. In particular as low Earth Orbit starts to fill up, it sometimes overflows into the other orbit bands.
Some of the space travellers depicted on the graph did not return from their missions. I've tried not to sensationalise these events in order to be respectful to those who have lost their lives. I have chosen to simply end the missions at the point where those involved where killed. This does mean that these events can be easily missed and I hope that the user will understand that I do not wish to trivialise them, this just seemed the most respectful thing to do.
Most of the data is drawn from Wikipedia, but some is from my own research. The concept of the graph and the graph itself is my own work, please do not reproduce without permission.