Maven Space Mission Challenge

As part of one of the Maven Analytics challenges, the goal was to "share a single page data visualization that captures the awe of outer space through our history with space travel." Since there wasn't a traditional business problem tied to the dataset, I saw this as an opportunity to stretch my visual creativity and use of the features with Power BI.

The first step I took was analyzing the data through a series of pivot tables in Excel to create a question and help direct the approach for the visualization. I noticed some variables were significantly higher than their counterparts within each field. For example, the Cosmos-3M rocket had over 100 more successful missions than the Voskhod, and almost 300 more than several of the following rockets.

This led me to wonder if the highest numbers of success missions equated to the highest success rates. With this new question in mind, I primarily focused on the number of successful missions and percentages of successful missions from the total mission. Furthermore, I organized the counts and success rates by rocket and year. What I found is that there was not a direct correlation between number of successful missions and success rates. The only data point that appears in the top 5 rankings between both measures was the year 2018, holding 2nd place for number of successful missions (113) and 5th place for success rate (96.58%).

I incorporated a background related to the data, and matched the visualization colors to it. I also put time into aligning the modules in a clean manner and experimented with rounding the corners for a different look.