About

About this project

Zenith Burn is a website of interactive visualisations that compare spaceflight past and present. Its purpose is public education, so accuracy comes first.

• People in Space: everyone who has crossed the Kármán line.
• Missions: every crewed mission, with its crew, duration and sources.
• Programmes: individual programmes, starting with Artemis and Apollo.

The data covers crewed flights from 1961 to November 2026, including crews who are in space now.

Data sources

Every person and every mission lists its own sources, with the date each was checked. Select a row in either table to see them. The main sources are:

• Wikipedia
• Wikidata
• Spacefacts
• NASA publications, including Apollo by the Numbers (SP-2000-4029)

The site uses facts from these sources, not their text.

How the data is made

One AI system gathers the data from the sources above, and a second, independent one checks it. Automatic checks then test every file for structural problems, such as duplicate records, broken links between people and missions, and impossible dates. Values that can't be confirmed from a source are left blank rather than guessed.

Known problems are listed openly, and a first round of corrections was made in November 2026. Some values are still missing or approximate. Missing values show as "Unknown" rather than a guess. For example, the maximum altitude of some flights that docked with a space station may be the spacecraft's own orbit rather than the station's.

Definitions

• Been to space means crossing the Kármán line, at 100 km altitude. Orbital flights qualify. Suborbital flights qualify only if they reached at least 100 km. The 80 km line used in the United States is not used here.
• Failed launches are judged by the altitude they actually reached. Challenger (STS-51-L, 1986) broke up far below 100 km, so it isn't listed, and nor are the crew members for whom it was their only flight.
• Duration runs from launch to the spacecraft's landing, not how long a particular crew stayed in space.
• Nationality is current citizenship, or citizenship at death for people who have died. Nationality at final flight is citizenship on the day of that person's last launch.
• Age is calculated from the date of birth on the day you view the page.
• Mission outcomes: a success met its main goals, and the crew returned safely. A partial failure returned its crew safely but missed its main goal. An abort is a launch or ascent abort. A fatal mission is one on which crew died.

What we measure

To learn which pages are useful, this site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, from the company that hosts it. It counts page views and records which page was visited, the referring site, the browser, device type and country, and how fast the page loaded. It sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device and does not follow you across sites, so there is no cookie banner. We never see who you are.

Disclaimer

This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA or any space agency.

This site is owned and managed by X user @KyleMcloughlin.