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Why is it so hard to go back to the moon?

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Project Brief


Objective: Highlight the key differences between Apollo and Artemis in terms of objectives, technology, costs, and timelines and support reader comprehension of the complexities outlined in the article while maintaining alignment with Scientific American's house style and editorial standards.


Scope: Using the article as a foundation of what to talk about, design, source data, and create visualizations. The design process includes confirming enough data to make visualizations, producing a concept sketch of what the visualizations could look like, a tight sketch of the visualizations using actual data, a final sketch, last edits, and then converting the print graphics to digital (desktop and mobile) formats. The entire process and decisions were documented for fact-checking purposes. 


Team: I found, cleaned, and analyzed the data, drafted sketches, and created all visualizations using primarily Adobe Illustrator with feedback from the graphics editors, Amanda Montanez and Jen Christiansen, and Jen making editorial and stylistic improvements to the visualization for publication. Kate Francis from Brown Bird Studio created the rocket spot illustrations, and the article was written by Sarah Scoles, edited by Clara Moskowitz. 


Data: 

Budget Data from the Planetary Society

Timeline and Mission details from Nasa.gov



Links: 

Scientific American Article

Print Graphics

full two-page spread in a magazine showing text on the far left, bar chart of budgets for the NASA Apollo and Artemis missions on the right column of the left page. The right page shows a timeline of missions by program (Artemis or Apollo) with budgets encoding aspects of the missions - duration, mission location (lunar landing, lunar flyby, earth orbit only), number of EVAs, and if a moon landing, where on the moon they landed.

Desktop Graphics

And of course, everything that goes in print also ends up on the website. After the graphics were sent to the printers, I got to work on converting them to digital layouts.

Apollo and Artemis program budget chart. Today’s total federal budget is more than twice what it was during Apollo, but NASA receives a much smaller share of it now compared to then. The Apollo budget—in 2023 dollars—was $291 billion (66.6% of NASA budget); The Artemis budget is estimated at $93 billion (26.8% of NASA budget).
Timeline of Apollo and Artemis programs, with mission details. The Apollo program included more than a dozen separate missions, but Artemis has condensed its initial stage into four main flights: an uncrewed test flight of the rocket, followed by a planned human trip around the moon and then two crewed landings.



Mobile Graphics


Mobile mockup of chart: Apollo and Artemis program budget chart. Today’s total federal budget is more than twice what it was during Apollo, but NASA receives a much smaller share of it now compared to then. The Apollo budget—in 2023 dollars—was $291 billion (66.6% of NASA budget); The Artemis budget is estimated at $93 billion (26.8% of NASA budget).

It was Jen's edit to overlap the spot illustrations of the rockets with the bars. It's those little chef's kiss touches that really just elevate it.

Mobile mockup of chart: Timeline of Apollo and Artemis programs, with mission details. The Apollo program included more than a dozen separate missions, but Artemis has condensed its initial stage into four main flights: an uncrewed test flight of the rocket, followed by a planned human trip around the moon and then two crewed landings.


From Beginning to End

From the beginning, I knew I'd focus on budget, missions, and significant moments in the programs. My initial sketch for the budget wasn't too far off from what ended up being published, but the concepts for the mission timeline went through some changes. I had just watched a ChartChat about pairing visualizations and they showed something like the "% Budget' bars below - bars that showed a portion of the whole but sequentially so that you could also see how the bars changed from one to the next (as opposed to them all being aligned left, for example).


I had really liked that idea and wanted to see if I could incorporate it with a gantt chart timeline to show how long each mission took from approval to touchdown.

I kept moving forward with the same budget concept after getting first-round feedback on it, but abandoned the gantt/bar chart combo idea. I don't remember all of the feedback I received, but I do remember one bit about gantt charts being an unusual enough visualization that the audience might very be familiar enough with it. And it's not cool enough to warrant all the work it'd take to make it look good (my words). Which, fair enough.

So next I tried a bubble idea, leaning into the visual language of orbits and celestial bodies because, well, it's space. Why fight the tide.

Jen stuck my earlier rough sketches into an adobe illustrator template file and I got to work.

I quickly realized that having the mission bubbles located on the timeline wouldn't work space-wise because the Apollo missions happened so rapid-fire that the overlap between missions would obfuscate any of the mission-specific data I wanted to encode. I proposed splitting up the timeline and bubbles, and then mocked-up both a horizontal layout to see if it'd work space-wise and a vertical layout.


I also had aspirations of showing the per-mission budgets but the data wasn't concrete enough to support this, eventually.


The first vertical layout had the shorter timelines on the left and the bubbles on the right. Jen and I looked at both and decided to keep working on the vertical layout. And keep working on it I did.

Coming together. With the timelines and bubbles officially divorced, I started exploring different layouts for the bubbles. They started off as side-by-side.

And then I quickly moved to staggering them, preferring the more natural flow to this layout. I was puzzling over how to show which missions bubbles belonged to which timeline bubbles and originally drafted these flowy lines.

However, I never liked them, probably for the same reasons you don't, and quickly jumped all over Amanda's suggestion to just directly label the timeline bubbles with I, II, III, etc. I don't know why, but this internship proved to me that creating good legends is legit the hardest thing about making these sorts of spreads. The draft below shows the legend as best I could make it at the time.

Now we're starting to make the visualizations with real data and thus begins the iterative process of going from working design to final visualization. And in one of the back-and-forth rounds, Jen levelled up the legend in a major way.


We worked with Kate Francis from Brown Bird Studio to create the spot illustrations of the rockets. I'd later work with Kate again for an article about goofy running birds, illustrating their running gate. Jen ran point with Kate but we worked together on the art direction for the rockets.


It was during these rounds that we started getting fancy with the illustrator tricks. The timeline bubbles, for example, are layered white and orange bubbles and the orange bubbles have a Multiplying opacity setting to get that overlapping-shaded effect.


The blurry rings around Artemis missions 3 and 4, signifying planned EVAs, also received an upgrade. I made them blurry using a gaussian filter, and Jen leveled them up by creating stacked rings of scaling stroke widths and scaling opacity for a much smoother blend.

I also traded my quickly-grabbed stock moon png for a custom mini-posterized vector image of the moon based on NASA imagery, as well.


Also, what a stroke of genius, amiright? Using a picture of the moon in a visualization of moon landings?!?! That's why they pay me the big bucks. :)


Et voilà


If you want to read more about the experience of creating my first print visualization, I've written about it in a blog!

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