People in space timeline (Piste)

A Gantt-style timeline of everyone who has been to space, from Yuri Gagarin in 1961 to the people in orbit right now. Piste — originating from French — means a trail or track: each bar traces a person's time off the planet.

How it works

Every spaceflight is a separate bar on a person's row (launch → landing). Station stays that span several ferries — a Soyuz up, a different Soyuz down, with expeditions in between — are merged into one continuous trip, so the bar reflects real time in space rather than double-counting overlapping records. Suborbital hops (Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, X-15) are included and can be filtered out.

The whole dataset is baked into the page at build time — there are no live API calls, so the site is fast, works offline, and hosts anywhere static.

Data sources

• Wikidata · CC0 — the base dataset: people, gender, photos, and per-mission launch/landing dates via crew links.
• Open Notify · public — cross-check for who is in space now.
• Launch Library 2 · CC BY-NC 4.0 — the authoritative source for nationality, agency, flight timelines, day counts, spacewalks and photos, and the backfill for recent fliers Wikidata is missing.
• Supercluster · editorial — a gap-filling pass: gender for recent suborbital fliers, the space-tourism brokers (Space Adventures), and the two SpaceShipOne pilots.

Caveats

• Nationality and agency come from Launch Library 2 where it has a record, falling back to Wikidata. Nationality is the nation a person flew under (so Soviet-era cosmonauts show their present-day country, e.g. Gagarin → Russia), Europeans are grouped under ESA, and the space tourists show the company that flew them (e.g. Space Adventures) — with only a couple of early self-funded fliers left agency-less.
• Status is In space / Living / Deceased; "in space now" is a snapshot taken when the data was built.
• "In space" here means past the US 50-mile / 80 km astronaut boundary, so Virgin Galactic counts even though SpaceShipTwo falls below the 100 km Kármán line — the total therefore sits a little above Kármán-only tallies quoted elsewhere.
• Recent suborbital tourists are filled in from Launch Library 2, which carries no gender; Supercluster supplies most of the rest, so only a couple still read Unknown. A few obscure early flights may still be missing.