To the ISS or beyond

For those unaware, tomorrow is a big day for British science and in particular space exploration.  Tim Peake, the first ESA astronaut selected from the UK, will be heading up for a 6 month tour on the ISS.  Those that know me will understand my fascination with such an event.

I decided it would be nice to mark this occasion, in my own way, by pulling together another Tableau dashboard centred around the ISS.  Well in particular the astronauts.  A friend of mine was curious as to how long the astronauts are spending on the ISS, so I decided to look at this in terms of how far mankind could have travelled from the Earth in this time.

Now I took some major assumptions here:  The ISS travels on average at 27,600 km/h, and will execute 15.54 orbits of the Earth in a single 24 hour period.  Therefore with these assumptions, and knowing how long each expedition to the ISS has lasted (according to NASA), I calculated a very rough (back of the envelope, if you will) calculation to illustrate how far these astronauts could have gone from the Earth.

As you can see from above, I've included the Moon, Mars, and Jupiter as a bit of a reference, and it's clear that only the most experienced of astronauts like Gennady Padalka, has made it to the Red Planet at its average distance ~225 million km.

I'm really looking forward to launch tomorrow, and seeing some of the experiments Tim will be running while on board the ISS.  And of course adding Tim's data to the graphic above!

Edit: to include Jupiter, and a slight issue with my scale.. That's a reminder to have someone check your work before publishing