Inspiration
COVID-19 jolted every part of the economy but not all space-related industries moved the same way so we wanted to figure out how investors and agencies wanted to know what parts of the U.S. space economy are truly resilient and worth long-horizon bets? We set out to turn BEA’s “U.S. Space Economy” tables into a clear resilience scorecard.
What it does
This project turns the BEA’s U.S. Space Economy accounts (2012–2023) into a plain-English resilience scorecard. We measure how much each industry fell in 2019 to 2020, how strongly it rebounded by 2023, how fast it’s compounding now, how bumpy that growth is, and how much value it keeps (real value added vs. real gross output).
How we built it
We added the BEA excel workbook into R and cleaned up the tables by skipping header rows, fixing ellipses and footnotes. From Table 1 (Real Value Added) and Table 5 (Real Gross Output) we computed metrics: Dip (2019→2020), Rebound (2020→2023)
Challenges we ran into
Coming up with an insightful question was our first challenge as we wanted to make an impact on our audience and help with decisions long-term. Another challenge was choosing which charts to use to make sure they were the best visuals for our question was a hurdle we faced. We had to make sure that was the strongest graph so it is able to be read easily by the audience. We also had to figure out how to shorten the legends and make them more concise so they would be taking up the whole space.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The process to clean the raw data and adapt the project, and working with real data sets that are very messy was a big deal for us. The cleaning process for the inconsistencies in time, and dates. We are proud of our group and the way we managed tasks and were able to work together efficiently and effectively.
What we learned
We learned how messy data can be, the effort that it takes to clean up data. After this, we were able to perfect our craft in creating data visuals using R, and trying to reach our audience in a better way. We also learned how to collectively work in a team and used our shared skills in order to create a project.
What's next for Comparing the Resilience in the Space Economy
We want to research more about how different companies like SpaceX & ULA affect/lead space economy changes with more time and information. For example, we could compare SpaceX and ULA, new vs legacy company, especially with a 2014-2015 split that we researched about.
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