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Some nitpicking / philosophical thoughts: - This can only be a lower bound: There may be privately or secretly "launched" people (e.g.: Chinese military scientists, that missing SpaceX engineer, who knows what the NSA does, Mafia's posh new traitor treatment ...) - "People" needs a definition here (are dead people still people, what about aliens?)
what?! Can you elaborate?
Some nitpicking / philosophical thoughts: - This can only be a lower bound: There may be privately or secretly "launched" people (e.g.: Chinese military scientists, that missing SpaceX engineer, who knows what the NSA does, Mafia's posh new traitor treatment ...) - "People" needs a definition here (are dead people still people, what about aliens?)
> that missing SpaceX engineer what?! Can you elaborate?
Is there a long-term graph of this? I believe the number has been nonzero since 2000, and wanted to see how it's changed over time.
[Edit: oh cool, there's something kinda like it in the sibling comment! Mine was different, showing a less granular graph wth the population averaged out on a yearly basis. But it also included a table of all missions and notable events affecting trends in the population of space.]
Some nitpicking / philosophical thoughts: - This can only be a lower bound: There may be privately or secretly "launched" people (e.g.: Chinese military scientists, that missing SpaceX engineer, who knows what the NSA does, Mafia's posh new traitor treatment ...) - "People" needs a definition here (are dead people still people, what about aliens?)
It's essentially impossible to covertly put or keep anything in space. Getting into space requires expending a rather obvious amount of energy, which there are fleets of satellites from many different nations continually watching out for. Staying in space requires being in full view of, well, nearly 8 billion people. It's not something that anyone is presently doing in secret.
Once there are a myriad of commercial ships zipping around cislunar space, the potential for covert flights to slip through the cracks becomes significantly greater. But for the present Earth-to-LEO regime -- no.
Is there a long-term graph of this? I believe the number has been nonzero since 2000, and wanted to see how it's changed over time.
Here's one up to 2014: http://www.arcaneknowledge.org/science/spaceflt.htm Number of living humans who have walked on another world: https://xkcd.com/893/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By then it may be quite easy to track accurately!
Most likely. "Any civilization advanced enough to leave its own plant will be advanced enough to track accurately those leaving" -- Civilized Tracking Corollary (2017)
It is currently only possible to be in space on the ISS (or in transit to/from there) right? Does anyone know when the last human space mission farther than Low Earth orbit was? And is any country seriously planning another one?
there's also a Chinese space station but it's not currently occupied. The last mission past low earth orbit was Apollo 17. As far as I know, SpaceX are the only ones planning on taking crews further out, first with a mission around the moon, and then possibly Mars
> Apollo 17
From where are you getting this data?
Probably from http://open-notify.org/ , it provides free space data.
Here's a few more APIs I've collected into a small R package:
Hopefully some day this number will be so large that it will be impossible to track accurately.
By then it may be quite easy to track accurately!