To mark the 45th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, Nefarious Plots charted the total number of humans in space over time:
Interactive version of the chart here. Susannah Locke captions:
Check out the big, red USSR/Russian blocks versus those skinny American lines in blue. That’s because the American presence in space has often consisted of shorter missions. A lot of this discrepancy has to do with access to space stations, where people can hang out for long periods, sometimes even longer than a year at a time.
The Dish 