Astro-Know

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  Home page

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  Viewing an astronaut

Inspiration

According to NASA's 2020 workforce report, 12% of NASA employees are Black, 8% are Asian-American or Pacific Islander, 7% are Hispanic or Latino; 1% are indigenous, and less than 1% are more than one race. With these statistics in mind, I wanted to create an app that acknowledges the contributions of astronauts a part of underrepresented minority groups.

What it does

Astro-Know is an interactive web app that fetches details of astronauts of color and showcases notable accomplishments to highlight the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

How we built it

Wikipedia has various articles listing astronauts of color. By parsing through the web pages with Pandas DataFrames, I extracted names from the HTML tables. Then, I queried for more information using The Space Devs API to obtain even more information (dates of birth, individual wikipedia pages, biographies, social media, etc.).

Challenges we ran into

It turns out that extracting text from Wikipedia tables is difficult. I tried the Wikipedia Python package, the Wikipedia API, and web scraping with BeautifulSoup to no avail. What finally worked was loading the table into a Pandas DataFrame.

Moreover, the API I was using had some strict limits. I could only make a few calls an hour before being blocked for ~40 minutes. What I ended up doing was storing the JSON from the requests into a file to call instead of the actual API itself.

What's next for Astro-Know

Technically, I'd like to integrate a React framework like Next.js to make the app more robust. Conceptually, I'd like to dive deeper – beyond the scope of diversity, larger issues more directly affect underrepresented minorities, such as the racial wage gap and workplace abuse. I'd like to find and present data on that, as well.

Built With

• javascript
• python