Trends in Progress in Aerospace Sciences
Ever since the suspension of the space shuttle from service, Russia has been
America’s main source of space transportation to the International Space Station. NASA has
since been concentrating on developing technologies for Mars travel while still functioning
for everything else on their Congress assigned budget. The private space industry has been
growing exponentially since then picking up the slack where NASA left off. In the progress
in Aerospace Sciences Journal the trend of increasing interest in space related topics,
correlates to the growth in the commercial space industry. This matters because the
aerospace field is now more focused on space exploration.
In order to gather the sufficient data from the article, I meticulously downloaded
every article I studied for the analysis assignment. Each set of articles were saved into
folders identifying the year they came from. Because the articles were published at
different times in the year, I sorted the articles by the issues they were in inside of each
year for better clarity when analyzing the data. Beginning in 2010, I changed the name of
the files numbering the articles from 0 to 70. This was a clever solution I implemented so I
could upload every article to voyant tools and analyze the embedded graph in
chronological order with years on the x-axis.
This journal is a good representation of the research currently going on in the
general realm of aerospace sciences. So in order to answer the overall theory, the best way
to do that quickly is to look at the frequency of words such as space, spacecraft, or rocket.
Word frequencies are a good choice of data analysis for the large amount of quantities of
content in the journal because a computer program can easily do the counts. Especially
since this is a question that is involved in looking at content over time, a graphs containing
time and space interest would be a prominent source of data.
To be able to compare the growth of the private space market with the focus of the
journal, both need to be quantified in order to have data to analyze. Normally, the growth of
a market over a period of time would easily be done using stock market data, however the
full collective market of private space companies are not available because some of them
have not gone public. Job trends and public interest are two alternative ways to understand
growth in the market. Job trends indicate the ability companies have to hire new
employees. This ability stems from the increased revenue and assets the company attains,
hence their growth. Public interest is also another key indicator of growth for a couple
reasons. Public interest is what determines the funding towards research projects and the
amount of media attention a company gets. For example, Apple gets more media attention
than your local barbershop, because Apple has gone through much more growth than the
shop. Both public interest and job interest have graphs accompanying their trends, and can
therefore be judged against the word frequencies to understand how growth has affected
the focus of the journal.
By quantifying growth, the trends can be explored in order to compare them to the
trends in the journal. A way to quantify the growth of commercial space companies is to
take a look at the job trends in SpaceX. SpaceX is arguably the leader in the commercial
space industry. Therefore, for the purposes of analysis, SpaceX will represent the private
space sector. The other notable private space companies are not as well known and do not
have as much data available as SpaceX does. HubPages posted an article about the jobs in
aerospace, specifically SpaceX. According to the chart they posted, there has been an
exponential growth in the jobs at SpaceX post 2009. The most notable growth begins in
mid-2001 and continues on past that. Looking at the word frequencies of “spacecraft” the
first major article talking of spacecraft didn’t occur until late 2013. Before that year, the
journal has little to no mention of spacecraft in their articles at all. Despite there being a
two-year gap in the correlation, there is no doubt that there was still an effect
Public interest in space in the past few years correlates with the output of articles in
aerospace on space related topics. Collecting data of the general interest in space is more
difficult to quantify however, luckily the majority of people use Google. Google has a tool
that has the collective data of search results since 2004 called “Google Trends.” The graph
collected from this tool is from looking at the search trend of “SpaceX” over the past 10
years. While there are peaks due to various newsworthy articles, marked with letters, there
is a general increasing trend since 2011. This result comes from anyone who has ever used
the Google search engine to look up this term and therefore is a good indication of the
public’s interest in the topic. The word frequencies graph of “space” has its first major peak
in mid-2012, before that it is a clear flat line. Public interest is a primary factor to a
company's focus of funding, hence if there is an increase in public interest in space, then a
company is more inclined to fund space related research. This research then gets published
in journals such as Progress in Aerospace Sciences.
There are a few issues in the data collected. The graph containing “space”
frequencies in the articles has a problem. The word “space” in a journal about aerospace
sciences is fairly common due to its many meanings. Most of the time the articles are about
engineering research and the word “space” comes up often, for example the phrase “the
space above the airship.” This isn’t the same meaning as the research is focused on,
meaning there can be false indicators on the graph. Attempting to rectify that fact, the
graph on “spacecraft” is also used for analysis. However, even the term spacecraft doesn’t
have to be included in an article on the general idea of space. Another issue is the lag of
correlations from the different graphs. Both public interest and job trends have an effect
after about two years. This can be due to the lengthy publication process, time it takes to
complete research projects, or the “red tape” within a corporation. The best way to
definitively tell the correlation of the growth in the private space sector and the increase in
focus on space in the journal would to first take an aggregate view of stocks of every
private space company in America. Then, take into account every article published in the
journal since its creation and look for key word indicators. With that data it would be much
more accurate than the data included in this current research.
References
Inglish, Patty. "Hot Jobs In Aerospace at Brownsville, Texas - SpaceX Increases Sites and
Employment." HubPages. HubPages, 25 Nov. 2014. Web. 10 July 2015.
"Google Trends." Google Trends. Google. Web. 10 July 2015.
<https://www.google.com/trends/>.
"Voyant Tools: Reveal Your Texts." Voyant Tools: Reveal Your Texts. Web. 9 July 2015.
<http://voyant-tools.org/>.