As I wanted to give some context to human space exploration before and after Apollo 11 I needed to include some way of providing my users with this contextual content. During my design phase, I came up with the idea of including two interactive timelines within my prototype one for breakthroughs, missions and firsts before Apollo 11 and the key milestones in human space exploration since.
To make my timelines interactive I wanted to add an on-hover interaction to each of the images and titles on the timeline, which would increase the image in size and overlay some text explaining the mission.
Here is my first timeline in its initial state:
As I now needed twenty short pieces of text on different space missions I decided it would be a good idea to use ChatGPT to help with this task. This was for a few reasons, the first was that I was approaching the soft deadline of the design critique and to try and get information as well as shorten it into the readable content I needed would take a lot of time. The second was unlike the rest of my content which I was able to take in the main from the content I was provided, simply editing it to suit my individual needs, I had no content on these missions to draw from so I felt ChatGPT could give me the initial content on the missions and I could then edit it if necessary to fit my content.
As I only wanted to provide a short overview of each mission for my users, these missions were after all not the main story simply context to help users understand the time at which the Apollo 11 story occurred and its lasting legacy. I decided that fifty words would be a good length of content for each mission I had chosen. So, in ChatGPT my prompt was “50 words on (insert mission)”
Above are examples of the responses I got from ChatGPT, this content provided the information I wanted and in truth only required a small amount of editing, removing or rewording some phrases or changing the units of some of the statistics given.
Below is the text content I used for the four examples above:
Sputnik, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, marked the dawn of the space age. Sputnik orbited Earth every 96 minutes, transmitting radio signals that stunned the world. Its success spurred the space race between the United States and the USSR, shaping the future of space exploration
On March 18, 1965, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov embarked on humanity's first spacewalk during the Voskhod 2 mission. Venturing outside his spacecraft, he spent 12 minutes floating in the vacuum of space, tethered only by a 5-metre cord. This milestone marked a bold step forward in extravehicular activity, paving the way for future spacewalks.
The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) was a historic space mission that fostered cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Launched on July 15, 1975, it featured a joint rendezvous and docking in space between an American Apollo spacecraft and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft.