If you think about it, many major geopolitical situations depend on the technical parameters of missiles. Missiles are terrifying, fascinating, and often relevant to understanding world events.

Missile science is really a sub-category of aerospace engineering. An important truth about aerospace engineering is that it is almost always easier to take an existing design and modify it for a particular application rather than drafting a new design from nothing. Hence, to study missiles, you need some sort of missile spreadsheet that lists existing missiles by their parameters. Once you have a missile spreadsheet, then it becomes data science. This also raises a natural question of "What columns should a good missile spreadsheet have?"

The problem then is that there is a huge spectrum of missiles out there, and it is not clear that they can all fit in the same spreadsheet. There are:

• Tactical missiles
• Strategic missiles
• Ballistic missiles
• Cruise missiles (Can maintain constant speed/altitude)
• Strike missiles AKA attack missiles
• Anti-{air|tank|ship|ballistic|…} missiles

It seems that everybody who writes about missiles feels the need to define a new missile acronym. For example, ASCM, SLBM, CRBM, MRBM, LRBM, ABM, ICBM… etc. What is the meaning of the endless acronyms for categories of missiles? Mostly, they are relevant to different applications. For example, there are arms control policy makers, military groups, and so on.

We can deduce that a good general-purpose missile spreadsheet should have things like:

1. What it can fire from
2. What it can fire at
3. The path it takes to the target
4. The unit cost
5. Type of payload
6. Bounding-box dimensions
7. Mass

Realistically, it matters more what we can actually get from available sources rather than what an ideal spreadsheet should have. So, let's take a look at what sort of data is actually available.

After a quick search, the CSIS Missile Defense Project seems to be the most obvious source for this sort of data, although it's not provided easily machine-readable format. I solved this problem by writing a Scrapy spider and applying some heuristics to normalize the data. The results of this effort are at the bottom of this page (requires JavaScript.)

CSIS Missile Threat data isn't that great. It has data entry errors and incomplete records, plus there are some easily provable factual problems. For example, Ukraine doesn't show up on the page for ATACMS, despite the fact that Ukraine getting ATACMS was headline news.

To create this informational web page, I scraped data from the CSIS Missile Threat Project, and corrected some problems with the resulting dataset. Specifically:

• Replaced country names with ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes
  • For example, the alpha-2 country code for "Russian Federation" is "RU"
  • See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2
• Corrected data entry errors:
  • 'alternate name', 'alternative names', 'alternative name' replaced with 'alternate names'
  • 'wahead' replaced with 'warhead'
  • 'operators' replaced with 'possessed by'

• Missile.index (http://missile.index.ne.jp/en/index.html)
  • Possibly out of date?
  • This might be the subject of a future post.
• Jane's
  • Prohibitively expensive
  • Quality: unknown.

• CSIS Missile Defense Project: https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/
• Scraped dataset: https://resultsmotivated.com/csis_missiles.json