What is Spacelog?

On 12th of April 1961, 27 year old Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the earth, in Vostok 1. Less than a month later, America launched its first crewed spaceflight, the suborbital Mercury-Redstone 3, with Alan Shepard becoming the first American astronaut. In the years that followed, these historical achievments were followed by many others, culminating on the 21st of July 1969 when Neil Armstrong become the first person to set foot on the Moon.

In fifty years since humanity began to explore in person the universe outside our home planet, there have been many memorable moments, of beauty, of bravery, and occasionally of tragedy. For those who did not live through them it is sometimes difficult to appreciate the excitement of these early flights. Spacelog aims to bring those missions back to life: a website for exploring crewed space missions through transcripts of conversations from during the flights between those in space and those back on the ground, and from photography taken at the time.

To date there have been over two hundred human spaceflight missions. Only a small number of these are currently available on Spacelog, although we'd be delighted for assistance in getting more up and alive.

The team behind Spacelog

Spacelog is an entirely volunteer effort. The original work was done by a team of thirteen, producing two missions; since then other people from around the internet have got involved, whether reading through the transcripts with a careful eye looking for subtle errors, or preparing new missions for release on the web.

The original team

• Russ Garrett
• Matthew Ogle
• Hannah Donovan
• Chris Govias
• Gavin O'Carroll
• Ryan Alexander
• James Aylett
• George Brocklehurst
• David Brownlee
• Ben Firshman
• Mark Norman Francis
• Andrew Godwin
• Steve Marshall

Contributors

• Mick Boldon
• Emily Carney
• Palmer Dabbelt
• Peter Dufault
• David Ginsberg
• Tim Hatch
• Nathaniel Hine
• Jeff Hlywa
• Adam Johnson
• Benjamin Levine
• Steve Midgley
• Tom Morris
• Frank O'Brien
• Igor Racyborynsky
• Dananjaya Ramanayke
• Greg Roodt
• Matthew Somerville
• Christopher Stumm
• Trent VanDenBerghe
• Jeff Venverloh
• Jeremy Weatherford
• Sophie Welles
• David Woods

Made in a fort

Yes, you read that right. Spacelog is a /dev/fort project, meaning that the initial work was done in a week in isolation in a fort: Fort Clonque on the island of Alderney off the French coast. For six days we lived and worked together, spending most of our time in two communal rooms with a coal fire going most of the time. We cooked, ate and occasionally got covered in soot, and we designed and implemented the first version of Spacelog, including our first two missions: Mercury-Atlas 6 and Apollo 13.