WorldSpaceFlight.com

So after we found the error in the send email process, we got curious about the Guestbook. Lo and behold, there was an error there, too! Corrected that error, and there was a new problem. We tracked that down to a database problem and got that straightened out. The lesson learned here is that just because something was working a couple weeks ago, it may not be working today. A new release of underlying software just may play havoc with existing code.

Ain’t life fun!

It seems that the process to email the webmaster decided to quit working properly after several months of flawless operation. Emails that arrived inexplicably were empty. As it turns out, there was an error in the code, and in spite of the error, the process actually worked for quite some time.

We suspect that our host made an upgrade that wasn’t as forgiving of error, which is actually a good thing. Regardless, we found the problem and fixed it.

So if emailed us within the last couple weeks, we probably just got an empty message. We apologize, but all is well now.

The China in Space page has undergone significant updating stemming from announcements earlier this year concerning the Chinese space station. Check it out.

I am an advocate of space exploration. I am also an advocate of doing only that which is practical and provides some return on investment.

That said, it is my opinion that the International Space Station is neither practical nor is there any appreciable return on investment. Up to this point, and for a few more months,  a crew of three is just enough to keep the thing flying. The station isn’t even complete yet, and some components are beginning to show their age.  Experiments which have been performed have really added nothing new over the years. Just increasing the crew size to six really isn’t going to change the situation.

Manufacturing in space?  Give me a break. The minor increase in efficiency which may be achieved is more than offset by much higher capacity and significantly lower costs of earth based manufacturing. Transportation costs alone make it impracticable. There are many examples of research once done in space but found to be more efficient and much easier on the ground.

Given the state of the economy, in my opinion, the United States should withdraw from involvement in the International Space Station, immediately ground the Space Shuttle, and dedicate the savings to the Ares and Orion (Project Constellation). Even scrapping the remaining 7-9 flights of the Space Shuttle would result in tremendous savings. The Space Shuttle has been a huge boondoggle  since it’s inception.

As things stand, Orion is still five years in the future. By eliminating the Space Shuttle now and going to work on the Ares and Orion, we can shave some time off that projection. And by eliminating involvement in the Space Station, Orion resources can be conserved and used to do something useful.

PaulGV has requested more information on the Buran test flights.

This data has not been put on the web site due to some unresolved data descrepancies.  Much data points to the “fact” there were 24 test flights of the Buran Analogue. Yet we have data indicating 25 flights. We do have durations for some, but not all flights.

Keeping in mind that the data is, at this point, somewhat suspect, here is what we have:

1) 10 November 1985, Stankiavicius, Volk, 12 minutes
2) 3 January 1986,  Stankiavicius, Volk, 36 minutes
3) 27 May 1986, Stankiavicius, Volk, 23 minutes
4) 11 June 1986, Stankiavicius, Volk, 22 minutes
5) 20 June 1986, Levchenko, Shchukin, 25 minutes
6) 28 June 1986, Levchenko, Shchukin, 23 minutes
7) 10 December 1986, Stankiavicius, Volk, 24 minutes
8) 23 December 1986, Stankiavicius, Volk,17 minutes
9) 29 December 1986, Levchenko, Shchukin, 17 minutes
10) 16 February 1987, Stankiavicius, Volk, 19 minutes
11) 25 February 1987, Stankiavicius, Volk,  19 minutes
12) 21 May 1987, Levchenko, Shchukin, 20 minutes
13) 25 June 1987,  Stankiavicius, Volk, 19 minutes
14) 5 October 1987, Shchukin, Volk, 21 minutes
15) 15 October 1987, Bachurin, Borodai, 19 minutes
16) 16 January 1988,  Stankiavicius, Volk
17) 24 January 1988, Bachurin, Borodai
18) 23 February 1988, Bachurin, Borodai
19) 4 March 1988,  Stankiavicius, Volk, 32 minutes
20) 12 March 1988, Bachurin, Borodai
21) 23 March 1988, Bachurin, Borodai
22) 28 March 1988, Bachurin, Borodai
23) 2 April 1988, Shchukin, Stankiavicius, 20 minutes
24) 8 April 1988, Shchukin, Stankiavicius
25) 15 April 1988,  Stankiavicius, Volk, 19 minutes

If and when we can corroborate the data, it will be published on the site.

It has been reported that the text is not appearing in the images required to submit entries to the guestbook or to send email to the webmaster.

It seems our host has upgraded to PHP5, which broke one
of the scripts. This has been investigated and fixed.

Canada in Space has been moved to its own directory - http://www.worldspaceflight.com/canada/.
Europe in Space has been moved to its own directory - http://www.worldspaceflight.com/europe/.

Prior to this time, both had been sub-sections of America in Space. Both Canada and Europe have very viable and active space programs, and while they may partner with NASA (America), they also partner with each other, with Russia, and with China. The content of the pages has not changed. The move was made to solidify the statement that neither the Canadian nor European space programs are in any way subservient to the United States and NASA. They are not, and have always deserved a better position in the WorldSpaceFlight hierarchy.

The Astronaut Memorial page has also been moved from America in Space to Astronauts & Cosmonauts. The origin of the Memorial page goes back to a day when America in Space was the only set of pages… WorldSpaceFlight.com did not exist yet. As WorldSpaceFlight grew, the Memorial page grew from being an American only page to one representing the world.

Some minor additions were made to the Primates page in “America in Space”. These additions were for Russian launches of monkeys during the Bion series.

Some major additions were made to the Space Dogs  page in “Russia in Space”.  Previously, only dogs who orbited (or were intended to orbit) were listed in the table. A second table has been added for the numerous dogs who were sent up in sounding rockets or were sub-orbital.

A new entry appears in Odds & Ends (”America in Space”) mentioning Felix, the French space cat!

Management of the links contained in all the pages was never a problem when there were relatively few pages, but as the site has grown, it has become a major headache.

Introduction of the dynamic menu system reduced this work load tremendously. Only the highest level of the menu is actually present in the individual pages, and these items tend to remain rather static.

We have, however, maintained some html menu items for people who can not (or will not) use JavaScript. These are what proved to be a major pain in the posterior. We are addressing this problem by a slow transition to dynamic web pages.

The users will be seeing pages change from something-or-other.htm to something-or-other.php.

If you type in a url with an htm extension, and get a 404 error, try re-entering the request with a php extension.

Be patient. It will take a while for the search engines to get caught up with the changes.

There are all kinds of internet spam. We hate it all.

There is the email spam (pharmaceuticals, porn, phishing scams, Nigerian widows, etc.) with which most of us are familiar. We at worldspaceflight have that problem pretty well nailed. Our hosting company, ServerPoint, has a very good spam filtering system. We also have other measure in place which virtually eliminate email spam. I say virtually, because I did get one piece of spam about three weeks ago.

There is guestbook spam. This comes in a couple forms. One is the bots which search for an automatically post to guestbooks all kinds of trash. Many of them are posting links back to their own pages in an effort to enhance their web rankings. Another kind is people who have nothing better to do than to try to trash a guestbook. Worldspaceflight has always had a policy of reviewing submissions before they appeared on the web, but the amount of garbage to good became greater than what we wanted to deal with. We turned off the guesbook for awhile, but have since resurrected it. With our new procedures for validation, not many people sign it. But the few who do actually have something worthwhile saying and are willing to take the time. Another problem solved.

Then there are the bots (and some people, too) who like to spam (or trash) forums. The forum we had required a user to be validated to post (which prevented a majority of spam postings), but registering without validation allowed urls in the list of users. In other words, the user list (with urls) was available for anyone (or thing) which registered, regardless of whether or not they ever validated themselves. We became tired of deleting unvalidated users, especially since the forum was getting so little legitimate use. Had the software we were using allowed us to permit ONLY validated users in the user list, we might have continued the forum. (The forum was closed over a year ago, and all paths to it were removed a month ago. We STILL get about 30 attempts a day to register)!

So now we are trying the blog. Blogs are vulnerable to much of the same garbage guestbooks and forums are. Hopefully, the software will stop most of it in it’s tracks.

We shall see.