Space Travel
On April 12, 1981 the first space shuttle flight took place. I was 10 years old, had heard about this first American space flight in about 6 years, watched it, and I was hooked. I then received a few books on manned space flight history, which was just 20 years old at that time. I discovered that a German had been in charge of developing the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecrafts (Wernher von Braun). Anyway, I got interested in space travel and collected some info and a few links...
US space flights
Space websites must be among the most changing links in the world... So, for now, here are just some simple links about the US space history:
- Mercury flights. The beginning of manned US space flight.
- Gemini flights. Spacewalks and rendezvous practice.
- Apollo flights. Moon missions, Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz.
- Information on the shuttle and list of past shuttle flights.
Here is a link to NASA mission patches. This is a site to buy them, but when you click on them, you get some information on the crew, launches and landings, etc...
NASA published a large collection of space pictures, covering everything from 1957 to today, in 2008.
Russian space flights
There are even less websites about the Russian program. Space flight started with the flight of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961 (20 years before the first flight of the American shuttle). Here are just a few links on the Russian space shuttle - it flew into space only once, successfully, for like 200 minutes, unmanned. The program was cancelled after the break-up of the Soviet Union. The actual Buran shuttle was destroyed in a hangar collapse.
On May 22, 1983, the American shuttle mock-up and test shuttle Enterprise visited the Cologne-Bonn airport on top of a NASA Boeing 747 on its way to the Paris air show. Yes, I was there. On Apr 9, 2008, the Russian equivalent (mock-up and test shuttle), the OK-GLI, or Buran aerodynamic analogue, visited the Cologne harbor in Deutz on a barge pushed by a towboat on its way to a permanent exhibition at a German museum in Speyer. Again, I was there... So, here are the links:
- About the Russian shuttle program
- The Russian shuttle Buran
- The Buran aerodynamic analogue that visited Cologne