Space history web site

[ke4roh]

Let's make a space history web site! Imagine if you will, a web page to introduce people to the basics of space history - the races to space, to orbit, and to the moon, the Shuttle, stations, and so on. From that page are links to pages with details on each major section, and the information shows up in a timeline - relating the development of dependant ideas, technologies, and capabilities. You can even zoom in on the timeline to get more information about a particular project. In another section, an outline view shows the information you seek - allowing you to drill through sections like U.S. space exploration/Apollo/Apollo 4 where you find out that was an unmanned test flight. It is the space history nexus, an organized collection of references to other information available on the net.

Interested? Drop me a line and we'll chat!

Thanks!
Jim

[neubjr]

I think that the SEDS webpage structure needs to be updated in general. There is a lot of out of date information and just a lot more that could go on the webpages.

I do not really know where our webpages are hosted or what the official SEDS national page really is. But this is definitely something that could use some help. And things like a nice updated history page would be great! :)

-Joshua.

[SEDShead]

All the seds.org services (and seds.lpl.arizona.edu) are hosted at the University of Arizona, in Tucson Arizona (Room 101B2 of the basement of the Space Sciences building to be more specific). We got the machine (a dual processor Sparc 10) in 1994 (yes, its that old), from an Academic Equipment Grant (AEG) from Sun Microsystems. The one exception are these forums, which are hosted on my personal server out of my house (to keep the load on seds.org down). I'm running a Mac G4 with OS X, over a 768Kbps SDSL line (half the bandwidth of seds.org). It's on a UPS and has proven to be very stable over the ~15 months its been in service.

The official "SEDS National" pages are at http://www.seds.org/seds/ whereas the pages at http://www.seds.org/ have been an informal collection of UA SEDS html projects, and hosting of key resources that needed a home on the net (like The Nine Planets (http://www.seds.org/billa/nineplanets/nineplanets.html) and the Messier Pages (http://www.seds.org/messier/)) among others.

There have been at least two efforts to replace the content now at http://www.seds.org/ with the SEDS-USA organizational pages, and have all the space related content be linked from there. However, the suggestions for the design changes were never fully developed, and thus never got implemented. Brad Beiter made some posts in these forums (http://forums.seds.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=34) which stopped a while back.

A group made another proposal to the Sun AEG last year, but it was unsucessful. I'd suggest another try at it soon, as it never hurts to keep trying (and who knows how long the current hardware will hold out). I've got temporary replacement strategies in place, but nothing permanent.

I'd love to see a resurgence in the content development at SEDS.org (there are many, many undeveloped concepts), and am open to help implement any design changes that may be proposed. As a lot of grade schools and high schools use the site, we'd need to carefully roll-out the new designs, as not to confuse or alienate any of our current users...