Encyclopedia Astronautica

It's not often that the denizens of the 'Nest get to visit a URL that sounds like a character from the Asterix graphic novels.

Well chaps, we hate to break the news to you, but Astronautix isn't some Gaul dreaming of traveling to the moon to scalp a few Roman helmets - but is, instead, an online portal for space exploration; alias astronautix.com

And a mighty fine one it is too.

The site is a labour of love by its owner, Mark Wade, truly packed to the gunnels full of goodies.

This includes a fascinating look at the Soviet's combat ship development program. Craft like the Soyuz P which were equipped to find and destroy US satellites. The ship-killers actually went live, but it helped con the money out of the Soviet military for the hard-strapped cosmonauts.

In fact, the site is so full of material that our Mark has made the whole thing available as a CD-ROM too. All the 7,385 pages and 5,446 images on the site are available for less than $20 - an incredibly cheap offering, in our humble opinion.

The articles range from things that any SF fan will enjoy: a look at China's secret plans to colonise the solar system (yes, we know, they never really got there) to how early TV series like Captain Satellite inspired the early NASA heads in the space race.

The site also makes the jump to material which only the true aficionado of the space exploration game will appreciate: complete download of the Redstone and Jupiter mission launch logs, anyone?

That a lot of the content falls into the wistful 'never got off the drawing board' category, is perhaps a sad indictment on how the early star pioneering dreams from the Camelot era have been replaced with today's slow, commercial, robot trudge through the solar system.

"The greatest manned spaceflights that never were ... " is typical of the gems you can uncover at the encyclopedia.

Like our Star Trek dreams of universal peace and Mars & back by lunchtime, today's space program is as still as the lunar dust lying around the spears of the Apollo mission flags.

Haunted by the shades of might-have-been, Astronautica should find its way into the favourites list of any fan with an interest in reengineering the 'F' in SF from fiction to fact.

Click here to visit Encyclopedia Astronautica.