Stopping auto-registration!

We are happy to notice the continuous trickle of new users, but at the same time we feel guilty that the site is more or less static since at least three months. Recent events in the Virtual AGC project, and the upcoming Apollo 11 anniversary, took all the little spare time we used to devote to this site. The "team" will be in fact involved in a week-long public event that will be held in Rome, mainly targetd to kids and teenagers, but interesting also for "grown-ups". If you happen to be travelling in this part of the world drop us a note and join us at the event.

Therefore apologies to the registered users, and even more apologies to the new ones, for the lack of recent interesting additions. But they will come: we have, for instance, a number of small, but interesting and never seen before documents related to A8, A9, A10 that we are ready to publish, as soon as we can stop to write some intelligent remarks. And then there are the other 20 or 30 documents that we have in the pipeline for assemblying into PDF's and commenting.

We will also continue to add original pictures from our collections with detailed explanations. That will take time but it has been requested more than once.

In closing, let us remind that this site is open to volunteers: you can contribute in many ways, mainly writing interesting pieces, articles, descriptions. But also commenting on the existing material will be a great help.

NOTICE TO comcast.net USERS. Comcast.net keep filtering out e-mail sent from european domains without any good reason. This happens also to the user registration e-mails that our server automatically sends to users (a well-known and validated procedure). To these users we recommend to complain with comcast.net, while we will proceed to manually activate your account when we see a new registration (we cannot even send you an ordinary e-mail).

In recent years there has been a steady increase in the offering of web sites in relation to astronautics and space exploration. Thanks to the work of many enthusiasts, a wealth of information about the past and present of astronautics is now on-line. In addition, the availability of a great number of important technical documents, as well as of information provided by different historical services and archives, has created a critical mass of information that now requires effort to get ordered and organized, at least from a knowledge management view point. 

However not all the web sites are 'good enough' for those die-hards who find engineering applied to space exploration one of the great achievements of our age: many enthusiasts often "drool" after an astronaut picture in training but they do not look at the technical details being accomplished or the engineering details of the tools/instruments at use. Only after the Apollo 13 movie, did people start to learn about the heroic efforts of 'those nerds' in mission control, but again that was the tip of an iceberg of engineers and technicians that made it happen. The truth is that very seldom discussed, or hinted at, are the heroics of those thousands and thousands of engineers who, working behind the scenes of their own companies and agencies, made the impossible, possible and, borrowing from the British Interplanetary Society, built the bridges from imagination to reality.