Sometimes you have to go far away to do something special
In a welcome return to an actual fort and the location of the very first project, the fifth /dev/fort expedition left Southampton Airport for Alderney on November 22nd, 2010. After a day of bandying ideas back and forth, the idea from Russ Garrett of building a site to make the original transcripts from early NASA missions more useful won the group over. And after some two hundred postits were created, catalogued and prioritised, the three designers and ten developers got to work and built something full of stars.
We registered the domain in Alderney airport on the way back, and pushed the code to github the same day, setting ourselves a goal of getting it live within 48 hours of return.
Only thirty-six hours after touchdown at Southampton Airport, a flurry of tweets announced the lift-off of our project: Spacelog. There you can browse and easily link to the transcripts from the Apollo 13 and Mercury 6 missions. Since then we — and a host of other contributors from around the world — have added eight further missions, and are working on preparing yet more.
Roger. There’s nothing like an interesting launch.
The site has more than just the transcripts though. In with the transcripts are some of the lovely NASA photographs, such as mission control, Apollo 13 clearing the launch tower and the damage to the service module that was the cause of the (mis)quote “Houston, we have a problem.”
Along with the transcripts, there is a visualisation of the various stages of the Apollo 13 spacecraft, and some stats porn on the amount of conversation in the phases pages. There is also a run-down of who was involved on the people page. And the scans of the original transcripts that the text was taken from are also available. Add in full text search and we think we made something beautiful.
We are proud to say that we built this in just a week.