Other : Site updates

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2004
2003

Entries are in reverse order (latest at top). I have not hyperlinked internal page links (in bold here) as the pages periodically change or are occasionally removed!

2004

Monday 7th June

Trying a different style of page header as the large text looks clunky. (Another alternative that many people use is to create images for headings, but with the number of pages I have now, that is rather impractical – and they would take up site storage space.) I don’t think I’ll ever be happy with the way this site looks! Also, links now match the colors of each page section, and visited links are grey.

The spacesuit illustrations are back on one page; it’s easier to manage.

Saturday 5th June

Slight changes to navigation: links to the Site map are now at the bottom of each page. Clicking on the cosmonaut in the page header will take you home (there is a text link below, also).

Thursday 3rd June

Added another photo to my photo gallery. Also redid all the thumbnails there and in the Cosmonauts’ Group so they are the same size; looks better. (FrontPage does automatic thumbnails, but just reduces the whole photo, so they end up all different sizes.)

Monday 31st May

I rearranged the Cosmonauts’ Group news pages so that earliest entries are at the top of the page. Also, after heroically laboring all week, I finally finished the translated Zvezda page!

Sunday 30th May

Revised Russian launches page and made some corrections. The Links pages have been split into smaller sections.

Wednesday 26th May

Poems are now all on the one page (access from Other).

Tuesday 25th May

Two more personal pages added (cut from the About me page, which was getting too long): Favorites and a personal Photo gallery.

Monday 24th May

Added a page about Zarya in the ISS section. Pages on Zvezda and Pirs to follow – transliterating them (via Babelfish) and typing them out is a tedious process, though, so these might be a while in coming!

Saturday 22nd May

Added a list of those in the Cosmonauts’ Group for 2004. Cosmonaut updates has now been split into two pages (getting too long).

Thursday 20th May

Illustrations for the Russian spacesuits are now on separate smaller pages. I am still picking up minor errors in my pages and am endeavouring to fix them!

Wednesday 19th May

Found a cosmonaut’s website via Collectspace: Talgat Musabaev! Quite a nice site, too. I’ll add it to my links pages ASAP. (On Space links page 1.)

Tuesday 18th May

Cosmonauts Yurii Onufrienko and Yurii Usachyov have both left the Cosmonauts’ Group; :-( see Cosmonaut updates for details.

Some quick site stats: approximately 6.45 mb used (out of 15), site been up nearly 8 months, 1557 visitors to date.

Monday 17th May

Redesigned the index pages for each section. Accidently deleted the “Other” graphic; I’ll upload it again ASAP!

Sunday 16th May

I have divided the Cosmonauts’ group page into three, and brought back the thumbnail portraits; it looks a bit better.

Saturday 15th May

I’m continuing to alter a few things on my pages here and there; I am also periodically adding a bit more detail to the ISS life support systems page.

Tuesday 11th May

Added a new page at last, Soyuz survival gear. Access from the Russian spacesuits section.

Wednesday 5th May

Replaced the top navigation links with image links, which look snazzier! Note that I have also changed some of the pages’ names. I now have nearly 50 pages!!

Tuesday 4th May

I have created main contents pages for each section and linked to these in the menu at the top of every page. I removed the secondary drop-down menus as I was tiring of having to alter these every time I added a new page!

Sunday 2nd May

I have added a ISS life support systems page as the ISS systems page was getting a bit long (access from the ISS section).

Friday 30th April

I have divided the Russian spaceflight section into smaller sections as it was getting a bit unwieldy. Soyuz TMA-3 also landed safely early this morning (00:12 GMT/UTC). :-)

Saturday 24th April

A second Control Movement Gyroscope has failed. From the 22nd April OOS report:

Update on CMGs:В Yesterday at ~4:18pm EDT, U.S. CMG-2 (control moment gyroscope #2) lost power and spun down, when its controlling RPC (remote power controller) tripped and could not be reset. Automatic software reconfigured the steering law for the two remaining gyros, CMG-3 & CMG-4, and they are performing nominally after some slight current increase initially. The Russian segment (RS) is ready to assume attitude control with its thrusters if another CMG fails, and control handover procedures would be the same as used for the two-CMG ops during last week’s CMG-3 lube test. [Ground-based diagnostic procedures determined that the RPC-17 did not experience an overcurrent spike (as resulting from an arc-caused short circuit) but most probably failed due to a faulty hybrid FET (field effect transistor) with – as other failed FETs before – a known manufacturing flaw (metal oxide breakdown of FET circuit, resulting in a “Failed Open” condition). An EVA is required to replace the RPC module (RPCM), mounted externally on the S0 truss segment, with an available spare unit. Concerted planning of such a spacewalk is underway, to be scheduled as soon as possible after the current two-crew ops period.]

Thursday 22nd April

The visiting crew docked OK to the ISS yesterday. I can’t say I like the Expedition 9 patch design – way too cluttered! The Soyuz flight patch (see Spacefacts) is much nicer. Let’s hope the landing goes OK, too – the media will have a field day if anything goes wrong. :-(

I also added a couple more recent photos of myself.

Monday 19th April

I’ve not added any new pages for a while, but am still adding bits to the ones here, such as the TsUP page.

Expedition 9 also lifted off successfully today from Baikonur Cosmodrome. :-)

Sunday 18th April

I have redone the Russian glossary so it is in definition list style (like this page), rather than a table – the table was getting rather large and unwieldy!

Saturday 17th April

Energiya have their Expedition 9 and Visiting Crew pages up at last, so I’ve added those details to my ISS crew page. A mention of the two vykhody, spacewalks, assigned to Expedition 9 was in the 3rd April on-orbit report: both using Orlans, on 22/7 and 24/8.

Other major events for Increment 9 are: undocking of Progress 13P – 5/18; launch of Progress 14P – 5/19; undocking of 14P – 7/21; launch of Progress 15P – 7/28; and two Russian Orlan EVAs, on 7/22 (unique because no Soyuz docked on DC-1 & no Progress docked at SM aft end), and 8/24. Systems that will be closely watched to make Increment 9 a success at this time include Elektron, TVIS treadmill, RED resistive exerciser, US EVA capability, minor Soyuz anomalies, some software changes planned for this year, and CMGs.

Friday 16 th April

*Sigh* Changed the menus to drop-down form-style menus again … They’re nothing fancy, but do save some page space. (It’s that “Time Of The Month” – just bear with me!)

Wednesday 14th April

I reduced the text size (again!) to 11 pixels, which many sites seem to use; if it is too small, in Internet Explorer select TOOLS | INTERNET OPTIONS | ACCESSIBILITY (the button down the bottom) then check the "Ignore font sizes specified on web pages" box, then OK. In other browsers you can adjust the text size without these extra steps (in Mozilla, select VIEW | TEXT ZOOM). I hope I am not exasperating people too much with all these changes; it’s just my indecisive nature. I rearranged and added a bit more to Site information.

Monday 12th April

NASA crew photo and page for Expedition 9 is up, so I’ve added the photo to ISS crews. Energiya are a bit tardy updating their site! Launch is set for April 18th – next Monday in Australia (we’re a day ahead of the U.S. date).

I have also altered all the data tables on various pages to pale blue and red (subtle patriotic colors! ;-)) as they look better – borders show up a horrible default grey in Netscape and Mozilla. I’m still not happy with the navigation, so there could be more minor changes.

Sunday 11th April

How would you like to share your home with THESE guys? The grey sheepskin-like object in the photo is in fact a European wasps’ nest which Dad found in the roof attic last week. It’s been there a year at least and there would be 30-40 000 wasps inside, all with bad attitudes. He had to call in a pest controller to poison them (you would NOT want to disturb this nest). The nest is constructed by the wasps – they chew up bits of wood into a sort of paper maché and make this elaborate structure. It’s probably about a meter or so across. The European wasp is an introduced pest here (one of many). This is one thing they don’t have to worry about on the ISS!

Tuesday 6th April

Still wasn’t happy with the layout, so I have added table menus in the top right of every page which contain all the page links for a particular section – the main sections are Russian spaceflight, Links and Other, as well as the Site Map and Home pages. You can access these from the main menu at the top of every page, so you are 2 mouse-clicks away at most from any other page. (Note the color-coding!) It’s still not entirely satisfactory, but it will do for the time being – I have been fretting about this since last week and I am tired of it! I still like the Javascript drop-down menus such as those at The Shuttleworth Foundation and Olympic Eurogym sites, but these are complex to include in a site so I will leave it for now.

Another space tourist is to go up later this year – some billionaire American scientist-type who probably wouldn’t know what a Soyuz was if it came up and bit him – and I am jealous.

Saturday 3rd April

After a headache-inducing couple of days, I have reorganized the link structure of my site a little. There are 5 main sections: Russian spaceflight, Links, Other, the Site Map and the Home page. The main sections of Russian spaceflight and Other are accessed via introductory table-of-contents pages. The other alternative is to use Javascript drop-down menus, but I haven’t found one suitable yet (I am not smart enough to write one myself!). All pages are accessible from the Site Map, so you are only 2 mouseclicks away from any other page. Hope that isn’t too confusing! Note that ALL pages now have the .html ending – MS FrontPage for some reason automatically assigns .htm to pages.

Coming up: 12th April – Cosmonautics Day

Thursday 1st April

Thanks for the nice guestbook entries! I think you can only write a certain number of words, though, as I noticed a couple of messages got cut off at the ends. I am still making minor changes to the appearance of my site as I am still not happy with the way it looks – I may try to reorganize the Site Map.

Wednesday 31st March

Just discovered that all the Home links at the top of each page weren’t working because I – or FrontPage – left the l off the .html extension! That should be now fixed.

Tuesday 30th March

An update of sorts – from last November (2003) – added to Cosmonaut updates; a bit behind but I don’t think things have changed too much since then. I’ve rearranged the page so that the most recent entries are at the top.

Friday 26th March

Added a Soyuz TMA page; access from ISS Russian segment or Site Map.

Tuesday 23rd March

Three years since Mir was deorbited. :-( A new page – Lost dreams – a sort of tribute to Mir and the way things used to be. Most Buran and Mir links (including articles) have been moved to this page (my site is mainly about the Russian ISS program, so I have not gone into detail about these previous ones – there are plenty of great sites about them, anyway).

Saturday 20th March

If you have been following the daily NASA On-Orbit Reports, Mike and Sasha have had their hands full with various mechanical failures! The Elektron oxygen generator gave up the ghost (one of the air/liquid units got contaminated), so they have been burning two oxygen-generating candles (TGK) per day (there are over a hundred of these on board – as of 19/3, 13 burnt, 108 left):

After replacing the Liquid Unit #6 (BZh-6) with the remaining spare (BZh-7) and reconnecting BITS2-12 telemetry cables yesterday, the crew today replaced feed hoses and cleaned the assembly. Elektron activation will be attempted tomorrow morning (~2:30am EST). [Both the Elektron’s air/liquid separator unit (GZhS) and the removed parts (BP pump unit, A-R water feed hoses) were flushed with water from Rodnik storage tank 1 (BV1), toweled clean and inspected for possible reuse or else disposal. The flush water was tested for pH (reported value: ~8). The EDV container with the unclean flush water will be discarded.]

Control-Movement Gyroscope #2 was showing anomalies, as was #3 (#1 failed a couple of years ago):

As previously reported (3/15), over last weekend U.S. CMG-2 (control moment gyro #2) experienced three transient LoC (loss of communications) events with the GNC MDM (guidance, navigation & control computer). These events are a known anomaly affecting all of the CMGs. CMG FDIR (Failure Detection, Identification & Recovery system) automatically recovers the affected gyroscope by power cycling it (turning it off/on) and bringing it back into the steering law for attitude control. There is no action for the crew. Coincident with the LoC events, CMG-3 briefly exhibited elevated levels of vibration on its flywheel. Specialists are working to establish whether the vibrations were due to the CMG-2 LoC events, or are a separate anomaly.

None of this is life-threatening, but they spend most of their time in such mechanical troubleshooting, as well as doing various experiments.

Tuesday 16th March

More changes! All pages now have the graphic header, and a more uniform color scheme – a bit easier to maintain! Layout is otherwise the same. (After uploading, I noticed that some of the links in the top bar aren’t showing for some reason, so I will try to fix that.)

Sunday 14th March

I have altered the home page a little – put link descriptions on the Site map. Some more nice entries in my Guestbook! :-)

Yurii Koptev, head of Rosaviakosmos, has retired; he is to be replaced by Colonel-General Anatolii Perminov (appointed by the Russian president). Will this see the Russian space program become more militarized? :-(

Saturday 13th March

I have consolidated some of Sergei’s pages.

Wednesday 10th March

Found a new version of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center site at www.gctc.ru/. Also see Taxi crews for a new Energiya portrait of the Soyuz TM-33 crew (from the LK site). Added a section about cosmonaut training to Active cosmonauts (from the GCTC site).

Tuesday 9th March

Decided to reinstate the ISS and Taxi crews photos after all. Also a few new photos on the Sergei Krikalyov links page – including an Expedition 1 portrait not on the official sites (this from Loty Kosmiczne). (I also just found that a couple of the site links at the top of Sergei’s pages went to the wrong places, but this has now been fixed!)

Yurii Gagarin’s birthday; he would be 70 if he were still alive!

Wednesday 3rd March

Just over 1000 visitors to my site! I have added a little more information to the ISS Russian segment and ISS systems pages.

Saturday 28th February

The spacewalk was partly successful, but had to be terminated early – see Russian exits for details. More space links added.

Thursday 26th February

I couldn’t resist mentioning this Spacestore ad at the spaceref.com site: now you can buy your very own Astronaut Doll! “She comes in her official NASA blue flight suit and flight boots with NASA luggage – all packed in a cool pink clear plastic backpack. Great for travelling to and from the International Space Station or grandmas!” A real space babe! Rather wish I could send up one to the guys on the ISS with the message “This is the closest you'll get to a woman for 6 months!” Ha, ha. ;-)

Tuesday 24th February

Decided to reinstate the crew photos for ISS crews and Taxi crews, but only low-res, cropped versions.

Monday 23rd February

The Encyclopedia Astronautica site appears to be off-line for some reason; I hope it comes back! (Note: it is now – they had server upgrade problems.) Also, an upcoming Russian vykhod, EVA, in 4 days (26th). I have removed the photos from the Fallen Stars page as these are readily available on the Internet, on other sites.

Saturday 21st February

Added “ISS partners” to the first Links page; a few links have thus been shifted around. I have put all non-space links on a third Links page – note that all non-space pages have different color schemes to the space ones.

Thursday 19th February

Added some more to the About me and Site Information pages. Also thanks for the nice e-mails from those at collectspace.com! I am not the world’s best letter writer so my replies might be a bit tardy, but I do read and appreciate them! :-)

Sunday 15th February

Finished the ISS Russian systems page – access from Site map or ISS Russian segment. I have removed the photos and mission patches from the ISS crews and Taxi crews pages to save some site space; the photos are readily available from the Energiya and NASA sites (as well as many unofficial sites). Some links have also been moved (e.g. Mark Shuttleworth's link is now on the Taxi crews page).

Saturday 14th February

A HOT 40°C day in Melbourne – if you’re not living here, be grateful! (Though we had one of the coolest Januaries for some years – go figure!) A couple more nice guestbook entries. I am (slowly) working on a page about the ISS Russian systems (life support, etc.).

Tuesday 10th February

Added a page about TsUP, Moscow Mission Control. The next Russian spacewalk is set for 26th February.

Wednesday 4th February

Some site statistics from the Yahoo server –

• Total page views to date: 792
• Highest monthly page views: 304 in October 2003
• Most popular browser visitors use: 93.35% use MSIE 6.0
• Most common screen resolution visitors have: 67.31% have 1024 x 768
• This page is linked to most often from this URL: 53.60% of visitors link from Unknown (the second-highest is from the Spacefacts links page).

Monday 2nd February

The language encoding for all my pages is now “Windows-1251” (Cyrillic), not Unicode – select “Cyrillic [Windows]” on your browser if the Russian words don’t display properly.

Sunday 1st February

Added a “Cyrillic and the Internet” section to Russify your computer!; trying to explain, in my rather incoherent way, how web pages encode languages such as English and Russian.

Friday 30th January

Cosmonaut Talgat Musabaev retired from the cosmonaut squad late last year – see Cosmonaut updates for details (I was also told that Yurii Gidzenko left the Cosmonaut Group in 2001!). I have also redesigned the Russian launches page so it is much simpler (using lists).

Tuesday 28th January

Removed the New cosmonauts page and mentioned them in Active cosmonauts instead (with links to articles and photos). I am removing a few other photos from various pages to save some website space.

Saturday 24th January

I have split Site information into two pages, adding a new page, About me. Site info has links to helpful website design sites.

Wednesday 21st January

Added a Site information page, including a little about me.

Sunday 18th January

Added a Martian poem (written in 2001). I am still tweaking the appearance of my website pages. I have also divided my Links page into two pages as it is getting rather long!

Monday 12th January

Added a few (rather irate) comments about President Bush’s space policy to Martian Dreams. I have been feeling this way ever since Mir was deorbited.

Sunday 11th January

Some more guestbook entries, at last! Thanks for the nice comments.

Wednesday 7th January

Added ISS crew selection methods to Active cosmonauts (which answers one of my questions on the Frustrations! page), and some more links to the Links section.

Saturday 3rd January

Another addition to Cosmonaut updates; Sergei and crewmates have been moved to a later flight (STS-122).

Worth reading is Anatoly Zak’s 2003 Chronology at Russian Space Web.

Friday 2nd January

A Happy New Year! Hopefully this one will be free of spaceflight accidents.

A new crew roster for Cosmonaut updates added. Sergei Krikalyov seems to have vanished from the flight list!

2003

Saturday 27th December

A (belated) Merry Christmas! Added a new (more flattering!) portrait of cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko to Active cosmonauts, obtained via Spacefacts.

Tuesday 23rd December

Added more links, and found out how to use highlight boxes for my hyperlinks rather than underlines (in my favorite colors of pink, purple and blue!).

Saturday 20th December

I have finally got some sort of understanding of Cascading Style Sheets, so I’m giving this a try on my site! (Their only disadvantage is that they might not work in older browsers.) For a change, I’ve altered the body font to Verdana, which seems to be popular on many sites.

Thursday 18th December

Cosmonaut photos on the Active cosmonauts page are all now in pop-up windows (the larger NASA photos appear in separate browser windows).

Wednesday 17th December

Spent the (very hot) day adding embedded styles to all my pages and tidying up the HTML a little. Also re-did Spaceflights page (in Sergei Krikalyov section) so it doesn’t take so long to load (pop-up image windows are very useful!).

Tuesday 16th December

I have redone the ISS crews and ISS visiting taxi crews pages so that photos are in pop-up windows – this much reduces download times! I'll do 8 crews to a page.

Monday 15th December

Added some computer links on website design to my Links page.

Saturday 13th December

Added the dates for 2004 Progress and Soyuz launches (as approved by Moscow) to ISS Russian launch schedule. These, of course, are subject to change! There are 4 Progress and 2 Soyuz launches. (The first Shuttle launch, STS-114, is to take place in September or October. See also Spacefacts for a tentative schedule.)

Friday 12th December

Finally found a fix for that annoying JavaScript page error! The error is generated by the Geocities server. The fix is at Home-Made HTML, or you can view it in the HTML source code for any of my pages.

Tuesday 9th December

The horrid hot Australian summer is underway (35°C or so as I write).

No new pages, but I am still adding links. I’m nearly half-way through the 15 MB allotted to this free website!

Friday 28th November

I have added more links to the Links page.

Friday 21st November

Still coming to terms with turning 33! Only 7 years away from 40 …

The NK site seems to be back up at last, or part of it (the magazine staff moved to new premises in Moscow, so the site was off-line for a few weeks).

I have added a Martian dreams page, about Energiya’s plans for a Mars mission – I am still working on the page, so it may change a bit, but I’ll put up what I've done so far. NASA tends to get all the media attention when it comes to Mars missions – they act like they’re the only ones who want to send humans there – but Energiya has proposed a feasible plan.

Saturday 8th November

I have revamped the Active cosmonauts and Cosmonaut updates pages a little. Cosmonaut updates has some more details added.

I probably won’t add any more pages for a while – I’ll take a break! I'm continuing to make minor corrections to various pages. The links to NK, GCTC and the FAS Russian Space Industry pages are still broken, but I will leave the links there in the hopes they come back.

The script error displayed on my webpages is due to a Javascript error generated by the Yahoo server, as far as I can figure out.

Sunday 2nd November

Slight corrections to ISS taxi crews and ISS expedition crews page 2 pages – added Soyuz patches from Spacefacts. I had the wrong patch for TMA-1!

Friday 31st October

More tweaking of pages – used “cellpadding” for main table instead of “blockquote” to put space between text and margin. Looks better!

Novosti-Kosmonavtiki and the Cosmonaut Training Center sites have been unavailable for a few weeks – I hope they are coming back!

I just used FrontPage to do a check for broken links, and found a whole lot of them! Though I checked them some time ago and they were OK. My apologies again … I will fix what I can.

Wednesday 29th October

Added separate page for Russian EVAs; access from Sea Eagle and Falcon or Site Map.

Tuesday 28th October

I have only had my website up just over a month, and I’ve altered its appearance several times already! Added a couple of small cosmetic changes today using inline style tags: removed the underlining from hyperlinks (looks better) and the boring grey scrollbars are now colored! I looked at the source codes of a couple of other websites to see how this was done. I have been reading about Cascading Style Sheets and think I can more-or-less understand how they work, but my website would need a major reworking to utilize them! CSSs don’t work on older browsers, so I will leave things as they are for now.

Note that the colored scrollbars don’t show up in the Netscape browser, rather disappointingly! (I just installed it and had a look.)

Expedition 7 also landed safely today, as was mentioned on the news, and in the right spot this time!

Monday 27th October

Put a small, low-resolution photo of myself on the Site map page, if anyone is interested … (Not that you’re missing much.) I also figured out how to center the main text on each page … just put “center” before the main table. Duh! (I’m still learning …)

Sunday 26th October

Ooops again! Joachim from Spacefacts alerted me that some of my picture links on the Active cosmonauts page were broken – I had saved the photos with a capital first letter, but written the links to them in small letters which thus nullified the links, so that is now remedied.

Saturday 25th October

Russian launch schedule added (access from ISS Russian segment or Site Map). Also added somewhat better Challenger and Columbia crew photos to Fallen Stars.

Wednesday 22nd October

My second guestbook entry! Thanks to Bob and Kjell for their compliments. :-)

Monday 20th October

Updated Expedition 8 on ISS crews 2 page (new Energiya photo), plus new Energiya portraits of Kaleri and Tokarev. Expedition 8 launched on Saturday and will be docking to the ISS sometime today.

Wednesday 15th October

Site Map added, as well as Kosmonavt 67 Sergei Krikalyov tribute page (biography and links). Access this from Active cosmonauts (click on his name) or the Site Map.

Monday 13th October

ISS crews split up; 4 crews per page (2 pages at the moment). Pages will get too long, otherwise.

Saturday 11th October

I have changed all body backgrounds to white with dark text – easier to read and print out. (Make sure the “Print background colors and images” option [Tools | Internet Options] is unchecked!)

I have also deleted Mission patches and put images of these after each Expedition in ISS crews. The ISS visiting crews are now linked to this on a separate page, Taxi crews.

An “error on page” message also shows up when I view my website through Internet Explorer 6. I’ve noticed this on some other websites, but I can’t figure out what it is! I don’t know if it’s the HTML code or what.

Wednesday 8th October

Cosmonaut updates added (access from Active cosmonauts page). I’m still “tweaking” the appearance of my pages.

Tuesday 7th October

Trying a new look for webpage backgrounds – easier to read! Also, one guestbook entry already!

Monday 6th October

Glossary added (Russian space words).

Sunday 5th October

ISS mission patches added (access from ISS crews page).

Saturday 4th October

Guestbook added! Please talk to me! :-)

Thursday 2nd October

ISS crews added.

Saturday 27th September

Been going through my external links and found a few broken ones. Ooops! My apologies … I’m in the process of fixing them.

Thursday 25th September

ISS Russian segment added.

Sunday 21st September

FINALLY manage to get site uploaded and working, after several attempts!