Site information
From 2001 I was writing some ISS-related stories for myself and gathered a lot of material and links during my research, and thought that I could put this together in the form of a website. I created my “RuSpace” website to provide information about the Russian space program that I felt was interesting and (hopefully) useful, as well as being a source of links to many other sites I liked and had found helpful.
The site was first created at Yahoo! Geocities and first uploaded on 21 September 2003. Some pages of the original version of the site can be viewed at the Internet Archive. I have stored the Updates page locally and the Guestbook (archived and local versions). I initally named it “Kosmonavtka,” «Космонавтка» (Russian for lady cosmonaut) as I was stumped for a site name, but later came to dislike it (it is awkward to pronounce, sounds odd and makes no sense to most), so I renamed it in 2010.
The website was not really planned from the beginning; instead it has grown and evolved rather haphazardly. It seems to have consolidated into information about the contemporary Russian space program, rather than try to attempt the enormous task of a complete history, which is covered quite adequately by other sites. “RuSpace” is by no means a comprehensive overview of the Russian space program; I have concentrated on topics of interest to me.
The other sites of my collective were originally part of this one! They just grew also, and branched off into their own sites.
The logical color choice for my website would have been white-blue-red – the Russian flag colors – but I dislike red and it looked garish when I tried using it in my site design, so I substituted a nice shade of pink :-).
Some small screenshots of my site at different times (see my main About my site page for a more detailed overview):
Why does the Russian space program appeal to me? It’s a bit hard to express coherently, but some reasons are:
- I grew up during the Cold War (was a teenager in the 1980s), and the USSR of then was an enigmatic superpower. I never regarded the “Evil Empire” as such, but more of an intriguing alternative world. I still feel an odd emotional attachment to Russia, despite having no ancestry there, or ever having visited (so far …).
- The Russian program seems to have a spiritual/emotional element that is lacking in the prosaic programs of the West (NASA, etc.) There is a Russian philosophy called Cosmism, a sort of merging of spirituality and the cosmos. I think the space program in the Soviet era was almost a quasi-religion, a replacement for the then-banned Orthodox Church. I could still envision the two merging again (cosmonauts as angels literally ascending to the Heavens/the Cosmos).
- I love Soviet-era space art, such as the Soviet space-themed posters. These were hand-painted or drawn, and the designs quite imaginative and inspiring. Yes, of course, it was propaganda (a lot of it aimed at children, who would seem poignantly naïve compared to digital-media-saturated children now), but it is still art in its own right.
2:09 PM Tuesday, 6 September 2022