A volunteer project to bring to life early manned space flight in a searchable, linkable format. In fifty years since mankind began to explore in person the universe outside our home planet, there have been many memorable moments, of beauty, of bravery, and occasionally of tragedy. For those who did not live through them it is sometimes difficult to appreciate the excitement of these early flights. Spacelog aims to bring those missions back to life: a website for exploring manned space missions through transcripts of conversations from during the flights between those in space and those back on the ground, and from photography taken at the time.

To date there have been over two hundred human spaceflight missions. Only a small number of these are currently available on Spacelog, although we’d be delighted for assistance in getting more up and alive. For NASA missions, the transcripts Spacelog works from were prepared in the 60s and 70s; from there, they’ve been scanned, converted to text, and then cleaned up by Spacelog volunteers. There are a whole bundle of different tasks that people can help out on, from the very small (such as noticing and pointing out a problem with a transcription of a particular mission) up to the fairly large (transcribing an entire mission). Along the way there are jobs involving writing new material (biographies, descriptions of key moments and phases, and so on), selecting images for use in missions (and possibly cropping or preparing them in Photoshop), and if you’re a programmer you can get hold of the source code behind the site, and help develop Spacelog further.

In general, the first step in getting involved is simply to tell Spacelog you’re around and interested. Drop an email to the spacelog@googlegroups.com mailing list, and ask any questions you need to get started. If you use IRC, the team tends to hang out on #spacelog, which can be more useful if you need to ask a number of related questions.

Project owners + coordinators: The Spacelog Team

To learn more and participate, visit: http://spacelog.org

To stay up-to-date on this project:

follow https://twitter.com/spacelog

join https://groups.google.com/group/spacelog

chat on irc://irc.freenode.net/#spacelog

copy-pasted from: http://spacehack.org/project/spacelog