The Last Frontier

The Space Travel Page

A million years from now, our descendants will populate this galaxy. From the red dwarfs of the globular clusters to the blue giants of the galactic nucleus, a hundred billion stars will shine on the homes of a trillion trillion human beings.
--Marshall T. Savage in The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in 8 Easy Steps
Mankind has taken its first tentative steps towards the stars. Unmanned probes have visited every planet of the solar system other than Pluto, flown past comets and asteroids, plumbed the atmosphere of Jupiter, and landed on Venus and Mars. As well, 12 men have set foot on the Moon.

Plans now in train will in a few short years see a probe land on Titan, more (unmanned) landings on Mars, a Pluto mission (maybe), a Europa orbiter, and even (albeit little more than a glimmer in NASA's eye at the moment) a craft to probe far out beyond the heliopause. A kind of precursor to a starship.

On these page you will find links to information on all of these, plus many other missions, past, present, and future (as well as a few that never got off the ground). As well, there are links to commercial and non-profit space ventures (as well as the government agencies), launch vehicles, space colonisation and settlement sites, and space exploration in general.

What won't you find? Earth-based and earth-orbiting astronomy--in fact (with certain notable exceptions such as the space stations and Gravity Probe B) earth-orbiting satellites in general. That basically means you will not find things like Hubble or (for the most part) SETI covered here. On the other hand, if somebody has plans afoot to put a telescope on the moon or at one of the Lagrangian points, a link will eventually find its way onto this page.

The vast majority of the pages linked here are HTML ones. For the most part I have steered clear of PDF (ie Adobe Acrobat) documents. There are, however, a number of exceptions, mainly those which seemed particularly interesting or important. For example, Robert Forward's 1986 paper to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society reviewing the Feasibility of Interstellar Travel. These are marked by a "(PDF)" after the title. To view them you you will need to have the Adobe Acrobat Reader program installed on your computer, which (if you don't have it) can be downloaded free of charge from Adobe's website. Note that some of these PDF files can be very large, and may therefore take a while to download, especially over a modem connection.

These pages were last updated on 6 December 2000.
6 December 2000: It's been quite a while (two and a half years) since I last updated these pages, and consequently the present update is very large (and has taken some three months). All existing links have been tested, and (where possible) fixed. Unfortunately, there may still be the occasional broken one. When after an interval of several months (on impulse) I tested some of the links a second time I found that a couple of those I had already fixed had changed and had to be hunted down again!

I have also done some reorganisation, particularly between the Missions... and Exploring... parts; and the About... page has been split in two on account of its size. As well, I have made an attempt (not entirely complete) to distinguish website links from those to articles, essays, technical papers, and the like.

If you do know of any WWW pages or other online resources that might usefully be linked here, or if you do find any broken links or other blunders, send an email to s.souter@edfac.usyd.edu.au.
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