Jonathan's Space Pages

List of spaceflight missions

List of spaceflight missions

The file missions.html lists each human spaceflight mission. The columns in the table are described below:


To fully describe a human spaceflight mission we need to consider its different segments, allowing for transfer of astronauts from one ship to another and for stays aboard space stations.


A stay aboard a space station is called an expedition. Expeditions are also assigned mission tags; they are kept in a separate file to make the task of counting `number of human space mission launches' simpler. The expeditions file is expeditions.html


In the simple case, the space station mission has three segments: the ferry ship from launch to docking, the expedition from docking to undocking, and the ferry ship from undocking to landing. However more complicated situations exist, where a ferry ship docks to add crew to an existing expedition, or where the expedtion ends with cremembers remaining on board and reassigned to a new expedition.


Therefore, the start and end times of the expedition are not necessarily the start and end times of a particular crew member's stay on the station.


The third set of mission tags are called the auxiliary missions list. This is for spacecraft which are launched without anyone aboard but are later occupied. A particular case of interest here is that of the Apollo lunar modules. The auxlilary missions are listed in auxmissions.html


All these mission tag file have the same format. The columns are:

Column Descriptions