Some Space Statistics

As one of my first Delphi projects was a front end for a data collection about human spaceflight, just to help me to find errors, to calculate statistics and last not least of course to learn Delphi. As I had some requests about the database I've uploaded most of the tables (except those containing images due to size and copyright) - it is a 600k ZIP archive, the tables are for made with Paradox 5, and the field names are mostly in German, and the database structure is probably far from being optimal. The program itself isn't finished yet (and due to lack of time it won't be in the near future) it anyway can already calculate some nice statistics and generate HTML files of them directly.

As most statistics use tables heavily so a browser without the HTML 3.2 table support will display them garbled.

About the statistics:

All data is calculated by computer, so if the start and landing dates I collected are correct these should also be correct. For some spaceflights (especially the Soviet/Russian ones) I have these times only up the minute, which of course means the seconds of the calculated times should not be take to seriously - especially since I didn't include the leap seconds in these calculations yet. :-)

As I'm not sure about the nationalities of the cosmonauts from the states of the former Soviet Union all are counted to Russia except the two which for sure come from Kazakhstan.

Only those flights with at least one orbit are counted, so the ballistic flights of Mercury 3 and 4, the two Soyuz launch aborts and the Challenger accident are not in these times.

Dates are always in the notation recommended by the ISO standard 8601, that means year-month-day hour:minute:second. This is simply to avoid all the confusion by the different date notations in different countries; if you want to know more about this ISO standard you can find a summary here. Times are always give in UTC (also known as GMT). The short codes of the nations are taken from another ISO standard, ISO 3166. There's again a summary available on the web collected by the RIPE here; both original document are copyrighted, see at the ISO web server for more info.

The sources

The data is collected from so many sources this listing must be incomplete, but nevertheless I try to list them. Some of them are in German only.

Still searching

Of course the data is still incomplete, so here's a short listing of what I'm looking for at the moment - if you can provide any of this please contact me.

AAAAA - American Association against Acronym Abuse

The following acronyms were use in the statistics for the status of the astronauts on the respective mission:

AcronymMeaning
CDRCommander
PLTPilot
SPTSenior Pilot
LMPLunar Module Pilot
CMPCommand Module Pilot
DMPDocking Module Pilot
MSxMission Specialist #x
MSxPMission Specialist #x
Payload Commander
MSxCMission Specialist #x
Commander on Space Station
MSxFMission Specialist #x
Flight Engineer on Space Station
MSxRMission Specialist #x
Cosmonaut Researcher on Space Station
ScPScience Astronaut
PSxPayload Specialist #x
FEFlight Engineer
CRCosmonaut Researcher
MRMedic Researcher
PCPhysician Cosmonaut

Last changed 1998-09-01