News Spaceflight101.com shuts down

[IronRain]

After the launch of Insight, I was reading various articles on the interwebs about the mission. I noticed that spaceflight101.com hadn't published anything yet, which surprised me.

Today, I looked again and was greeted with the following homepage:

I'm not sure on what happened and why they shut down, but I think it's a loss. Their mission previews where full of details, and they have a big list about various rockets and their details.

I've reached out to them on social media, but haven't received a reply yet.

Since I often used this site and linked to it from O-F, I thought to post this here as a final token of appreciation for what they've done.

 

[BrianJ]

Shame
They had some good info.

 

[Ripley]

Oh no, that's a loss.
I hope they'll keep their pages up.

 

[Xyon]

This is due to recent circumstances that will no-longer allow me to arrange my work & personal life around a worldwide launch schedule

This strikes me as what happens when things are run by a single person who goes and has kids or something, and suddenly priorities have to shift. It's a loss for the community, but at the same time I hope it's happy news like that, rather than any personal tragedy driving this change.

 

[IronRain]

Oh yes, I definitely hope so.

Full statement that has been posted:

No-Longer Providing In-Depth News Articles

Going forward, Spaceflight101.com will shift focus to high-level technical content and no-longer provide in-depth articles & live coverage. The site will remain a resource for technical information on launch vehicles & satellites; launches & other events will be covered in a much more concise manner with the exception of special event coverage.
This is due to recent circumstances that will no-longer allow me to arrange my work & personal life around a worldwide launch schedule. I will be able to put out roughly the same volume of content as I previously did and will do so in the form of technical content not offered by other outlets.

 

[boogabooga]

Perhaps this person should try to find a volunteer partner or something to try to share workload. Might look good on a student's CV.

 

[Urwumpe]

Perhaps this person should try to find a volunteer partner or something to try to share workload. Might look good on a student's CV.

Or a collaboration with us... we have quite a few people already covering launches of their pet rockets with quite some very good detail, maybe we could find a cooperation there to get the best of both communities.

The tricky question would be getting people interested in doing more than just a popular launcher. For example, my Twitter feed gives me some good alert on sounding rocket launches in Europe, so I could be a good volunteer for doing those campaigns. But as traveling salesman, father and Heavy Metal dude, it would be a bad idea to rely on me alone.



Idea: One technical assistance option for that would be creating a specialized rocket launch campaign CMS... Which has some interesting parallels to a past project at my paid job, regarding the planning and communication of product launch campaigns... this could actually be a profitable software project.

 

[Ripley]

This strikes me as what happens when things are run by a single person...

Wait, what?
All that info managed only by one person? OMG!

 

[Xyon]

Wait, what?
All that info managed only by one person? OMG!

An assumption of mine based on the language used in the announcement. It seems to hold up though, since the message talks about a change in personal circumstances, and uses the singular pronoun to refer to the "team" behind the site.

 

[IronRain]

A longer explanation on Facebook:

Going forward, Spaceflight101.com will shift focus to high-level technical content and no-longer provide in-depth articles & live coverage. The site will remain a resource for technical info on launch vehicles & satellites; launches & other events will be covered in a much more concise manner.

This is due to recent circumstances that will no-longer allow me to arrange my work & personal life around a worldwide launch schedule and regularly spend hours watching over countdown operations.

I will be able to put out roughly the same volume of content as I previously did and will do so in the form of overview pages on current missions and upcoming launch vehicle projects.

Patreon is paused for the June 2018 billing period, please consider pausing your contributions until the future for the project becomes fully clear over the weeks and months to come.

Apologies for any disappointment this may cause to some -- including me, though it had been coming for some time looking at the time spent with content only a very small audience seemed to appreciate.

Starting with new additions to the Launch Vehicle Library: OmegA - https://t.co/HBZgsVsRFP
Proton Medium - https://t.co/wrJFMs5ThS
Soyuz-5 - https://t.co/4wRB0TVDxk