Update November 24 2003: I've now found that there is a way to run STSPLUS under Linux! See the STSPLUS On Linux page for full details.

The idea of space travel - particularly the human exploration of space - has always fascinated me. I have fond memories of bunking off school to watch some of the later Apollo lunar landing missions on TV, and of pestering the headmaster at school to get the TV projector rigged up in one of the lecture theatres for the first manned shuttle flight. Until quite recently, it was almost impossible for ordinary people to get anywhere near to any of our home planet's space flight programmes. Several relatively recent developments have contrived to change this - the rise of the Internet, the fall of communism in the old Soviet Union and the increased "commercialisation" of the space industry, to name but a few. Thanks to the seti@home project, it's now even possible for those with Internet access to play an active part in the hunt for intelligent life outside of our own solar system. Which reminds me - now that I've got DSL at home, I really must get this set up and running...

A good place to start is, of course, the NASA home page at http://www.nasa.gov - if there were any awards for pure quantity of information on a web site, NASA would surely win them all!

If you know when and where to look in the night sky, it is also possible to see several orbiting satellites and spacecraft without ever leaving your back garden. I used to use a DOS based program called STSPLUS to predict when I'd be able to see interesting things from my back yard. The program provides a 'real-time' display of the positions of one or more of a list of nominated satellites and/or spacecraft. The screen shot here shows STSPLUS tracking the position of the Russian MIR space station. If you click on the picture, there's a bigger version which shows the details a bit more clearly.

Now that I'm using Linux for 99.999% of my computing needs, it's probably appropriate to give some details on setting up some suitable spacecraft tracking facilities under that OS. Fellow Linux users should therefore select the Linux Software link from the menu on the left and read on...