Jonathan's Space Pages

List of spaceflight rides

The file rides.html lists each individual's role on each human spaceflight mission. There are three subsections: human space rides, chimp space rides, and aborted space rides. The entries are ordered chronologically in each subsection. The order of rides within a mission follow the order most commonly used by the mission's launch agency when listing the roles. The columns in the table are described below:

Column Descriptions

• Ride No Sequential ride number in this subsection.
• Program - Which program the spaceflight was part of. See programs.html
• Categ - each participant is assigned one of the following categories to disinguish military space fliers (M) from the various kinds of civilian astronaut (C and P categories).

  
  

  Code	Meaning
  M	Active military (even if on loan to a civilian space agency)
  C	Civilian government employee
  PG	Private individual assigned to the mission by a government space agency
  PB	Private individual flown on the mission by their private-sector (business or nonprofit) employer
  PS	Private individual flown as a staff member of the private-sector (commercial or nonprofit) mission operator.
  PT	Private individual flying as a tourist
  A	Non-hominid animal (only chimpanzees included for now)

  
  The distinction in the PB vs PS class os based on whether or not the business is the mission operator or not (are you a staff member - like a flight attendant - or just a business traveller?).

• Role Code An abbreviation assigned by me as a short mnemonic for the role (see next item). The code consists of two components separared by a solidus (slash): the mission code and the role sub-code for that particular role. The mission code is the same as that used in the missions file.
• Mission The mission name, as in the missions file.
• HSFID The mission ID, as in the missions file.
• Role Traditionally, each person on each mission has an assigned and usually unique role on the mission - e.g. 'Commander', 'Mission Specialist 3'. I have attempted here to give the role name used by the agency operating the mission. For some recent tourist missons it is not always clear if official role names exist, or what they are, but I have made a best guess.
• Name Full name of the individual at the time of launch, including rank and other honorifics.
• Rank Military rank of the individual at the time of launch, if any. Provided separately here for convenience.
• Employer - Organization code for the organization or agency of which the individual is an employee, except for ride category PT (tourist) when then individual's employer, if any, is consider not to be relevant.

  
  For simplicity, the owner of a company is treated here as an `employee' of that company, whether or not that is formally true (see e.g.: Branson, Bezos).

• Sponsor - Organization code for the organization/agency providing the seat on the mission. Often different from the employer - for example for a USAF officer flying as a NASA astronaut, the employer is USAF but the sponsor is NASA. Similarly a university payload specialist on Shuttle remained an employee of their university but their seat on flight was assigned and funded (sponsored) by NASA.

  
  Note that the sponsor of a particular ride (seat) is not always the operator of the mission. For example, NASA procured individual seats on Soyuz flights operated by Roskosmos.

• ID - The astronaut ID number from the astro.html astronauts list.
• LDate Launch date and time, taken from the missions list.
• Duration Launch to landing duration for the ride. Format days:hr:min:sec (truncated in some cases when full precision is not available).

  
  A trailing asterisk indicates that the flight was still in progress at the time the table was last updated.

• Segments - The list of segments. Each ride is a series of mission segments, of which the first, the launch segment, is identified in the RoleCode column. For missions which have more than one segment, the additional segments are given as a comma-separated list of role codes in the Segments column. See roles.html for an explanation of the role code format.

  
  The segment lists are used to automatically generate the segments file which has one line per segment with full details on each segment. Rather than parse the segment list you may want to consult the segments file directly.