About Spacebasics
Since I was young I have consumed space content from across the web, varing greatly in its level of complexity and quality. I understand, therefore, that finding quality content when you don't know where to look can be difficult. For this reason, I began to consider creating a sort of repository where information about a variety of space-related topics would be available at various levels of complexity. For years, though, I would not realize the opportunity to create such a site.
My opportunity came in junior year at Technology High School. All of us in NHS, the National Honors Society, were required to complete an individual project as one of our service obligations to the club and the community. While many kindly volunteered their efforts locally, I was motivated to create a project which could potentially gain a wider reach while also using my knowledge of aerospace and my ability to research. I also considered possible integration with the nearby Robert Ferguson Observatory, where I had already dedicated hundreds of volunteer hours presenting, operating telescopes, and more. Quickly, I began work on this website.
So, what makes Spacebasics unique? Firstly, it's the wide range of topics available. While many excellent sources are available, they often focus on a certain area: perhaps some deep dive into historical rockets, while others examine asrophysics. One who wants a common repository for all space-related topics may be left with either one too broad, such as an encycopaedia, or one too complex, as with a repository of scientific papers. I hope that Spacebasics can fill this niche. Secondly, the accessbility of the "complexity toggle" allows readers to easily tune their experience based on their comprehension, maximizing usefulness across ages and knowledge levels. Finally, NGSS alignment makes the topics additionally relevant to students, while dynamic animations make the reading captivating.
Although I had worked on websites by the time that I developed this one, my overall knowledge was very limited, especially with respect to my chosen architecture for this site: Astro, which I chose because of the potentially dynamic-content heavy nature of the site should I include animations or interactive elements. It is both far more powerful and far more complex than the likes of Wordpress, for example. It is, therefore, tempting to use artificial intelligence to assist with the design of the site. While I initially avoided this option due to ethical and practical issues with generative AI, I ultimately decided that the time expended in trying to entirely avoid AI (and therefore the time lost for developing content) would have been too great.
Regardless of any AI use on the site's "shell," I can promise with absolute certainty that I will never, ever generate any part of this site's educational content, information so deeply crucial and easy to manipulate, with AI. Links to other sources on any given topic are provided to verify any information in the article.
Thank you for visiting Spacebasics. I hope that it brightens your day (or darkens the night) just a little bit!
- Aaron Goldfield