If nasaspaceflight.com and its forum is blocked for you too, here’s how to access it
Sometime last year, nasaspaceflight.com (NSF) stopped loading for me. I could not access any page on its website, all of which said “Sorry, you have been blocked” no matter which browser I tried. Since then I’ve been accessing the NSF site in alternate ways because of their valuable space journalism and their active forum. Lately, the issue seems to have grown. Multiple people in India have been noting that they’re unable to access the NSF site or its forum. Some of them reached out to me asking for a solution. I shared multiple solutions with them, and they found it useful. As such, I’m sharing those here on my blog hoping to help all who may be affected the same way with this or another such useful website.
A VPN is the obvious thing people try when a website isn’t accessible. But the thing is it may or may not work reliably for nasaspaceflight.com because it’s actually the Cloudflare service they use as the site traffic intermediary that’s blocking access for certain visitors based on its blackbox-esque security implementation. It doesn’t provide anything in the way of a human fix, not even the hated CAPTCHA nor a contact email on the error page. The bottomline is even if the NSF site loads for you through a VPN today, it may not tomorrow. I doubt NASASpaceflight folks are even notified of these blocks by Cloudflare.
More reliable solutions to access NSF’s website
- To follow NSF’s coverage and forum discussions, subscribe to their RSS feeds. These work because feed readers fetch website content using a different mechanism and usually from server locations different than yours. Here are the links to the NSF website’s RSS feed and its forum. If like me you’re interested in continually following only a particular category on their website, each of them have RSS feeds too—such as their Artemis coverage feed.
- Use the Internet Archive and its browser extension to access specific pages you come across from NSF. If a page is not archived and service shows you no results, it can still work. If you initiate saving a new copy from there itself, it usually is able to save one because their servers are elsewhere than yours and so can access the site to grab a copy.
- Add the “Instapaper Text” bookmarklet to my browser. When you come across a NSF site page, clicking on the bookmarklet will access the article through Instapaper and parse the text and media for you.
I hope these solutions help. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like guidance on enabling these solutions.