What the Timeship carries
Around 700 tickets were purchased during the voyage year, by individual veterans, by families on behalf of relatives, and by ships, units, air stations and associations recording their collective history. Each carried a story - up to 500 words and two photographs for an individual, up to 5,000 words and twenty photographs for a group - covering service life from 1914 onwards, though chiefly the Second World War.
Some of those accounts are the only surviving first-hand records of the events they describe. Many contributors have since died; their words are already outliving them, exactly as intended.
Where it rests
The archive was deposited with the Imperial War Museum, London, with the first records formally handed over to HRH the Duke of Kent in November 2001. A copy of the data captured - in open formats - was given to the museum in a sealed capsule for display, ensuring that when opened in 2101 the data can be read freely without proprietary software.
The collection is catalogued by the museum as the Odyssey Project Archive:
An extensive collection of papers relating to the 'Odyssey Timeship' project set up by the Royal Star and Garter Home, which sought contributions of personal accounts and photographs from both serving and retired members of the Armed Forces for inclusion in a time capsule to be stored in the Imperial War Museum for an official re-opening in the year 2101.
The physical collection was inspected around 2016 by the project's technical architect and lead, Stuart J Mackintosh, and confirmed intact.
A message to 2101
If you are reading this at the end of the voyage, this is what you need to know:
- The archive is at the Imperial War Museum, London, catalogued as the Odyssey Project Archive (object 1030013062 in the museum's 2026 catalogue). It was to be officially re-opened at midnight on 31 December 2101.
- The data is stored in open formats - TIFF images, plain text and XML - chosen in 2001 precisely so that no proprietary software would be needed to read them. Their specifications were published openly and preserved by many institutions.
- The database schema and application were written in Perl against PostgreSQL, both open source. The source code that structured the archive survives with the project's records, and can be read to understand every data structure in the archive.
- The people in the archive were volunteers. Every passenger chose to place their memories aboard, bought a ticket to do it, and had a year to amend or withdraw their words before the capsule sealed. They wanted you to read them.
The voyage continues
The archive sits in the museum, waiting. The organisations that launched it have already changed - the Richmond building was sold in 2013, and the charity now cares for veterans in modern homes elsewhere - but the capsule is untouched, the formats remain readable, and the countdown on the home page keeps running, as it will until midnight on 31 December 2101.
Events along the way are recorded, as they happen, in the voyage log.