Wikipedia:WikiProject Spaceflight/Downlink/2011/January

Project News will provide details of discussions about and changes in the organisation and structure of the project, newly recognised content, and changes in membership. News from Orbit will summarise spaceflight news and upcoming events, and list suggestions for articles in need of updating as a result. Article News will give details of requests for assistance within articles, and discussions regarding content.

All members of WikiProject Spaceflight are invited to contribute any content that they would like to see in the newsletter, and we would particularly welcome the submission of editorials, or an article about an area of spaceflight which you are working on, or particularly interested in. Please see The Downlink page for more details.

A new working group has been formed. The space stations working group is expected to work towards creating Featured topics related to space stations. It currently has three members.

Discussion within the project is still dominated by the reorganisation proposals. A discussion over the formation and roles of working groups and task forces has led to some clarification regarding working groups, however the roles of the task forces remain vague, and several proposals to abolish them have surfaced. The Human Spaceflight to-do list has been merged into the main project to-do list, with the combined list currently located on the Tasks page of the Spaceflight portal.

A discussion regarding opening relations with the Aerospace biography task force of Wikipedia:WikiProject Aviation was held, but no conclusions were reached. The Article Alerts bot has resumed operation, and a problem with the information the bot had been delivering was discussed and resolved.

New assessment criteria for importance and quality have been implemented, and refinements continue to be made to the importance scale. The scope of the project was redefined to exclude astronomical objects explicitly. Although A-class criteria have been defined, a review process is yet to be discussed or implemented.

Colds7ream conducted an analysis of open tasks related to the reorganisation which four major issues remain unresolved: Discussion concerning the existence and roles of task forces within the project; recruitment of new editors; updating guidelines and whether the project or the task forces should be responsible for maintaining them; and the continued existence of the Human spaceflight portal six weeks after consensus was reached to abolish it.

Discussion about the structure of the project is ongoing, with several proposals currently on the table. One proposal calls for the abolition of task forces in favour of increased emphasis on working groups, whilst another calls for the task forces to become a list of topics. The idea of a formal collaboration system has been suggested, however opposition has been raised.

One of the main open tasks at the moment is replacing the older {{WikiProject Space}} and {{WikiProject Human spaceflight}} banners with the new {{WikiProject Spaceflight}} banner. Articles which need to be retagged are currently listed in Category:WikiProject Spaceflight articles using deprecated project tags. ChiZeroOne is doing a very good job replacing them, but as of the morning of 31 December, there are still 1,424 left to be converted. Additionally, the implementation of a new B-class checklist built into the template has necessitated the reassessment of former B-class articles, which the template has automatically classified as C-class.

On 8 December the Dragon C1 demonstration mission was conducted, with the SpaceX Dragon making a little under two orbits of the Earth on its maiden flight, before landing in the Pacific Ocean to complete a successful mission. The Falcon 9 rocket which launched the Dragon spacecraft also deployed eight CubeSats: SMDC-ONE 1, QbX-1, QbX-2, Perseus 000, Perseus 001, Perseus 002, Perseus 003 and Mayflower. The CubeSats do not currently have articles.

On 15 December, a Soyuz-FG launched Soyuz TMA-20 to the International Space Station, carrying three members of the Expedition 26 crew. It docked two days later. The Soyuz TMA-20 article is currently short, and could use improvements to bring it up to the same level as articles for US manned spaceflights. On 17 December, a Long March 3A launched Compass-IGSO2. There is currently no article for this satellite.

17 December saw Intelsat regain control of the Galaxy 15 satellite, which had been out of control since a malfunction in April. The Galaxy 15 article is in need of serious cleanup and a good copyedit. On 25 December a GSLV Mk.I failed to place GSAT-5P into orbit. A Proton-M with a Briz-M upper stage successfully launched KA-SAT on 26 December. Barring any suborbital launches at the end of the month which have not yet been announced (a NASA Black Brant was scheduled for December but does not appear to have flown), 2010 in spaceflight concluded on 29 December when an Ariane 5ECA launched the Hispasat-1E and Koreasat 6 spacecraft. These do not currently have articles.

Four launches are currently scheduled to occur in January 2011. A Delta IV Heavy is expected to launch NRO L-49 on 17 January. The satellite is expected to be an Improved Crystal electro-optical imaging spacecraft. Two launches are planned for 20 January, with Kounotori 2, the second H-II Transfer Vehicle, being launched by an H-IIB, and the Zenit-3F making its maiden flight to deploy Elektro-L No.1, the first Russian geostationary weather satellite to be launched since 1994. On 28 January Progress M-09M will be launched by a Soyuz-U. 28 January will also be the twenty-fifth anniversary of the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-51-L.

It was requested that the article Walter Haeussermann be expanded. Haeussermann, a member of the von Braun rocket group, died on 8 December. Although the article has been updated following his death, a user requested that more information about the engineer be added. Another user requested that the articles Commercial Space Launch Act and Launch Services Purchase Act be created, to cover laws of the United States concerning spaceflight.

Articles related to methods of taking-off and landing were discussed. The term VTVL currently has an article whilst VTHL and HTHL do not. It was suggested that the existing article should be merged, and each term be covered by the article for the equivalent aviation term, however some distinction between use in the fields of aviation and spaceflight should remain.

Concern was raised that a large scale deletion request could cause many images to be lost from articles, help was requested to investigate whether any of the images were not subject to copyright, or if they were then whether they could be uploaded to the English Wikipedia under a claim of fair use.

Concerns were raised about a large amount of content in the newly-created article deorbit of Mir duplicating existing content in existing Good Article Progress M1-5. A proposal to merge deorbit of Mir into Progress M1-5 was made, however objections were raised, and discussion has since stalled without reaching a consensus. It has also been requested that the article Mir be copyedited.

The existence of separate categories for "spaceflight" and "space exploration" has been questioned, with a suggestion that some of the exploration categories, including Category:Space exploration iteslf, should be merged into their spaceflight counterparts.

Missile Range Instrumentation Ship is currently listed at requested moves, with a proposal to rename it tracking ship. The only open good article nomination is of the book Mission: Earth, Voyage to the Home Planet, which is currently awaiting review.

Another way to improve the activity of the project is to attract more editors. Spaceflight is a topic which many people have at least a very casual interest in, and therefore it is strange that there are only about four or five people regularly participating in discussions on the project talk page. Evidently action is needed to raise the profile of the project.

One way in which the project's profile can be raised is to have a major success associated with it. The creation of a featured topic could be one such success, and would also be hugely beneficial to articles in the area that it relates to. Space Stations are one of the most high-profile and notable areas of spaceflight, and are therefore a logical choice to spearhead such an initiative.

To this end, in late December a working group was established to concentrate and coordinate efforts to establish featured topics related to space stations. An initial proposal calls for topics on Skylab, Salyut, Mir and the International Space Station, as well as one on space stations in general. There is currently an effort to get Mir promoted to Good Article status; the article currently requires a copyedit, after which it will be sent for peer review and then to GAN.

This is by no means a short-term project. There are many articles, particularly for the larger space stations such as the ISS and Mir, which are currently nowhere near becoming recognised content. Skylab is the smallest of the proposed featured topics, but it still requires that three C-class articles, two Start-class articles and a redirect all reach at least Good Article status, with at least three becoming Featured Articles. The ISS topic is so large that it may have to be subdivided.

I don't expect that we will have any featured topics by the end of the year, but I believe that a Good Topic, which requires all articles reach at least GA status, but does not require any featured articles, may be possible. I also believe that several articles on the subject can easily be improved to Good Article status, and some articles may be at featured level by the end of the year. In the long term, having featured topics will benefit the project and its content.

The Salyut 2 article describes the station:

The article is currently assessed as start class, and is in need of attention. It consists of the above paragraph, along with a list of specifications and an infobox. The article needs to be rewritten in a more encyclopaedic style, and with more information about the space station. It has not yet been determined whether Salyut 2 would have to be included in a featured topic about the Salyut programme, or whether since it was never manned it is less integral to the topic, however if its inclusion were necessary then in its current form it would be a major impediment to this. Downlink readers are encouraged to improve this article, with a view to getting it to B-class and possibly a viable Good Article candidate by the end of the month.