User talk:Allyddin Sane

A number of issues are still under discussion:

• Introducing better defined assessment criteria and an A-class review process
• Setting clearer importance criteria for assessing articles
• Establishing a joint task force with the Astronomy and Solar System projects to cover space telescopes and planetary probes
• Defining the roles of projects, taskforces and working groups, and processes for establishing new ones
• Improving the profile and activity of the project

Much of the current discussion is taking place on the WikiProject Spaceflight talk page, however there is still some discussion on the original proposal page.

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

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.

It was requested that the article

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.

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

A report on popular pages from December 2010 revealed surprising trends in readers' interests. Boeing X-37 was the most popular article within the project's scope, with SpaceX Dragon in second with Global Positioning System in third place. The top seven articles were all assessed as C-class, with the remainder of the top ten being Good Articles. It was noted with some concern that moon landing conspiracy theories was more popular than moon landing.

A discussion regarding whether missiles warranted inclusion within the project scope was conducted, and resulted in the continued inclusion of missiles.

The last remaining articles tagged with the banner of the former Human Spaceflight WikiProject were re-tagged with the WikiProject Spaceflight banner. The last banner was removed on 8 January, and the template has since been deleted. The project is thankful to ChiZeroOne for his work in this field.

Concerns were raised that the new article reporting system was not working correctly, however it was noted that there is sometimes a delay before articles appear on the list.

Discussion regarding the existence of the separate spaceflight and space exploration category structures led to a mass CfD being filed on 10 January to abolish the space exploration categories, merging them into their counterparts in the spaceflight category structure. This was successful, and the exploration categories have been removed. Several other categorisation issues remain unresolved.

A proposal was made to standardise some of the infoboxes used by the project, the future of Template:Infobox spacecraft (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) was discussed, and design work began on a replacement. Template:Rocket specifications-all (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) was nominated for deletion and subsequently kept due to extant substitutions, however it was noted that the template had been deprecated by WikiProject Rocketry. Concerns were also raised that the existing infoboxes were not well-equipped to handle spacecraft which operated in more than one orbit, or whose orbits changed over the course of their missions (which in practise is most of them).

Five members of the project gave interviews for the Wikipedia Signpost, and a report on the project, authored by SMasters (talk · contribs), is expected to be published in the 7 February edition of the Signpost. It is hoped that this will raise interest in and awareness of the project.

On 22 January, an H-IIB launched the second H-II Transfer Vehicle, Kounotori 2, to resupply the International Space Station. It arrived at the station on 27 January. Less than a day after its arrival, another cargo mission was launched to the station; Progress M-09M departed Baikonur early in the morning of 28 January, docking on 30 January. In addition to payloads to resupply the station, the Progress spacecraft is carrying a small subsatellite, Kedr, which will be deployed in February. Kedr does not currently have an article. Progress M-08M departed on 24 January to make the Pirs module available for Progress M-09M, and has since reentered the atmosphere. Its article needs to be updated to reflect the successful completion of its mission.

The NanoSail-D2 satellite, which failed to deploy from FASTSAT in December, unexpectedly separated from its parent craft and began operations on 18 January, with its solar sail deploying on 21 January.

Nine orbital launches are scheduled to occur in February, beginning with the launch of the first

A

Discussion was held regarding the naming of spaceflight-related articles. Concerns were raised regarding inconsistency in article titles and disambiguators. A project guideline was adopted to standardise titles, with the parenthesised disambiguators "(satellite)" and "(spacecraft)" being adopted as standards for spacecraft, and the exclusion of manufacturers' names from article titles was recommended. Issues regarding Japanese spacecraft with two names, the correct names for early Apollo missions, and dealing with acronyms and abbreviated names remain unresolved.

A large number of articles were moved to conform to the standard disambiguation pattern. In addition, several Requested Moves were debated. A proposal to move

Help was requested for adding citations to List of Mir spacewalks. A request was made that STS-88 be reviewed against the B class criteria, and suggestions for improvements made. Another user requested improvements to the article Yuri Gagarin, with a view to having the article promoted to featured status in time for the fiftieth anniversary of his Vostok 1 mission. As a result of this request, Yuri Gagarin is this month's selected article.

Questions were raised as to whether an article or category should be created to cover derelict satellites. The categorisation of spacecraft by the type of rocket used to place them into orbit was also suggested. In another categorisation issue, it was questioned whether Space law should fall under space or spaceflight.

Stop press: Mission: Earth, Voyage to the Home Planet has now been promoted to GA status.

№	Article	Movement
1	Space Shuttle Challenger disaster	↑14 (15)
2	Richard Branson	↑5 (7)
3	Neil Armstrong	↑2 (5)
4	Space Shuttle Columbia disaster	↑16 (20)
5	Global Positioning System	↓2 (3)
6	Apollo 11	↑2 (8)
7	Satellite	↑4 (11)
8	Space Shuttle Challenger	↑42 (50)
9	Apollo 13	↓3 (6)
10	NASA	↓1 (9)

For the full list of the top 1,500 popular pages within the project, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Spaceflight/Popular pages (or the archived record for January).

His article describes him and his spaceflight experience:

The article is currently assessed as C class, and had been assessed as B class prior to the criteria being redefined. Although a full reassessment has not yet been made, it seems close to the B class criteria, however details on his spaceflight experiences are somewhat lacking. It has been requested that the article be developed to Featured status by April, in time for the fiftieth anniversary of his mission.

An

User:ChiZeroOne has set up a collaboration page in his userspace, initially focussing on articles related to Skylab. Collaboration pages were at one point proposed as part of the structure of the Spaceflight project itself, however no consensus was achieved on the issue. If this collaboration is successful, it could open the door to a reevaluation of that situation.

Five orbital launches were conducted in February, out of nine planned. The first, that of the

Category:Derelict satellites orbiting Earth was created as a result of discussion surrounding the categorisation of derelict satellites. Concerns have also been raised that satellites are being listed as no longer being in orbit whilst still in orbit and derelict, and a discussion was held on how their status could be verified. An effort to categorise spacecraft by the type of rocket used to launch them is underway, however the categorisation of satellites by country of launch was rejected.

It was reported that a

A particular concern was raised regarding false claims in the article Van Allen radiation belt. In one case a scientist to whom one of the claims had been attributed was contacted, and clarified that he had made a remark to that effect as a joke in the 1960s, but was not entirely sure how or why it had been included in the article. Other concerns were raised before the discussion moved to WikiProject Astronomy.

A question was raised regarding the copyright status of images credited to both NASA and ESA, particularly with regard to images of the launch of the Johannes Kepler ATV. The discussion reached no general conclusions, however it was found that the specific images that were suggested for inclusion in the article could be used, since they were explicitly declared to be in the public domain.

A template, Template:Spaceflight landmarks (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs), was created to cover landmarks in the United States that are related to spaceflight. Several sources of public-domain NASA images were also discussed, and it was noted that almost all NASA images are public domain, however there are some exceptions.

It has been proposed that

Presumably, the lack of collaboration is due to folks not being aware of what's going on, so here's a quick rundown of some of the ways you get involved in the group effort. Firstly, and most importantly, it'd be fantastic if more members got involved in the discussions ongoing at the project's main talk page, found at

Secondly, it was established earlier on in the project's formation that a great way to attract more editors would be to develop some good or featured topics. There are a couple of efforts ongoing to try to see this idea to fruition, such as the

Satellite was the most popular article of February, up six places from seventh in December. STS-133 was the highest climber in the top 10, up 78 places from 88^th. January's most popular article, Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, dropped seven places to eighth. Moon landing remains ahead of moon landing conspiracy theories for the second month in a row.

Of the top ten, two articles are featured content, two are listed as Good Articles, and the remaining six are assessed as C-class.

№	Article	Movement
1	Satellite	↑6 (7)
2	Space Shuttle	↑11 (13)
3	NASA	↑7 (10)
4	Neil Armstrong	↓1 (4)
5	Apollo 13	↑4 (9)
6	Global Positioning System	↓1 (5)
7	International Space Station	↑5 (12)
8	Space Shuttle Challenger disaster	↓7 (1)
9	Apollo 11	↓3 (6)
10	STS-133	↑78 (88)

For the full list of the top 1,500 popular pages within the project, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Spaceflight/Popular pages (or the archived record for February).

The article is currently assessed as start-class, and is missing a lot of information. It also lacks some basic features such as inline citations. Since Europa was a fairly major programme, enough information should be available to produce a much higher quality article, and it could probably be brought up to GA status with enough effort.