Talk:STS-8

STS-8 has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
August 23, 2009	Good article nominee	Listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on July 27, 2009.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the Space Shuttle mission STS-8 flew Guy Bluford (pictured), the first African-American astronaut?

Cat

Can anyone explain the cat? Ravenmasterq 16:24, 20 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm trying to get some more information on it. At the time, it was just a crew photo that was of a much higher quality than the one previously on the page. Cjosefy 17:47, 20 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Still, there's got to be a reason why the cat is in the photo. Maybe it was part of the crew? :P --Kitch ^{(Talk : Contrib)} 02:38, 29 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, and that new caption doesn't help much at all...Ravenmasterq 20:32, 26 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

African American

The article says this flight had the first African American in space. I'm assuming that no black person from any other country flew before him. Shouldn't it really say he was the first "black" person in space to stress that no European or Russian flight had had a black crew member before. Or maybe I assumed wrong and there was a black non-american in space before the guy in the article? I understand that there is a wish to avoid the word black to describe a race in some countries, but what do you call a person who isn't American but is black? A non-american african american? I can't think of a better decription than black, sorry. -OOPSIE- 06:04, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Even mentioning "African-American" in this article is overtly racist, divisive and soooo Frankfurt School politically correct. How about describing the rest of the crew as "Euro-American" to balance things out? Or, maybe we can give the Frankfurt School the kick in the arse that it so rightly deserves and remove gratuitous references to hyphenated-American and color of skin. —Quicksilver^{T @} 19:59, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It is misleading, as Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez was the first black person in space, having flown on a 1980 Soviet mission. But since "African-American" limits itself to Americans, while misleading, it is accurate. Canada Jack (talk) 16:38, 26 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Launch accident comment

An interesting detail - Shayler, p. 166, notes that "Interestingly enough, the Soviets had publicly criticised the near-fatal accident of STS-8 when its SRB almost burnt through just weeks before." when talking about the Soyuz T-10-1 abort. The Soyuz abort was on September 26, the day before the SRB burnthrough was discovered - I wonder how this worked out? Presumably they made the criticism before announcing their own problem, but I'd be intrigued to know the exact dates, and whether this was likely a way of deflecting attention... Shimgray | talk | 20:54, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:STS-8/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

This article deserves GA status. It is well written, neutral, stable and well referenced with in-line citations, despite the uninteresting nature and history of the STS-8 mission. A number of minor problems had been fixed during the review, as documented below. Materialscientist (talk) 04:52, 23 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Extended content

Overall impression is good. Comments

Can we explain a bit the purpose of the Asahi Shinbun experiment?
~~Naive minor question, is Challenger indeed "she" ?~~
~~Terms to clarify~~
~~"aft cargo bay"~~

~~"small solid rocket upper stage"~~

~~"manifest" (perhaps a note intended for non-specialists or non-native speakers)~~

Materialscientist (talk) 07:52, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, that was a quick response! In order:

I'll look into this - I'm honestly not quite clear. I think it was something to do with nucleation of ice particles, but I'll try to find a clear explanation.
It's an open question. We use "she" fairly broadly for ships; I've always had a habit for using it for named spacecraft, because it seems right by analogy. That said, I'm happy to change it.
Done.

Any other thoughts? Shimgray | talk | 14:41, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

~~"After a successful insertion into a circular orbit at 160 nautical miles" why nautical miles? In any case, I guess km should be added.~~ Materialscientist (talk) 08:17, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"The launch, in darkness, was the first American night launch since Apollo .." Just for personal curiosity, why this and Apollo articles stress American? Did Soviets fly at night? Vostok missions didn't, Salyut did, but I'm not sure which were manned. Materialscientist (talk) 08:17, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
There is ample part on planning, which should be balanced by (a brief summary of) mission achievements and their impact. The analysis is so far focused on minor incidents and routine operation which sound almost like training (which off course it is, but). Granted, the INSAT part is explained, but doesn't seem enough. This is perhaps the major problem to be addressed. Materialscientist (talk) 09:02, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

160nm because that's how the source gives it. I don't know why NASA like(d) using nm for orbital heights, but it seems to have been common practice - I assume it's an aviation thing? I'll add a conversion.
I honestly don't know. Some Soyuz flights may well have been in darkness; Soyuz 1 in 1967 was apparently the first manned night launch, and Soyuz T-10 - the aborted launch in September 83 - was also night or at least twilight. The sources all either stress American or seem to be implicitly working within that context. I've not seen anyone refer to it as the first night launch anywhere. Best to be cautious here, I think.
This is a bit of an annoyance - NASA didn't seem to publish a mission report, and this was one of the least "interesting" flights in that very little actually happened outside the plan. Most of the details I have are planning documents and press kits; there's very little that explicitly talks about this mission in the past tense, and what there is is quite limited. The experimentation was mostly dull routine stuff; the PFTA and TDRS had some impact, but mostly of the form of "yes, this works, we can go ahead". I should be able to scare up some more details, though - how do you think it would be best done, as a separate "Results" section, or merged into the orbital activities? Shimgray | talk | 14:30, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Up to you. I would scramble a separate section (a summary), but smooth flow of text is more important than traditions, i.e. if the text fits nicer into "orbital activities" then why not. Materialscientist (talk) 23:23, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've been looking at the other Shuttle GAs (there's only two, which surprises me) - STS-74 and STS-125. Both have a pretty firm chronological layout, though admittedly there's a lot more material available for both to do it this way. I'll aim for this pattern, I think, but I'm afraid it might be a few more days until I can sort it all out. Sorry about the delay! Shimgray | talk | 09:56, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

...wow, that took a while. Sorry; it slipped my mind entirely. I've hacked together a section with comments on all the main projects (TRDS, PFTA and INSAT) and notes on a couple of others; the rest, there's a bit of a dearth of. The materials research work seems to have been used - it's cited in a few papers - but not really in a way I can easily mention; the rest is a blank. Shimgray | talk | 14:41, 22 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wake-up calls

I would like to remove the "wake-up calls" section from this article (and by extension every other, but baby steps...). I've tried this twice but been reverted because we need more discussion; the problem is, there doesn't seem to be any central discussion anywhere on these ;-)

To summarise my objections to the practice, generally speaking:

The information is trivial. I can't see how it's particularly interesting or informative to a casual reader, which is borne out by most article-length histories choosing to to omit them.
Covering it separately gives undue weight to the concept; they imply that what songs were played to the crew for five minutes each morning is as relevant as the scientific results of the mission.
In any case where it's specifically relevant and interesting, we can mention it - appropriately - in the context of the event itself. ("Flight day seven began, appropriately, with...")

It's been suggested we should retain it because it's consistent, since many other NASA spaceflight articles have these templates. But consistency could just as easily be an argument for removing them all; we should never feel compelled to keep material just because someone added it, and I really don't see how having these sections improves our articles.

Does anyone have strong feelings either way? Comments appreciated, and apologies if I sound frustrated... Shimgray | talk | 09:57, 21 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm uncomforatable with simply deleting the information out of hand. If you're up to working it into the other text, within the STS-8#Orbital_operations section in this article, for example, I would be completely supportive of that.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 14:18, 21 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think that would be the ideal solution... except we run into undue-weight issues. This would work elegantly on a detailed article such as STS-128, where we have a solid paragraph or more per flight day. Here, we've a couple of scrappy lines - I had trouble finding even this much - and adding a bit about the songs each morning would make most of the section about that, which brings us back to one of the original problems. Shimgray | talk | 14:32, 21 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It'll take some more digging for these older missions, but the sources are most definately out there to make all of the STS articles look like STS-128 (actually, they easily could and probably should be even longer, but I say that as something of a space flight fan). I've actually been meaning to take on expanding at least some of these Shuttle mission articles, I just keep putting it off is all. I think that the main point is not to get lost in the current state of the article. If we start deleting all the little details because they seem to overwhelm the article, then we'll never have a truly complete article.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 19:01, 21 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This information is not trivial and we have a well maintained reliable source to reference it from (NASA archives). This isn't some random song playlist, the songs are very specific and chosen for their connections with the mission objectives or the individual astronauts. This is referenced in the NASA archives for most of the songs. This information is likely more interesting to the casual reader than the heavy technical details.--RadioFan (talk) 14:24, 21 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's sourced, yes. But I honestly don't understand - how on earth we can argue it's significant and non-trivial? This is material that even a comprehensive chapter-length article on the mission (Evans) reduces to a single passing comment (in a quote) on "a school song each morning", and most sources don't mention at all. If they're meaningful in the context of the individual astronauts, the appropriate place to discuss it would presumably be in that person's biography, in the section discussing that mission. Shimgray | talk | 14:32, 21 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]