Template talk:Future spaceflights

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This template was considered for deletion on 14 November 2011. The result of the discussion was "keep".

It seem quite unfair to have Blue but not Virgin in this list. If the list is about orbital flights, New Shepard should be removed. And if it's about suborbital, SpaceShipTwo should be added. 194.3.185.37 (talk) 13:51, 15 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I agree; but I think of it not as unfair but inconsistent. Rowan Forest (talk) 14:51, 15 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Can those who are putting alphabetical order in place of chronological please undo their edits. The 2021 and 2022 uncrewed flights, for example, are now a confusion of timing. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 15:34, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Randy Kryn:Thanks for addressing the issue. I'd also like to recognize your tireless work fixing the italics in the spaceflight-related pages for years. Now, the primary reason I have placed the spacecrafts in alphabetical order inside each year, goes back to when I first edited this template, six years ago. In the absence of any written rules for ordering within this template, I merely followed what my predecessors were doing. While the spacecrafts were listed in chronological order by their year of flight, inside each year they were all in alphabetical order. Here's a sample of what this template looked like at the time. On a more personal note, I as a Eventualist consider listing every spacecraft in this template in chronoogical order to be rather troublesome. For instance, how will the following be placed in chronological order? [Hope Mars Mission, Mars 2020, Tianwen-1] While I intended to list the three Mars probes in alphabetical order, as of the time of my writing, this also happens to be the chronological order for their respective launch dates. Note however, that a year ago they merely had information saying they will be launched in July (July~August, to be precise), with no dates. And at the time there was one more probe in the mess. Many spacecrafts on the template, especially those whose launch is still a few years away, only have announced the year it will fly, and doesn't disclose any specific dates, let alone months. Several of them have been postponed multiple times, in the worst cases, by each year (I wont get into the specifics). Launches with a tight window, such as planetary probes and ISS missions, tend to get delayed at the last minute, and be postponed by a few days. In a chronological order, this template will need to be fixed each time that happens, whereas in an alphabetical order, it can be left alone (well unless it gets renamed), and one will remove it from the template only after the launch has occurred. As written in WP:CRYSTALBALL, matter related to the future must be dealt with care. Most launches can be ascertained by the year, so the spacecrafts are listed in chronological order in terms of it. In terms of months and dates, there is high uncertainty, so I kept them in alphabetical order, which in the long term is more reliable, and has less bias. Unless there is an editor willing to sacrifice their time to update the template everyday, the alphabetical order is more practical from a maintenance prospect. Kind regards, Hms1103 (talk) 17:17, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the full and informative reply Hms1103, and I must have been mixing this template up with another one (there are lots of space templates floating weightless in cyberspace). I saw your reply earlier, but only read a couple sentences and wanted to put my attention on this later and, in the meantime, thought of maybe a good in-between best of both worlds. But I don't know if it falls within your concerns or not. How about listing the flights which have launch months established in chronological order (so a reader, like myself, can easily see the upcoming missions and not have to dig) and the ones which don't have an established launch month or year remain in alphabetical order. Six of one, half dozen of the other. Randy Kryn (talk) 02:35, 8 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Randy Kryn:Apologies for my late reply. About the proposal to list dated spacecrafts in chronological order and have undated ones in alphabetical order, I fear the existence of two ordering schemes in the same section may confuse newcomers. Another concern is that once in a while, a spacecraft which previously had a set launch date (or month) gets delayed without revealing a new specified date. A recent example of this is the James Webb Space Telescope.[1] Every time this happens, there will be a back and forth between the chronologically listed parts, and the alphabetically listd parts. As written in my first post, if it's all in an alphabetical order, there will be no need for rearranging, even when a delay happens. That said, I would say that there probably would be no harm in adopting chronological order in this template for the crewed launches, as for the near future there probably won't be more than ten launches each year. For the robotic probes, I feel using alphabetical order within each year is better, simply because they are numerous. Please also note that in a chronological order, bias can occur over what comes first, especially for spacecrafts with a close launch window. I believe there were cases of certain lunar probes being rearranged so that an anon's preferred probe gets listed first, and I remember seeing similar edits for the Mars probes launching this year. I feel such bias would be more difficult to take place in an alphabetical order. Kind regards, Hms1103 (talk) 20:48, 14 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]