Talk:Comparison of super heavy lift launch systems

Energia vs Saturn V launch record

There is a debate whether Energia's Polyus mission consitutes a failure, but in similar fashion, shouldn't Saturn V's launch record include mention of Apollo 6, where both 2nd & 3rd stages had serious problems and payload failed to reach intended orbit? If anything, that failure was far more serious than Polyus failure, where Energia itself performed as intended, whilst Apollo 6 problems occurred in the launch vehicle. --Mikoyan21 (talk) 16:09, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Apollo 6, with its malfunctions, reached orbit and completed its mission. It is not controversial because there is no controversy, it is generally regarded as a launch success. Although I suppose that if you wanted to generate a controversy to further your agenda, you're more than welcome. Though I would want to go with Apollo 13, which is regarded as the only partial failure. Tablecat (talk) 01:04, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

If one wants to generate controversy in this topic, there is plenty of opportunities. The problem is that in different communities the same mission might be "generally regarded" as success or failure - and those different communities meet on Wikipedia and can't find the common ground. The Wikipedia rules are ambiguous, which in some cases leads to endless battles about what is more correct point of view. Avmich (talk) 18:04, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

• Actually, I would be inclined to agree that Apollo 6 was a partial failure. The failure of the upper stage to restart resulted in the spacecraft having to use its own fuel to correct its orbit, and meant that some mission objectives could not be met. That is the definition of a partial launch failure. --GW… 08:42, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't really see how anyone (except NASA, to show assurance on the vehicle) could classify Apollo 6 as anything but a partial failure. The payload failed to reach intended orbit and the 3rd stage would not restart. That the launch yielded much useful information should not ignore glaring facts that the rocket did not perform as intended. Whereas in case of Polyus and Apollo 13, mission failures were not caused by launchers. --Mikoyan21 (talk) 19:18, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

• I still think that Polyus should be considered a launch failure, since the rocket would have been incapable of reaching orbit without the component that failed. I agree with your points regarding the Saturn V record. Since all the participants in this discussion who have raised the issue of the Saturn launch record have agreed there was a single partial failure (even if they can't agree which flight it was on), I will make that change. --GW… 20:42, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

• Isn't Apollo 13 a failure of the payload instead of the launcher? nihil (talk) 07:09, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

The Energia success record was discussed to death on the previous heavy-lift page. In brief: -if the first launch was considered to be a suborbital test of the Energia core booster (with the Polyus failure considered as a payload failure, not an Energia failure), then since it didn't go to orbit, the success record is 1/1 -if the first launch was considered to be a orbital test of the full Energia launch system, then the record is 1/2. 2/2, however, is logically inconsistent either way you look at it. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 21:45, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Definition of success

The question of how to define the launch success record is coming up once again, and people are proposing complicated definitions of "success," leading to difficult discussions of what should be counted as a success. I think that it is desirable to keep the definition as clear and simple as possible. Therefore, I'd like to suggest that launch success is defined by a single criteria: did the booster succeed in placing its payload into orbit, or did it fail to place its payload into orbit? This is, I think, about as clear and unambiguous a definition of "success" as can be come up with. I am very skeptical about use of more subtle definitions, because it seems to me that too many people have an interest in tinkering with the definition in order to make one company's booster look good, or bad. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 17:16, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

• By that criteria, the launches of satellites such as Orion 3, Arabsat 4A, USA-142 and USA-143 would have been a success. In all of those cases the spacecraft achieved different orbits to those planned, and as a result they were rendered completely useless. None ever entered service. How can that be considered successful. --GW… 22:11, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

The top-level requirement here is for clarity and understandability: the definition used has to be simple and unambiguous enough to be understood by a non-expert in the field. I'm not sure what definition you propose that would be less ambiguous or more clear-- Successful Launches to Orbit on U.S. Launch Vehicles, for example, uses the definition used here. For the details on the launch, it would be appropriate to include a footnote, or better yet, a link. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 19:27, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

• I can see where you're coming from, but I don't think that listing missions that put spacecraft into completely incorrect orbits is particularly clear either. By analogy, if you were going on a holiday to Egypt to see the pyramids, and you ended up in Algeria instead (and didn't see any pyramids), then you wouldn't call your holiday a success simply because you ended up on the right continent. In my opinion, these articles follow a stupid format for listing outcomes, in that anything that was not 100% successful is considered an outright failure. Perhaps the easiest way to make this clear and understandable is to simply eliminate the success/failure aspect of the launch record, and have as straight count of rockets launched. The merits of various missions and their outcomes can be handled in detail in their respective articles, and we can avoid displaying potentially controversial information in such a black-and-white way. --GW… 20:04, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

"you wouldn't call your holiday a success simply because you ended up on the right continent." That's not the question. The question is whether you would say that the airplane crashed. The answer is no. The navigator failed, perhaps. The vehicle, however, succeeded.

You are right that the definition of failure can be complicated. This is, paradoxically, exactly why I think a Wikipedia article needs to use a simple, unambiguous definition.03:50, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

A rocket doesn't have to crash in order to fail. To use another analogy, suppose you are driving from London to see a concert in Birmingham. You get to Birmingham, however your car breaks down on the outskirts of the city, but still some distance from where the concert is being held, and as a result you miss the concert. You haven't crashed, you've just not quite reached your destination. You wouldn't call your trip a success merely because you'd reached the correct city.

I agree that we need to make these articles accessible to readers with limited knowledge, however I believe that doing this based simply on whether it reached any kind of orbit or not would be a case of dumbing it down so far that it would corrupt the meaning of the data. I also feel that it would be unintentionally introducing bias in favour of the rocket manufacturers - yes it is currently biased against them, but two wrongs don't make a right. That is why I think we should simply do away with listing numbers of successful launches altogether. --GW… 16:37, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

I'll chime in with a thought. And potentially, a solution. I will, for now, remain agnostic on the question of how success/failure ought to be defined. But I will say that nearly all of the claims on success/total-launches, that are used in one column of a table in all of the Comparison of ______-lift launch systems are totally unsourced and therefore not verifiable. Moreover, even when sourced, they are often a synthesis of multiple different sources which is not in accord with Wikipedia policy. So I tend to agree with the suggestion by G that we "do away with listing numbers of successful launches altogether."

Alternatively, and this is the potential solution, if we can find an outside reliable secondary source that provides the data on number of lauches, and number of successes, etc., then, voila, problem solved. We use the outside sources definition and data, and we no longer have to debate the criteria for success, which at best allows other editors to synthesize the claims in the Wikipedia article. Whadayathink? N2e (talk) 18:30, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

As we saw during the Energia dispute, it is possible to find two reliable sources that give different data based on different assessments. Therefore, even if we insist on inline references for absolutely everything in that column, it would not resolve disputes. If anything, it could make the situation worse as it could result in uneven standards if different sites with different definitions of success and failure are used for different rockets. Therefore I stand by my proposal to eliminate the success record. If users want details like that, they should fall back on the articles, where everything can be explained and referenced. --GW… 20:09, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

I think that you are taking something that is inherently simple, and by examining it with a sufficiently powerful magnifying glass, making it appear complex. There is a very clear distinction between a rocket that blows up on launch and one that makes it into orbit. Yes, I can suppose you can say that if you are on an airliner and there is a failure of the navigation system and it lands at the wrong airport, this is a "failure," but nevertheless, this is not going to go into the airliner records as a crash. This should not be controversial. I suppose, if you want to look at a fine enough comb, if the soft-drink dispenser on the space shuttle dispenses drinks at 10 degrees C when the specification is for 8 degrees C, that's a "failure," but that really is not what we are talking about. At the top level-- and this is an encyclopedia, not a manual of rocket engine design-- what people want to know by "succeed" is, did it put its payload into orbit, or destroy it? Geoffrey.landis (talk) 03:11, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

I would argue that putting a DBS satellite into low Earth orbit is as good as destroying it. Your $200m spacecraft is completely useless, and will probably be deorbited fairly quickly. If the temperature of your drink is a few degrees out, at least you can still drink it. --GW… 07:25, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

This is not the case for the Apollo 6 launch discussed, in which the launch put the Apollo into an orbit slightly higher than required, and quite manifestly did not destroy the spacecraft. Since the actual requirement on altitude of the parking orbit for that mission was "high enough to check out the spacecraft," that, in itself, had no effect on the mission. (The engine's failure to restart in space did have an effect on the mission-- but that was not a launch failure.) If you did define failure as "The booster either failed to put its payload into orbit, or else put it into an orbit in which the payload was unable to achieve its mission" (which is more complicated, and it adds an element of subjectivity), it would have no effect on the launch statistics for this article, since none of the launches of any of the vehicles here put payloads into that borderline state of in orbit, but still not usable.

The difficulty in defining success based on the criteria you seem to be proposing is that it rates "failure" based on the precision of the predicted orbit. If one booster predicts an orbit of, say, 250 nm plus or minus 5, and another booster predicts "we'll get it into some orbit, we can't say which", and they both perform identically, there's no objective reason to call one launch a success and the other a failure-- you're saying that companies can improve their success rate by simply making worse predictions. I don't see the point in this-- the definition should be based on the rocket, not the prediction.

In short, I really don't see the problem in making a simple, concise, and (most importantly) unambiguous definition, and writing it down explicitly. Those people who do want to use a different definition will be able to read it and clearly understand that the definition being used is different from whatever definition they use; that is, the article should be clear in what it is saying. And, the vast majority of readers, for whom "did it blow up?" is what they understand by the word "failure," will have a top level understanding of the success rate.

The main requirement here is that the definition of failure needs to be simple (simple enough to be understandable by non-experts), it needs to be objective (not based on subjective evaluations), and it needs to be explicitly written down, so that everybody understands what it means. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 13:56, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Since whatever criteria is selected will have to be implemented across all lists, your point that this discussion would have no effect is irrelevant. I don't think that your criteria are unambiguous, and I believe that non-experts may believe that launches were completely successful based on your criteria, when in reality they were not. Also, we should not forget about people who do know something about the subject - the article needs to be accessible to them, and not condescending. Since there are launches, Apollo 6 among them, which cannot be simply classed as "success" or "failure", I think it is stupid to display such statistics without explanation. Since this is not compatible with the structure and format of these articles, I believe it has no place in them. Therefore I would suggest we remove the number of successful launches altogether. --GW… 19:25, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

"I think it is stupid to display such statistics without explanation." At no point did I propose putting in such statistics "without explanation." Actually, it was the fact that you deleted my explanation that initiated the present thread. In this thread, as far as I can tell, you are the only one who are arguing that explicitly defining launch success as "the number of times the launch vehicle successfully launched its payload into orbit, divided by the total number of attempted orbital launches" is "ambiguous".Geoffrey.landis (talk) 01:54, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

By "explanation", I was not referring to an explanation of how you synthesised the data, I was referring to detailed explanations of what happened on specific launches. I would also argue that "you are the only one who are arguing that" your position is not "ambiguous". --GW… 08:30, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

Mass to TLI with refuelling

I think the column title "Mass to TLI with refueling" is too vague. If an upper stage is refuelled enough times, then it theoretically could put any mass that it is capable of carrying into LEO into any orbit. If a technique for refuelling without reaching a stable orbit could be made, then it could be even higher, depending on the structural limits of the rocket. Therefore, mass to TLI would at least equal mass to LEO. Now I know in this case the column refers to a specific proposal, but some readers may not. --GW… 23:56, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Chinese Super? HLLV

Just saw this: China is Planning a large Heavy Lift Rocket, dated July 27, 2010. Supposedly "about as powerful as Energia" so this might be the article for it. Or if not, then maybe the heavy lift article. Cheers. N2e (talk) 03:02, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

BBC News site. The Yeti (talk) 17:52, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

Falcon X and XX removal

Falcon X and XX are mentioned both as being super heavies. However they are just concepts, just like the Atlas Phase Studies. So, why is it nescessary to include them? Yeah, if they start development of them, they can be kept, but I don't think they're at that stage yet. Maybe in the proposed section, but not in the main section. Sound reasonable? 66.67.22.212 (talk) 13:20, 8 August 2010 (UTC)