Talk:Orbital Sciences Corporation

Removed the term 'reliable' access to space. The phrase: "Minotaur- Employing a combination of U.S. government-supplied rocket motors and Orbital's commercial launch technologies, the Minotaur family of launchers provides low-cost and reliable access to space for government sponsored payloads" quotes the corporate website. Please cite an outside source for these rockets to be considered 'reliable'.

When Rvg 2014 edited this article extensivly in June 2014, all mentions of the previous launch failures of the Taurus XL in 2009 (Orbiting Carbon Observatory) and 2011 (Glory) were removed. Why did this information go away? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.211.64.255 (talk) 03:39, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

I agree, we should restore the discussion about Orbital Science's failures.

PR Editing: Ethical or Not?
Edits have been made to this page by Ricochet PR, Orbital's PR firm. The changes include moving references to launch failures out of their own section into a section describing one of the company's business units. The move could be considered appropriate since the failures are related to that business unit, or could be PR slight-of-hand since the references have been minimized and would most likely be missed by those doing a quick scan of the article. This follows an attempt by someone at Orbital trying to remove references to the failures entirely.

The PR firm has been transparent in stating in the Edit Comments that the changes were made on behalf of their client, and the verbiage of the launch failures was only slightly altered during the move. Based on this, I haven't moved the references back to their own section.

What is the current consensus among editorial staff and users? Is this type of activity accepted practice, questionable or just plain wrong? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Krikiter (talk • contribs) 12:41, 9 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Generally, PR practitioners should not edit articles directly. Either request the edits on the talk page, or draft the edits and ask an independent Wikipedian to move them to article. As a PR practitioner, I think I'd probably only do very minor edits like minor updates, or spelling corrections. I&#39;m Tony Ahn (talk) 14:54, 9 April 2012 (UTC)


 * There have been a total of three launch failures from Orbital Sciences (Ref: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/antares-rocket-explosion-wasnt-orbital-sciences-first-big-malfunction-180953177/?no-ist ). Although the most recent failure is mentioned at the end of the introduction to the article, the others haven't been mentioned. I think the launch failures deserve mention in the "history" section. - Subh83 (talk &#124; contribs) 03:35, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Merger with ATK
Editors of this page may be interested in the discussion at Talk:Alliant Techsystems. --Brian the Editor (talk) 21:07, 13 February 2015 (UTC)