Talk:Space Age

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Kmargis.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 09:54, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 August 2018 and 13 December 2018. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Blue2gold, Blakec25.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 09:54, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Buried
Why the buried discussion of ballistic missiles and spy satellites? The space race was first and foremost a byproduct of the cold war.LeadSongDog come howl  18:48, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Deleted line "This is in stark contrast to those who believe we are still in The Dark Ages, as stated by Kurt Vonnegut" in the first paragraph as it seems Kurt Vonnegut was more making a statement about human beings being isolated rather than making a statement about the immaturity of our technology, so it didnt really seem relevant. 20:19, 18 May 2010.

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Information Age which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RM bot 08:45, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Definition of space age and associated boundaries
This article needs some references to solid sources (ideally academic papers) on the definition, scope and boundaries (beginning and end) of the Space Age. The beginning of the Space Age is clearly defined (with minor debate), however the article leaves completely open the question of whether the Space Age is still existant.

The beginning of the Space age was defined by a technological achievement. However the Space Age era encompasses the socio-politcal changes that were trigged by the first satellite in space. The contemporary view appears to be that the "Space Age" is seen as a retrospective era, mostly related to 1950s-1970s technologies and socio-politics of the cold war driven space race.

This contemporary view is reflected in publications such as "No Requieum for the Space Age". http://www.amazon.com/No-Requiem-Space-Age-Landings/dp/0199313520

A litmus test would be to judge if the adjectival form and example given by the OED "Very modern; technologically advanced: a space-age control room" is still relevant. If you polled people in the street what their perception of a "space age control room" is, would they say "very modern", or "very retro with lots of flashing lights and black and white screens"?

As such, I believe that the article should have a section with views on whether the Space Age still exists within the context of the narrow, open ended dictionary definition of 1957-present, being "The era starting when the exploration of space became possible" (Oxford English Dictionary), or whether the Space Age was a socio-political era that ended along with the cold war.

I'm writing all of this on the talk page only as I'm not an expert on the subject and don't have the time to do the research of reliable sources to generate the quality requried for publication in the article. I'm hoping that others interested in this subject will take the lead in presenting in a balanced way in the article a section on whether the Space Age still exists, and if not, when reliable sources considered that the era finished. Savlonn (talk) 10:40, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Space Age
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Space Age's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "Beischer1962": From Soviet space dogs:  From Laika:

 From Animals in space:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 20:38, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

"Space Age" the Company
Have removed the "This article is about the era; for the company "Space Age Electronics".. section, as it's essentially just a thinly-disguised advert for the company in question. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.255.233.2 (talk) 15:29, 28 September 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20140221145846/http://media.airspacemag.com/images/1stPhotoFromSpace.jpg to http://media.airspacemag.com/images/1stPhotoFromSpace.jpg
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090331174421/http://filer.case.edu/sjr16/advanced/20th_far_voyagers.html to http://filer.case.edu/sjr16/advanced/20th_far_voyagers.html

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External links modified (January 2018)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 3 external links on Space Age. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20161023002229/http://satellites.findthedata.com/ to http://satellites.findthedata.com/
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20132200291300/http://www.astronautix.com/articles/manirsts.htm to http://www.astronautix.com/articles/manirsts.htm
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20071027141415/http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/SpaceAge/ to http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/SpaceAge/

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End of Space Age edit
Someone made a good point that no one really made any attempt to say when it ended. From my research, there was a major decline in space missions in the U.S. after the Challenger disaster, so I am going to briefly discuss that on the page like so:

In the United States, the Challenger disaster marked a significant decline in manned shuttle launches. Following the disaster, NASA grounded all shuttles for safety concerns until 1988, and permanently grounded all shuttles in 2011. NASA has since relied on Russia to take American astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Kmargis (talk) 22:29, 18 March 2018 (UTC)


 * If you want to discuss decline in human spaceflight, go ahead, but please don't call it "the end of the Space Age". Also make sure you review our WP:Verifiability and WP:No original research policies. An encyclopedia like Wikipedia is supposed to include only information that WP:Reliable sources have published. I don't believe any reliable sources have published the opiniotn that the "Space Age" has ended.


 * I happen to be of the opinion that this article is based on a great deal of original research, skeptical that historians actually use this term to define a period of history. "Space age" seems to be a term used largely by advertisers to commercially exploit certain technologies. There is a much better historically accurate article, Space Race, that defines the period which marked the "dawn of the space age" and has relatively definable beginning and end (from mid-1950s through the fall of the Soviet Union.) JustinTime55 (talk) 13:15, 19 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Oh, I don't intend to call it that, I was just saying where the idea came from. In all honesty, I'm only editing the article because I'm required to for my history course. Kmargis (talk) 00:14, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Technological Costs
How about adding a section to the costs that each technological advancement required from each country? As the space race was an extremely costly capital competition, both the United States and the Soviet Union in particular expended large amounts of capital towards this competition. Why not reference these costs and explain why the amount of capital funded from governments (United States in particular) has decreased while private companies have been receiving subsidies and being encouraged instead of government lead initiatives?Blue2gold (talk) 16:37, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

Rewrite
Reference 1 (American Heritage article "Shooting the Moon") doesn't even use the term Space Age, so it doesn't verify that Sputnik started the Space Age. This should be replaced with reference 2.

That being said, the American Heritage article contains more info that is probably worth keeping; it goes into exactly why the US had to participate in the "Space Age" and why JFK upped the stakes to an Apollo Moon landing, which isn't covered at all in the article.

I also don't quite like the tone of the way the article reads, like a promotion for the Space Age though I don't know exactly how to word that or which cleanup tag is appropriate for that. JustinTime55 (talk) 15:08, 8 August 2022 (UTC)