Talk:VSS Unity VP-03

Possible Article Title Issues
The creation of this article documents a recent (as of late 2018) event. As such, I have some concern that its title as-rendered may not be the most appropriate one. Some sources (gunter's space page, other existing wiki articles at the time, though this is circular!) report the flight itself as "VSS Unity PF04", so I went with that for the title. Further, Virgin Galactic VSS spaceplane references that I've found on wiki italicize the name, while leaving VSS, and whatever appropriate mission-thingy if there is one, de-italicized. In short, it may be appropriate to move this article's name-title-italics, to a different namespace on wikipedia, and so on.MinnesotanUser (talk) 07:41, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

I'm afraid that "PF04" may be my fault. In Jonathan's Space Report I originally used this designation by analogy with the designations used by Scaled Composites for the Spaceship One flights. But Virgin Galactic, which took over the test program after the 2014 crash, uses a different system. In correspondence with Virgin Galactic staff I have determined that the correct designations for the powered flights are VP-01, VP-01-2, VP-02, VP-03 and (in Feb 2019) VF-01. They are also designated sequentially in order of VSS Unity free flight as N202VG-012, 013, 014, 015 and -016. The problem is that although the VP-.. type designations are in some sense "better", I have to write to Mike Moses each time to find out what they are. The N202VG-015 type designations are more robust in that sense. So, we should rename this page either VSS Unity VP-03 or VSS Unity, Flight N202VG-015 with a mild preference for the latter as it'll be easier to keep in sync for future flights. These VSS Unity designations are now documented in my newsletter, Jonathan's Space Report No. 762, whose permanent URL wil be https://planet4589.org/space/jsr/back/news.762.txt - this may be a Wikipedia-suitable reference for the info.

Similar changes should be made to other VSS Unity articles. I'm changing text inside the article but I'm not sure how to change the title of the article, can someone else do that? - Jonathan McDowell      JonathanMcDowell (talk) 20:04, 25 February 2019 (UTC)


 * ✅ Thanks for the input (and confirmation of suspicion), Jonathan. As the article's title is (in my judgment) uncontroversial, a simple page-move (change the title) action looks appropriate, per WP:MOVE.  As I'm now learning, it appears as though I have the power to do this.  However, I would like to wait a bit until your 762 is finalized, and not in its draft state.  I also have a concern about WP:OR (no original research) but I don't foresee an issue on this head-but it'd be better to have a stable link than the draft-page.  I refrain from seeing about moving the article's title for the moment both for the above reason, and also because I and others have made multiple edits with the "PF04" usage which will need cleanup.  Let's have a stable link (your final 762, perhaps) to base this on.MinnesotanUser (talk) 05:07, 27 February 2019 (UTC)


 * Pursuant to the above exchange (and now that JSR 762 is up) I've performed the appropriate page move, and will see about cleaning up same throughout the encyclopedia where "PF04" has been used. MinnesotanUser (talk) 03:59, 12 March 2019 (UTC)


 * ✅ Thanks. For the record on 2019 Sep 2 I received an email from VG pilot Mark `Forger' Stucky who recommends using designations of the form "VG-015 VP-03", i.e. use both sequential and mission-specific IDs and with the sequential ID of the form VG-nnn. JonathanMcDowell