Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/SpaceX Starship/archive3

SpaceX Starship

 * Nominator(s): CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 19:02, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

This article is about a reusable stainless steel rocket that can land on the launch tower's arms. There has been some very interesting events around it, from literal spy cams recording 24/7 by enthusiasts, to Jeff Bezos' litigation because NASA chose Starship instead of their Blue Moon lander. Enjoy. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 19:02, 11 March 2022 (UTC)
 * I would like the nomination to be withdrawn; it was an oversight by me to not read through the entire article before. In the meantime, I would try to copyedit the article as much as I can and seek help if needed.

Oppose and suggest withdrawal. The prose is not up to standard. Here are a few examples:
 * with the owner company SpaceX mostly self-funds the project - grammar
 * In November 2005, SpaceX first referenced a concept with some capabilities of Starship - "referenced a concept"?
 * and was not mentioned to be reusable - "mentioned to be"
 * Super Heavy BN4 was the first that can mate to Starships, while Starship SN20 was the first to feature a body-tall heat shield, mostly made of black hexagonal heat tiles. - first what?
 * Methane was chosen for the Raptor engines since it may be cheaper - well is it or isn't it?
 * SpaceX builds multiple other variants of Raptor - why not just say "many"
 * These grid fins are not spaced evenly for obtaining more pitch control and can only rotate in the roll axis - I have no idea what this means.
 * When the rocket launches at Starbase, it may make more than 115 dBA at up to a 3.7 km (2.3 mi) radius, and up to 90 dBA throughout most of Brownsville, a nearby city, comparable to a lawnmower. - It is not obvious that noise pollution is the subject.

The poor prose makes the article a slog to read. It is far from FA level. Graham Beards (talk) 20:08, 11 March 2022 (UTC)


 * Oppose largely for the same reason as Graham Beards, which I note was also mentioned at the very recent "no-consensus" GAR and slightly less-recent PR. Even in the lead and infobox, there are several issues that give pause. In addition to Graham Beards's observations, these are just some examples from before the Concepts section:
 * Wikidata infobox is very unnatural - it doesn't even say what Starship or Super Heavy are, "Has use" is an awkward label, no links to things like "orbital inclination" that may be unfamiliar to most people
 * "two-stage and super heavy-lift" - "and" doesn't make sense as these are both adjectives
 * Use of "notably" (MOS:EDITORIAL)
 * "is selected for many space programs" - should not be present tense, as it is not currently being selected; "has been" would be better
 * "integral to [...] making rapid transport between locations on Earth possible" - does not seem to be backed up in text (only one brief mention), and makes no sense as many non-Starship rapid transport methods exist
 * Odd word choice at times ("inserts" itself into orbit? "encourages" inequality?)
 * Inconsistency between tenses (throughout the text, but e.g. "is later caught by [...] would reposition the booster")
 * "is subjected to change" should be "is subject to change"
 * "To be more specific", "going to be", etc seem redundant and not in encyclopedic tone
 * "one of which is spaceflight news site NASASpaceFlight.com" - is there any reason to single this one out except that it was interviewed?
 * "Brownville, Texas, one of the poorest United States's cities" - ungrammatical, also should be Brownsville
 * "nearby the spaceport" - "near"
 * Given these issues and many more minor ones (missing "that"s, for example), the article is rather hard to comprehend and IMO fails 1a by some distance. If the nominator wishes I can go read through the rest of the article and leave more comments, but I don't think all of the readability/grammar issues can be easily fixed. ev iolite   (talk)  20:55, 11 March 2022 (UTC)


 * I would also oppose. I have not done a line-by-line review of this article since December (here), but from a quick readthrough, it's the same overall things just in different places. Cacti, I fear that as long as you are the main editor of the SpaceX Starship page, the grammar may never maintain featured article standards (unless something changes). Instead of a one-time fix being possible, it's an ongoing issue where you make a very high volume of edits (looks like 70% of all edits are you ). While I personally am not involved in reviewing featured article candidates, this nomination makes me feel a bit annoyed on behalf of those reviewers, as the article's overall disposition is the same as the previous times. Issues such as grammar and sourcing are extremely difficult to bring up to FA standards given the context of constant churn and rewriting. Leijurv (talk) 21:02, 11 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Given I was made aware of this discussion off-wiki, I am not going to take any kind of position, but I must state that my comments on the last FAC still stand regarding the lack of scholarly literature in this article. There is quite a bit out there on this topic. I also echo the concerns expressed by the others above and suggest you withdraw the nomination. Noah Talk 21:10, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

I have not looked at previous nominations or read the article before this, but seeing the opposes above I thought I would take a look at the prose. I picked a couple of paragraphs at random to look at. Not every paragraph had issues, but many did. Examples: Oppose and suggest withdrawal. This is not FAC-ready. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:36, 12 March 2022 (UTC)
 * "SpaceX has said its goal is to colonize Mars for the long-term survival of the human species. Musk himself has been pursuing the goal since 2001 with the Mars Oasis program, where a rocket would launch a greenhouse to Mars. At the time, its purpose was to stimulate the space market and increase NASA's budget. The final possible goal of the program is to send a million people to Mars by 2050, with a thousand Starships sent during a Mars launch window." Several problems: "where" is the wrong connective for "Mars Oasis program, where..."; there's a direct contradiction between Musk pursuing the goal since 2001 and "at the time, its purpose was"; and "final possible goal" is vague -- they don't know yet what their goals are?  This is probably meant to indicate that the final goal is only7 thought to be possible, but as written it doesn't say that.
 * "Another was proposed to launch a space probe orbiting around Io, a moon of Jupiter, which is difficult because of the mission's demand for shielding from intense radiation and large delta-v budget or range. Even further, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, who experiment with using solar sails to travel between the stars, proposed a mission riding on a Starship cruising to Mars." It's not clear what "which" refers to in "which is difficult"; "Even further" is vague; and the MPISSR's experiments are no doubt intended to demonstrated that interstellar travel with solar sails is possible, but they don't current have solar sails that travel between the stars as this wording implies.
 * "An analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think-tank wrote possible military-use cases of Starship": poor grammar.
 * "Of which, the tanks weigh...": don't start a sentence with "Of which".
 * "SpaceX builds multiple other variants of Raptor. The company specifies the Raptor engine has a ratio of throat area to exit area of 1:34.[67] Another is the Raptor Vacuum, designed to be fired in space." The third sentence would naturally follow from the first, but the second sentence makes the sequence incoherent.