Freebase: Discussion about Spaceflight

Spaceflight: Launch/landing locations

2008-10-09T22:24:06.0012Z

That makes sense to me. The only issue I see is for missions to space stations which are not currently modeled as celestial objects, but maybe they should be...

In regard to more specific destinations, I was thinking it would be cool to make a visualization of lunar and mars landings using whatever coordinates are standard. But maybe the coordinate systems are significantly different on each planet in which case maybe it makes sense to have a 'Lunar Landing' type and a 'Mars Landing' type, etc.

Spaceflight: Split spacecraft and missions

2008-10-09T19:22:57.0012Z

I'd rather get it right from the beginning, and pick one type for topic imported from WP, and create new topics as needed. I mean, do this if you're adding types by hand. If someone (or a bot) has already added both (or all three!) types, flagging it for split seems sufficient.

Spaceflight: Split spacecraft and missions

2008-10-09T18:32:10.0017Z

In email yesterday, evening asked me about what to do when a spacecraft is conflated with a mission. This sometimes also happens with space programs, eg. see International Space Station.

Usually this comes from Wikipedia having conflated the two. I say we type the topic as both things and mark it for split.

Thoughts?

Spaceflight: Launch/landing locations

2008-10-09T18:30:04.0012Z

Well, I see two properties here:

1) Destination (expected: celestial object) -- for missions that go to another planet or whatever, whether they return or not

2) Landing site (expected: geolocation) -- for missions that land back on earth

The description/help for each of these would help distinguish them.

Spaceflight: Launch/landing locations

2008-10-09T00:09:21.0001Z

What about space missions that land on celestial objects such as comets or other planets? Clearly a landing location can't be a geolocation in this case. Perhaps another property (or property of a type that includes the space mission type) with an ECT of /astronomy/celestial_object would be appropriate. This of course begs the question of how to specify the specific location on the celestial object. For spherical objects (such as the moon), there must be an analogue of long/lat. Maybe someone else can weigh in on this issue.

Spaceflight: Launch/landing locations

2008-10-08T20:12:47.0017Z

I notice that some space missions are co-typed as locations because mw_coord_bot picked up their lat/long from infoboxes on wikipedia. This is obviously incorrect, but recording launch and landing locations could be useful and interesting. Could we put these as properties on space mission? I suspect the launch location should just be type /location/location (or else some kind of type that includes that, like "Space mission launchsite" in this domain), but landing location should probably be a geolocation since so many of them are at sea, in the middle of nowhere, etc.