Talk:Suitport/GA1

GA Review

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Hi, I'll be your GA reviewer. Okay, here's the conversation so far:

Hiya, Swpb. I review a lot of sci/tech articles, and I looked around Suitport. I lean more towards inclusionism than deletionism; on the other hand, my experience with engineering tells me that most ideas, including patented ideas, have more to do with getting funding than with creating an actual product, until and unless there's an actual product. The references currently on that page don't, in my mind, establish notability. Has anyone constructed a Suitport? Has it been proposed for any future NASA or other mission? I get that the idea makes sense, but I'd like to see some reliable secondary source say that the idea makes sense. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:56, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

I seem to remember hearing about a demonstration suitport that NASA had built, but I don't know if it was fully functional, and I can't find a reference for it. It has definitely been proposed by NASA for use in future programs, as evidenced by their inclusion of it in the illustrated rover concept. It shows up a fair amount in industry discussions of near-future architectures, as a "when" rather than an "if". Unfortunately, the best info I've seen on it came from conference presentations (International Conference on Environmental Systems, run by SAE), which aren't publicly available. I understand if the sourcing issue keeps the article short of "Good" status, I'll keep looking for sources that highlight the notability better. Thanks for your quick response. — Swpb^{τ • c} 00:53, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Of course, you never know what will float to the top of google when you give it a few months, and just after posting the above, I found an AIAA paper (or at least the first page of it) that seems to indicate NASA Ames was using a real suitport as early as 1995, which I've now added to the article. — Swpb^{τ • c} 01:11, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't think NASA Ames was using a real suitport. The relevant section from http://www.spacearchitect.org/pubs/AIAA-95-1062.pdf, unless I'm missing something, seems to be "Philip E. Culbertson, Jr., the lead designer for the Hazmat vehicle, is making progress in adapting the Suitport to it. The two Suitports will provide direct, rapid don/doff access to two protective suits. In the ideal concept ...". It continues "In the prototype ...", etc. Note the future tense and "ideal concept". This is how academic engineers and government-funded engineers often write; they use the present tense just as long as they can get away with it, as if they have an actual product, and it isn't til you get to the end of the paper that you find out they never built it. However, the ref says that another variant of the suit was built and flight-tested: "Griffin built a test suit flew it [sic] on the NASA-JSC KC-135 aircraft, in a simulated lunar gravity test. A photograph of the Griffin Design suit demonstrator on the KC-135 appears in Figure 7. Aviation Week and Space Technology described this test: 'The unit could plug into other vehicles, such as lunar rovers ...'". So we've got an actual prototype tested, plus several patents and several illustrations, so we've got enough for an article. The next question is whether we've got enough for a Good Article. The worst case would be that you have to fold this material into some related article in order to get enough for a Good Article, but I'm hopeful that you can pull information from other relevant articles in here and keep this as the GA; for instance, articles on lunar exploration, space suits or hazmat suits might be relevant. Keep on digging and see what you can find. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 04:17, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

So to be clear, you're looking for more breadth of information, not necessarily directly related to suitports? — Swpb^{τ • c} 19:16, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I've been following Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Cold_fusion/Evidence. The arbitrators may decide to rule on questions of whether certain government sources on science should be considered primary or secondary. If government-funded science is considered primary, then this Suitport article has no secondary sources other than the ones on moon dust, and in that case, I don't think it can be considered GA material. Can you find any source that isn't a patent and doesn't come from NASA that discusses suitports? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 02:46, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Keep looking; I've put the article "on hold" until the weekend. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 14:03, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I think we can't save this GA nomination at this time. Some of the material here might be suitable for a different article, as long as the article is based on secondary sources. The problem here was that this was based primarily on patents, and interpreting the meaning and significance of patents is prohibited here by our no original research policy. Even if we find a relevant secondary source, they may not say what we want them to say about the patents. From the first patent: "The hereinbefore given description was primarily related to a crew member performing the duties involved in hazardous or toxic material clean-up, the principles of the present invention related to an environment suit and to the suitlock docking mechanism are equally applicable to the crew member performing the duties on a space vehicle or space station." That is, it's describing something not originally designed to be a "suitport". The second patent is based on "and claims priority" based on a German patent from 2002. You've done some fine work here; it may be best to fold some of this material into some other article on some related subject. Best of luck. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 00:33, 29 November 2008 (UTC)