Proposal talk:Include spacecraft in aeroway
Fundamental difference between airports and spaceports
It should be kept in mind that an airport as infrastructure for aircraft operation is a feature clearly distinct from aircraft production. A spaceport on the other hand is always largely an industrial facility because spacecrafts are always built on site and there is no clear distinction between production and operation. So before thinking about if to conceptionally combine airport and spaceport tagging you might want to think about how to define what a spaceport is in a way that draws a clear line towards industrial infrastructure.
Also keep in mind the inherent ambiguity of tags for infrastructure related to rocket launches which might also be used for sites exclusively used for suborbital launches (like sounding rockets or experimental stuff).
--Imagico (talk) 11:27, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
If you check for private space companies you will notice it's not necessarily always the "classic" rocket start :
- wikipedia:Mojave_Air_and_Space_Port "the first facility to be licensed in the United States for horizontal launches of reusable spacecraft"
- "More than 70% of each Falcon launch vehicle is manufactured or assembled at the SpaceX Hawthorne production facility" http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/09/24/production-spacex
- https://youtu.be/42fGDWioAho
- https://youtu.be/_vf4AYaTRfs
- https://youtu.be/CUmnzaDGifo rtfm Rtfm (talk) 18:37, 3 May 2017 (UTC)
Differentiation between Landing- and Launchpad ?
There was a point made here by AtonX : https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Aeroways#aeroway.3Dspaceport
I could imagine that the same pad might be used for both in the future, the launchpad might be also used for landing. For example if the launch tower is moved on rails after launch, or the increasing landing precision allows to land beside it. So possibly aeroway=rocketpad could be used for those which support both, launch and landing ? (Similar to helipad ) rtfm Rtfm (talk) 15:41, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
- For the near future all landed rockets need mating to a support structure as part of their reuse, and they land on empty pads without that structure. So currently launchpad and landingpad are distinct structures. But, being wary of obsolesence, there's at least one project on a circa-10y timescale (from 2017) which is intended to land on its launchpad, having integrated the structure. We could use aeroway=rocketpad and add launch=yes and landing=yes flags perhaps.