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This question:

Are spacecrafts single-use?

has gotten three answers, a lot of votes (Q and As) and has attracted attention via HNQ, but no one has mentioned that it is a very simple question with an easily findable answer and it shows no research or thought at all.

Are we ok with tweet-sized questions with no research? I'd normally ask the OP to improve the question on one of my higher-rep sites, but some very high rep users posted answers and didn't say anything.

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    $\begingroup$ We are generally a little more forgiving here about lack of prior research in questions as long as the question is 1) Clear and answerable, 2) not answered within the first page or two of a Google search, and 3) not easily answered on a Wikipedia page of a similar name (i.e. in this case "spacecraft"). $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    Commented Mar 2, 2018 at 18:13
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    $\begingroup$ However, to answer your title question, we do moderate questions here for a lot of other reasons. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    Commented Mar 2, 2018 at 18:13
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    $\begingroup$ Also, in the case of #2 and #3 if the Google or Wikipedia answer is not satisfactory (questionable, overly brief, lack of sources, etc.), then we might still be interested in the question. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    Commented Mar 2, 2018 at 18:18
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    $\begingroup$ Oh, I also forgot to mention that the question can't be a duplicate of another question here--but that should be a given! $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    Commented Mar 2, 2018 at 18:24

2 Answers 2

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Most of the SE sites (especially ones in beta, like Space.SE) need questions. Now, on SO I'm a lot more discriminating on answers (mostly because people are lazy and ask the same junk over and over) but here we need some permissiveness.

Unless it's a dupe, if it's on-topic I say it's fair game. Sometimes the best questions are the most basic.

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This particular question has interesting aspects which helped it make it pass muster. Also, it's seems fair to suppose the asker just didn't know what term to search for to get the answer to their question. 'Single-use rockets' yields nothing relevant. 'Reusable rocket' yields a list of high quality reports that go into all the aspects. One could have simply told them what to search for and then closed the question.

However, it is the sort of question it is tempting to answer, because there is a vast public out there who only occasionally get interested in space exploration, and this was a chance to quickly introduce them to key concepts in a digestible way. The answers now neatly fill a gap by very briefly explaining that reusability is very hard, no system is fully reusable, and the task is even harder as payloads and velocities increase. The answer it required was complex enough to be interesting, and remains undocumented in neat brief formats like SE.

I agree with what Machavity and called2voyage have said, but I note that the question continues to have 3 times the votes as the answer, so I added a bit.

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