Hubble Upgraded; NASA's Future Not So Bright

jokrswild writes: "After 5 space walks and 172 million dollars, Hubble has been successfully redeployed. Hopefully it will be able to amaze us yet again in its abilities to capture the unimaginable." And Captn Pepe writes: "Space.com has a couple of articles regarding what the Congressional Research Service and what NASA's new chief administrator have to say about the space agency's future plans and prospects. The short version is, don't hold your breath for a Mars mission."

Comments

Retiring Hubble

[Christ-on-a-bike]

The article says Hubble is going to be retrofitted once more and then retired in 2010. Would anyone like to fill me in on why it can't be kept going indefinitely?

Is there going to be a much better replacement, for example? I would have thought it economic to keep Hubble in space, even if it was superseded. Guess that shows what I know.

Re:Retiring Hubble

[Stripsurge]

Next generation space telescope is what you're looking for.

With the way cutbacks are being made, perhaps Hubble's life will be extended a bit longer while the NGST is put on hold for a couple years. I seem to remember reading something about Hubble being run at the same time as the NGST for a little while. Too lazy to look though.

I guess after a while the computers and other equipment eventualy break down over time because of all the radiation and junk. I realize that they built this thing with radiation shields and whatnot, but I don't think they stop everything 100% forever.

Let's have a nasa rider

[bmetz]

You know those stupid "would you like to give $5 to the so-and-so party?" lines at the bottom of the 1040? Well, why not have a "would you like to give $5 to the send-a-man-to-mars fund?" I'll pretty much die before I give a dollar to a politician so he can put my name on a "sucker to call when I need more money" telemarketing list but I'll gladly give money to a cause that means something on a historical scale like this.

The space lottery

[Pelerin]

The analogy with Columbus fails on a couple of respects, like the risk vs. benefit calculation.

Columbus new that the risks in his mission were manageable, and the immediate payoff was high. (Of course, Spain went on to become a gold-based economy, importing pretty much all manufactured goods and got their clocks cleaned by British wool and things like that; quickly losing its world status, but that's another story). The risks of a manned Mars mission are unknown in some pretty important areas, all having to do with long-term exposure to space, for both humans and machines.

Consider the moon landing. 10 Apollo spacecraft came before the one that made it. One of those (Apollo 3) burned horribly on the launch pad. And thanks to Hollywood we all know that Apollo 13 also failed to reach the moon. That's 2 failures in 13 missions; a 15% failure rate, and only considering technical failures, since the risks in the human biology area for that kind of mission were understood reasonably well by then, thanks to a succession of manned orbital flights.

Now consider a Mars mission. We don't know what effects on human bodies (and minds!) will result from prolonged exposure to radiation and zero gravity for a mission that lasts that long, except they all look pretty bad. And while unmanned space probes have continued functioning for decades in space, they don't have life-support systems so we don't know what the risks are in that area either.

So it seems to me that advocating a manned Mars mission now is not very rational. We would simply be praying we get lucky, but the odds right now don't look very good.

We (the world, not just the US) need to know a whole lot more about what's involved before making any kind of vaguely rational decision to go to Mars. Use the Space Station to the max. Also put another one in orbit around the Moon for a few years. Learn what the glitches are likely to be and then decide.