Slashdot Mirror
NASA Cancels Hubble Mission, and Other Space Bits
An anonymous reader writes "NASA Watch is reporting that NASA has cancelled Servicing Mission 4 for the Hubble Space Telescope. The reason given is not for budgets, but for safety." ender81b writes "With all the excitement generated by the Mars Exploration Rovers now is a good time to look at future space exploration missions. One of the most exciting is the Kepler spacecraft which will search for terrestrial planets around nearby stars. Other interesting upcoming missions include the New Horizons mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper belt, Deep Impact which will fire a small impactor into a comet to study the insides, Messenger which will fully photograph Mercury for the first time, and the ESA's Herschel infrared space telescope and Rosetta spacecraft which will land on a comet for the first time. Whew, good time to be invovled in space exploration!" StarWreck writes "Cnet.com is reporting that the Mars Rover uses Java. The same piece of software that lets people around the world play video games on their cell phones is now letting scientists drive the ultimate remote-controlled car across the surface of Mars."
Making NASA stronger == Kill NASA.
Don't Leave Children Behind == Leave them behind.
Healthy Forests == Cut down the forests.
I'm a space fan. I like manned space programs too. But they are going to wreck what NASA does do well, scientific research, for a program they will also not complete.
-pyrrho
And, therefore, make a complete fool of themselves?
I can see the inevitable kneejerk reaction now. "OMG Bush is taking away money from science to fund his reelection he is evil."
Get A GRIP!
This was being considered before Bush's new proposal. It is not the fault of his proposal. And we are going to have a replacement put up. Nothing is being lost here, nothing is being sacrificed on the altar of MTMS, Man To Mars Soonest.
I've been a fan of the Space program since I was a kid watching guys in bulky suits bounce around on the Moon. I may have been a fan earlier, but I don't remember much about the space program before Apollo.
Hubble was an amazing piece of hardware, designed to be serviced by the then-existant shuttle fleet. Which, as we all know, isn't what it used to be.
NASA's budget is limited. Always has been, always will be. They've got to make decisions on whether to keep servicing an old scope that, admitedly, is still doing good science, or spend their money on new projects that will arguably jump the state of the art as far ahead of Hubble as Hubble did in its day.
With the quality and light gathering abilities of surface based scopes approacing or surpassing Hubble - thanks to advances in adaptive optics and other fields - the decision to discontinue servicing Hubble is understandable. It was a fantastic instrument, and it will be missed when the mission finally ends. Note that the announcement isn't "Turn it off tomorrow." It's "We're not going to do any more servicing, but we'll let run until it dies of natural causes."
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
While a lot of this might be politics, the truth is, Hubble is what it is and has reached a point of where the question is, is it important to spend billions to service Hubble, or do we move on to something better. It would be nice if the space crews could drop by Hubble now and then and clean the bugs off the mirror, charge the battery, change the oil, but the truth is, this will be a task for the antique space junk fanatics of the centuries to come, they can take pictures of them next to it and post them on the Net with their cars with fins. We need to move on.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
NASA doesn't have that much money to play with anymore, and the hundreds of millions needed for another repair mission (even before the backup orbiter issue) was going to seriously screw up the timing of even getting the follow on telescope into the sky, not to mention the other robotic missions they're trying to keep alive.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Its a shell game. Bush announces new space plan: ' I hold a silver dollar in my hand'. Nasa immediately organizes and abandons hubble telescope mission. Nasa decides to abandon space station after completing it. Nasa decides to abandon shuttle replacement because the US wont be using the station after completing it and retiring shuttle Expect the following: To go the moon will require reinventing a rocket similiar to saturn 5 but at least twice the capacity. Money wont be found for this and that will kill the moon lander and mars landers. Nasa gets reduced by 1/2 or 2/3rds and will only launch small robotic vehicles to moon and mars. After awhile Nasa can't get budget for even those, because we've been there and done that. End of Nasa. End of US space program. Year 2012.
It seems like it is just an excuse from the head of NASA, who was a beancounter, alone. Perhaps the most tragic thing was that Columbia was lost while on a purely-for-science mission.
The thing is, bang for bucks, Hubble must be at least two orders of magnitude above the ISS in returning scientific data. It would not have costed above 10billion, compared to the hundreds of billions the ISS sucked up, and it had given us little, or next to nothing scientific data. No permanent scientific crew, the Destiny science module not being put to good use because the barebone crew of two is too preoccupied running it. All it stands for is an ego booster - we have a permanent manned presence in space, albeit a skeletal crew stuck for years in low Earth orbit, forever tied down doing endless plumbing just to keep it there.
I am starting to doubt if we will see a Hubble successor. And the sad fact is that we will not be fully realising the potential of Hubble, a good piece of hardware that had inspired and impressed so many of us at such a bargain price of under the cost of a B2 bomber.
We're thinking of sending someone to mars, but that Hubble thing--WAY too dangerous!
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
NASA is not going to die. Most people seem to forget that NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. There's an awful lot more going on than a few robotic probes and shuttle launches.
What is abundantly clear, however, is that Bush's "space initiative" is nothing more than smoke and mirrors designed to boost his approval ratings. Let's crunch a few numbers: Bush's plan set aside an additional $12 billion for developing a "Saturn Mark II" launch vehicle with a capsule capable of landings on both the Moon and Mars. Not only is the number ridiculous, but so is the method for obtaining the funds. Bush claims that $1 billion will be allocated by Congress, and the additional $11 billion will be found by restructuring NASA, including ending shuttle flights. So we'll finish up the station by 2010, auction the shuttles on eBay, and be on the Moon by 2015? Riiiight. First of all, NASA won't have any free funds from ending the shuttle program until at least 2010 when the station is complete, and then that only leaves 5 years for development of a completely new vehicle and support system. Even then, the shuttle's budget is only about $4 billion. The remaining $7 billion will have to be earned by cutting into NASA's remaining $11 billion. So once again, the Aeronautics branch of NASA is getting the shaft in favor of a bloated and fatally optimistic manned space program. Sound familiar? It's the shuttle all over again.
Since the federal government seems to be waffling on what it thinks NASA should be doing, I am in favor of a much less glamorous "bottom-up" approach to space exploration. Let the private entrepreneurs build simple craft to get us barely out of the atmosphere. From there, the craft get slightly more sophisticated, and through the magic of technological evolution from several sources, we end up exploring the solar system in ways we can't even dream of now. We can parallel this growth to that of the internet: it started as a large, well funded government program (ARPANET), but it wasn't until the little guy started to find commercial opportunities that it really took off (Amazon, anyone?) If we had relied on the DoD to create the internet for us, we'd be stuck with an online copy of the Library of Congress, distributed through a huge router the size of a steel factory and transmitting over a 9600 baud connection.
While Bush has his head in the sand, the X-Prize and the X-Prize Cup will be ruling the upper atmosphere! I plan on retiring at the Shady Craters Lunar Resort.
And, to keep this little tirade on topic:
The Hubble Telescope has performed beautifully and well beyond its intended lifespan. There are other, better space telescopes in the works. Let's save the shuttle flight for station hardware and let the telescope retire with dignity.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
The space program is nothing without popular support and the populous currently believes the mantra "Nuclear = Evil." Sad, but true.
Even sadder is that the space program will go nowhere without nuclear. Of all the propulsion methods that have been theorized, only nuclear powered ones (be it fission, fusion, or matter/antimatter) produce enough power and thrust to make space travel a feasible option.
Not to mention that no other solution provides a way to "live off the land" and create your own fuel from just about any source. A GCNR rocket could conceivably run off of hydrogen, oxygen, xenon, water, CO2, Iron Oxides, or just about anything else that can be cracked into a gas.
I really would give up this crazy crusade if I thought there was another option that was "good enough". Unfortunately, large amounts of energy are just plain scary. There's nothing we can do about that other than to handle that energy with care.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
No they cannot. Hubble can get near-UV, ground based cannot.
Hubble can aim at targets for LONG durations, being much more stsable, unlike ground-based telescopes.
And astronomy is much more than photographs, namely spectroscopy. Ground-based spectroscopy, even with adaptive optics, is still limited by atmospheric absorption and emission spectra. Hubble is not.
Keeping it around is really just an exercise in nostalgia for all the great things it has done for us.
As well as fruitful exercises in astrophysical research for the slews of scientists that currently use it, and those that have planned to use it in the coming years.
AAS (American Astrophysical Society), for example, has even had discussions about a future SM5, so the lifetime of Hubble beyond SM4 was being considered by many "real" astrophysicists.
make world, not war