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Space Tug to Save the Hubble?
Aglassis writes "In an article at SpaceRef, the CTO of Orbital Recovery Corporation claims that his company will be able to develop a space tug that could save the Hubble Space Telescope (from becoming 'a ballisticly implanted reef in the Pacific') by either moving it into a much higher stable orbit, or by moving it to the ISS where it could be maintained and operated. Some of the reasons that he cites are that the Hubble's replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, could be delayed or suffer some sort of failure. Since the JWST will be at the L2 point, servicing will be impossible."
Which of those advanced systems are going to allow for observing at wavelengths to which our atmosphere is opaque?
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
I'm not going to discount the value of a manned mission to Mars, but if there's anyway that can be done without having it mandate the end of Hubble, then we need to do it. Hubble has not only been nothing less than an incredible boon to science, it is also very near the only positive PR that the space program has had in better than a decade. The value of that is almost immeasureable.
Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee...
I dont think the idea is to attach it to the ISS. The general idea is to bring it into a close orbit with the ISS so it can be serviced then boost it into a higher orbit and just bring it back down whenever it needs more servicing.
On a similar note, the ISS needs space tugs like this one and needs to prove its usefulness as a repair shop in space. If you could use the ISS in this fasion to repair the HST then you could easily retro fit the ISS to build the type of vehicles needed to send a manned mission to the moon and mars a lot easier than if you were to simply launch the vehicles whole or try to assemble them in open space with the space shuttle(or its replacement) as your only aid.
An ISS with space tugs and large Saturn V style rockets could prove to be an excelent assembly area for any manned missions to the moon or mars. Without such a facility you need to send up the man power to assemble the vehicles along with a work platform each time you want to assemble a manned mission to mars. But with the ISS you have a permanent facility to do all the science and assembly work that the space program really needs. I think this kind of space tug is one of the very items that is nessicary to carry out space travel that is both cheap and useful for science and the common man. The other three items being the ISS, a heavy lift vehicle(such as the Saturn V in a modernized version), and cheap, reusable shuttles ala the X-Prize. If NASA had these four items then manned missions to mars and the moon would become so much cheaper and easier, and the added science that could be done would be emense.
"We Don't Need No Truthless Heros!" - Project 86
"Horizontal drilling" increased continental Natural Gas reserves by huge amounts over the past decade or two. It's why you can still afford to waste the stuff heating your house, rather than just cooking with it.
Just suppose that 20 years from now, laser drills are cutting exploration and production costs of natural gas by huge margins, enabling North American companies to burn the stuff to crack the oil out of the Alberta Tar Sands (which contain more oil than Saudi Arabia) and tell OPEC to go fuck themselves. North American energy independence.
And we'll have a moonbase, where we'll be starting to mine Helium-3, or fuse all that silicate stuff into solar panels, and beam the power back to Earth. Planetary energy independence.
Will we be saying "Bushy's corny CEOs", or will we be saying "Holy crap. That space programme we started in 2004 had some really awesome spinoffs!"
But you're right. All that rocketry stuff was just pork for Bell Labs and Raytheon. Transistors? Integrated circuits? Pah! Just subsidized R&D for Kennedy and Nixon's crony CEOs.
The only reason for those smaller, more expensive gadgets, is so that better guidance "computers" can be crammed into the spatial constraints of the nose cones of missiles. Nobody will ever benefit from those technologies, because vaccuum tubes are just fine for radios and televisions, and business can do all the "computing" it need with a room full of clerks and hand-operated mechanical calculators, thank you very much! We should never have gone to the moon in 1969.