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NASA to Reconsider Hubble Decision
blamanj writes "It's not dead yet. With cries of opposition coming in from all quarters, NASA has decided to review its earlier decision. Adm. Hal Gehman, chairman of the board that investigated the Columbia shuttle breakup last year, will 'review the (Hubble) matter and offer his unique perspective,' NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said"
Maybe it is just me, but I don't understand the point of abandoning a space project and crashing it into the earth. Why not push it out to space a little more... to somewhat a safe distance, and GIVE it to someone, like a school, or something. Im sure SOMEONE can put things like this, or a SPACE STATION to good use. Maybe if it isnt even in the immediate future, I think there is plenty of empty space out there, that we can even park them anywhere. Even if that is orbiting the moon... and if it gets destroyed, there will be no issue
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Without the shuttle to replace the failing gyro's onboard the Hubble, their isn't much that NASA can do, besides boost its orbit... Pretty much their choices are: -reconsider shuttle usage -ask the Russians to help with a manned mission (would need to send up a capsule, and something to hold the paylod - Soyuz is too small to hold all the replacement parts and astronauts) -come up with an unmanned mission to boost the orbit (this still wouldn't address failing gyros and other critical parts wearing out)
There wasa previous slashdot article talking abouit the advances in imaging processors. Couldn't they dso the same for the Hubble? The lenses are great (albeit slightly flawed), but with such raw data, new computers will pull better info.
Their previous decision may have been unpopular, but this is ridiculous. NASA needs to learn how to make a game-plan and stand by it, rather than trying to do everything in a really half-assed way. Plus, if they had waited a bit longer, I think they might have seen some interesting proposals on Hubble's future come crawling out of the woodwork from the private sector. Private investment and innovation in space technology is something NASA definitely needs to encourage rather than trample on in the years ahead.
AC.
Legos decided to get free press by saying they were going to stop creating Mindstorm legos. This got a lot of people up-in-arms and they started spilling the wonders of Mindstorm everywhere. Then lego states that they have decided not to stop making them. What free advertising!
I feel that NASA has used the same technique here. The general population supports NASA but it's hard to get the people to publically stand for NASA's support. By saying that they are scrapping the Hubble, they found a way to stimulate the public into lobbying for the program.
Way to go NASA! Marketing brillance!
AC
It's possible that some of the decision makers at NASA may have expected (or at least hoped for) this sort of reaction. If you want to boost your funding, propose cutting an expensive but popular program, in the hopes that you'll get an outcry and support for budget increases.
(I'm not complaining if this was intentional, mind you; I'm just congratulating them on their clever strategy if it was.)
How much would keeping the Hubble active cost compared to some of the proposed massively powerful earthbound scopes, anyway? Given the choice, I'd probably go for buying the OWL or the like rather than the Hubble if the costs are similar.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Here are a coulpe links to articles:
From today's NY Times:
NASA Chief Affirms Stand on Canceling Hubble Mission
Also,
O'Keefe has sent a second letter (dated Jan. 28) to Senator Mikulski.
Well, look at it this way. If you, Administrator O'Keefe, order a Hubble servicing mission and something goes terribly wrong, your career along with several people's lives are almost guaranteed to be forfeit. Are you going to make that order against the better judgment of the CAIB which was responsible for unravelling the previous catastrophe? No -- if you're even thinking about going back to Hubble, this guy needs to be involved.
Now think what you could build with that money in todays technology. I would suggest reusing some of the detectors designed for the next service mission. Use a modern light-weight mirror. No options for repear in space, just launch and forget. If it blows up, build another one. Mightbe be really modest in your goals, don't go for a design that is 10 times better than hubble, but try to equal it with a mirror of 1.5 - 2 meter. I don't know the exact number, but i believe SIRTF was built for something between 0.5 and 1B$. I would guess this could be done for less than 1B$ within 3 years to close the gap till NGST is built.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
O'Keefe is obviously being pressured by Hubble's political constituency. He needs validation of his controversial (but in my mind correct) decision to quell the disent. Who better than Adm. Hal Gehman who effectively put severe limitations on the further use of the Space Shuttle without being completely specific about its future use. I think it is very clever on O'Keefe's part. NASA had to swallow all of the recommendations of Gehman's board of review, whether they made sense or not. O'Keefe just wants to put responsibility on Gehman if an orbiter is stranded servicing Hubble. It is against O'Keefe's better judgement.
an ill wind that blows no good
... it to the space station, that way they could work on it, share fuel, be able to command it better, etc...
This wasn't Bush's call. This was NASA trying to appear "decisive" in implementing the new space push. Mismanagement on their part as usual. Don't be so dismissive of it either. If we do establish a presence on the Moon, we'll be able to build a telescope that will make Hubble look like a 25-cent plastic magnifying glass.
Blaze a trail to the New World
If we can't even justify servicing Hubble that means that the shuttle program is now completely dead. There is no other mission that could possibly be as important scientifically.
Of course everyone knows that the shuttle is dead, 14 dead people in two separate disasters mean that it won't be going back. But instead of facing up to that fact NASA will continue to burn money on projects that are meant to disguise the fact. The announcement of the Mars mission being an example, Bush announced the Mars mission as a way to cover the fact that shuttle was going to be all but terminated. The problem is that 'all but' part. Don't want to end all those jobs with contractors making juicy donations to the GOP, particularly not Halliburton.
There is a real failure of leadership here. Instead of saying it as it is we have a Karl Rove PR job that in effect will cost the tax payer a couple of billion dollars in futile attempts to fix a shuttle that no President is ever going to let fly again.
As for Hubble, the cheapest solution is probably to deorbit the current one into an ocean and send up a completely new Hubble. We already have a mirror for the thing, and it does not have spherical abberation defect. Kodak made a standby mirror for use in tests that they did not want to risk the real one on. Slap on the backups of the backups for the detection equipment and you can probably build Hubble II for $200 mil or so
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Even if they wanted to, they couldn't do it.
The optics on the HST are so sensitive, the sunlight that is reflected off the earth would destroy them.
Here is an article about a private company that wants to save the Hubble with a "space tug". I say if NASA is going to let it burn anyway, they should let private industry bid for the project. There are a lot of reasons that the Hubble is still relevant. NEO (near earth objects) anyone? The Hubble has made some amazing discoveries and I don't think it has outlived its usefulness yet.
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Let it go.. it's served its purpose (and what an amazing job it did!) but they're already planning a newer, better telescope to be launched in a few years. Plus, when we get on the moon we can build an even better one that will make the Hubble look insignificant in comparison.
Not so, Hubble was launched by Space Shuttle Discovery.
The ironic thing is that O'Keefe (appointed by Bush, keep in mind) said he won't risk another Hubble servicing mission, and will instead focus on the Mars mission.
The ironic thing, though, is that the manned Mars mission is way way more risky than servicing Hubble.
Luckily Senator Mikulski (Maryland, Democrat) has been pushing O'Keefe bigtime to reconsider his decision. At first he flatly said "No" but then after she kept pushing he said he'd reconsider! She just spoke at the Space Telescope Science Institute today about her efforts to swing O'Keefe.
make world, not war
It's simple, really. To sink the Hubble, NASA already plans on firing off an un-manned mission to drive it down into a decaying orbit:
This shows the resources for manuevering the telescope are already budgeted. There may be added expense in engineering a mount point on the ISS, and additional risk & effort involved in calculating a safe vector, but as the following (kick ass) tools can show you, the HST and the ISS have practically identical orbits assigned them. The difference in orbits between the ISS and the HST are in almost identical orbits, as regards altitude, speed and direction of travel. It would be simple and cheap to re-purpose the end-of-life booster pack to serve as a tow truck into ISS space.
What problems would this plan solve? Well, service missions are suddenly a matter of popping out on the patio and replacing a fuse, instead of a multi-billion dollar voyage risking the life and safety of many billions more worth of equipment, personel and reputation. Extra parts can be tucked in with ISS mission carry-on baggage if necessary. and the HST would still be one of the finest optical instruments ever imagined.
Would there be problems with this solution? Yes. There may be issues with local radiation effects in the vicinity of the station, effects that might diminish the sensitivity of the instrument, whether by heating, light-polution, communications equipment or even vibration from the motors used aboard the station. The HST was not designed to work under such conditions. However, many of these issues can be solved with careful consideration with engineering the mount point spar. Any remaining degradation is worth the pain, as a hobbled hubble is better than a scrubbed hubbled.
This solution is just the first off the top of my head. There are others to consider. Perhaps they could use the booster to park the HST in a non-decaying orbit long enough to wait on the arrival of cherap space flight. On second though, by the time we have cheap space flight, it will be a simple thing to put up copies of the HST and far more besides. I suppose there are other possibilities, but mating the HST to the ISS is the cheapest, fastest, safest and sanest choice for the immediate future.
Hubble is the most successful of NASA's programs since the Apollo missions. And it's not just being used in USA, but the data is being used/analyzed by people all around the world. It's freely available (after a 1 year period that the PI has exclusive access to it) and astronomers from Pakistan to Brazil have been using it.
The factor O'Keefe keeps mentioning is safety. But the ironic thing is that he keeps promoting a Mars program where risk, and hence safety issues, is far far greater. Also, there are many astronauts that have already volunteered to service Hubble (eg Grunsfeld, who was the lead in servicing mission 3B and did another Hubble servicing mission prior). In fact, Grunsfeld said he'd go in the shuttle to Hubble but not to ISS!
It seems to be more politics than science/funding issues. O'Keefe was selected by Bush, and now is actively pushing Bush's "Mars" agenda, which is starting to look more and more like a carefully disguised space-based militaristic program.
Most NASA and other scientists, as well as amateur astronomers around the globe, are against the decision to cancel Hubble. Even people actively interested in Mars exploration have praised the decision to fund Mars programs but adamanatly advocate not cancelling Hubble to do so.
Hopefully this decision will be overturned. Senator Mikulski addressed STScI this morning saying she was able to convince O'Keefe to set up a committee to review the feasability to service Hubble. Hopefully the committee will be unbiased and actively consider science instead of politics.
make world, not war
Yes, we could put a telescope on the moon (not so easily and probably not for many many years, and there are problems there, too, with vibration issues for instance), but that isn't really the point here. The issue is about whether or not to keep an operating telescope in operation until its replacement is flying. Hubble servicing missions have upgraded it from 1980s (or even 1970s) technology to 1990s technology (instruments, computers, solar panels, etc., get upgrades), so that's not a valid criticism.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
On the other hand, NASA has developed a new space telescope with a better mirror that is scheduled to be launched in 2011.
It is very important for NASA to do valuable science, but why not do it cost effectively? The cost of a shuttle mission, estimated at about $400m - $500m, is almost half of the whole budget for the next generation space telescope ($825m).
I really doubt Hubble is used for intelligence work, at least very often, though it probably could be in a pinch. I doubt the Hubble control center or staff is setup or cleared to do serious classified work. Hubble sure wont be any use for spying if its gyros degrade further since spy sattelites need to do a lot of manuevering and pointing.
h -1 2.htm
The NRO has its own really big telescopes which are specificly designed to look at the earth, manuever and point. They are called KH-11 or Keyhole. On the other hand the next generation Keyholes, KH-12 Improved Crystal, are proving to be a massively expensive and massively screwed up program, with TRW and Lockheed at the helm. They massively overpromised what they could do, government believed them and as usual they are probably using all the overruns to pad their bottomline. If Improved Crystal continues to slip, and KH-11's fail the NRO could get desperate enough to use Hubble assuming it still worked.
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/imint/k
This whole Hubble situation should be taken as a lesson in why its bad to let an account, like O'Keffe, run a research agency like NASA. You need to get someone that has a technical, engineering background and who is able to manage projects and keep spending under control. As I've said before someone like Kelly Johnson, the genius behind the old Lockheed Skunkworks is what they need. The fact that Bush has O'Keffe in charge of NASA indicates he is more interested in just dicking with their books than he is in actually doing anything.
@de_machina
cragen
Ummm... Yeah, what has private enterprise done for space exploration? The closest that private enterprise has done is earth imaging for example Digital Globe www.digitalglobe.com And even they are getting funding from the government. Maybe you are thinking of Iridium? Yeah that went well.
Space exploration is not a easy or cheap thing to do. There aren't many companies out there that can do it and even if they could wouldn't have the customer base to pay for it.
Whether or not I am a Westerner, is irrelevent to the truth of my statements. If $87 billion can be found for Imperial militarism, surely something can be found for Hubble. (With the aim being: stop spending money attacking other countries, and spend it instead securing your own borders and innate economy.)
Your sentiment towards giving the wealth to the poor has significant hazards (for instance, all welfare is morally corrupting), but within that mode, the aim of raising up society to a more affluent level is the only way to support long-term scientific adventurism. Getting the people's minds off of survival -- by securing it -- and onto more esoteric items, is the way to go towards social advancement or betterment. And from that, space exploration can just be a side effect.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]