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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"
At the very least, they should turn it around and point it at some nude beaches.
Attention Martians: If you see a gentleman in a suit with a texas accent, and slightly funny ears, landing, be sure to send him back - he wants your oil!
The site owner's response may show where future advances in space will occur.It looks like it's boiling down to a (deceptively) simple question: will you risk your life for your dreams? More importantly: will your country allow you to take that risk?
Brazil's answer seems to be, "yes". Meanwhile, here in the US, we're too busy killing ourselves in our SUVs. And don't get me started on 500+ dead and hundreds of $billions spent on the other side of own ball of rock!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Hubble gave us a new perspective on what it means to feel small and insignificant in the universe. Take a look at all the images it has produced- I've downloaded many and had them dumped to AgX paper so I can hang them up on the wall.
Hell, just click over to the hubble site here http://hubble.nasa.gov/image-gallery/ and you'll see star formation.
Just don't take away the tool that has cleaned a small bit of grease off the window to the universe and let us see what's out there. We need more photos to help 'instruct' some people down here that already are too big for their own good.
Well, if they don't want it, can I have it? I only have one tree in the back so it would be nice to tie a hammock to.
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...
The concept seems so simple, but the reality is much more complex. IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist), but orbital mechanics just don't work at all like you're used to things working on earth (or in Star [Trek|Wars]).
For one thing, if you give an orbiting object a push "up", that doesn't send it away from the planet! It just puts it in a higher orbit, and probably an elliptical one at that. An ellipse (oval) seems fine, but the Earth probably is at a focus, not the "center". If you've lowered the close point (perigee?) into the atmosphere, you've got big trouble.
Hubble simply doesn't have the sort of thruster that could boost it into a higher, more stable orbit. There are proposals to strap on a booster to do that job, but you've either got to send someone up to attach it, or find a foolproof way of doing it robotically. Remember, Hubble wasn't designed to be reboosted by anything but the shuttle!
And things go wrong -- remember the time the Shuttle crew had to build a flyswatter-looking thing to flip a switch on a satellite they'd just launched. More recently, of course, there's Mars, the Ship-Eating Planet.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Not so sure about that - a typical hubble repair mission involved about 5 days each with 8-10 hours of spacewalks. It also required a lot of fine motor control (they need to get into some tight spaces), and a big bag of various tools.
As much as I wish NASA could create robots like these and send them up... they would need to pretty much design these robots from scratch.
Since they would need to be constructed and programmed within the next 4 years or so - thats probably not in the realm of feasibilty.
The answer had always better be YES when it comes to scientific research and exploration. If the answer was NO, we'd still think the world was flat, if we'd even exist at all.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
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.
With just one or two spare gyros, I doubt any group would be able to use the Hubble for very long. After the gyros give out, you'll have a very large hunk of hardware travelling at thousands of miles per hour that's completely out of control. Even in orbit, with less stuff to crash into, that's a Really Really Bad Thing. Boosting hubble out to a permenent orbit (or at least out to one that would last 50 years or so until we would presumably have craft more capable of either fetching it or enshrining it) would be a huge cost. We have nothing on the shelf to do it now, and it would be cheaper to just dump the thing into the ocean. What I think we should be developing, in addition to a shuttle replacement, is robotic repair vehicles that we could use in case of a backup, or in cases of hardware that we really don't want people risking their lives for. Hubble, certainly, has intrinsic and sentimental value that people would be willing to take a risk to save. Somehow, I sort of doubt anyone wants to risk their lives repairing generic communications satillite #5 so soccer moms can continue to yak on their cell phones while causing mayhem in their SUVs. That means that we'd have to design satillites for easy repair using robots (more modular, easier access, etc.) Modularity probably wouldn't be a bad thing, anyhow. I suspect if we can develop robots that can (mostly, sorta) work on Mars, we can develop ones for earth orbit that can swap in and out some modules.
A few quick notes on Hubble and NASA:
If Hubble is going to come home on its own around 2007, that does not mean we have 3 years to make a decision. With every orbit Hubble gets a tiny bit closer to Earth. It isn't going to take a left turn in 3 years and suddenly be on collision course. We need to do something in the next year or so before the orbit decays to the point that a boost won't move it high enough. That and this is mostly about repair and replacement parts as previously stated - which brings me to:
There was a Hubble plan. NASA has had a plan all along to successfully and responsibly keep Hubble going. Obviously, some unexpected and tragic events have changed that plan.
However, U.S. folks posting with a gripe about NASA's bad planning with Hubble and the International Space Station need to re-direct their energies and complain to their congresspeople - they are the ones holding the purse strings, and they are the ones who cut the Hab module for the ISS. Each of us share the burden of what "popular opinion" is, and that is the only thing we can do about keeping plans on track.
Kulakovich