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NASA Engineers Dispute Hubble Safety Claim
Zeinfeld writes "According to the administration, the Hubble space telescope is going to be allowed to die in the next three years because the shuttle mission required to save it would be too risky. Meanwhile the public plans say shuttle missions to the space station will resume. Papers leaked to the New York Times say hogwash. The article (free subscription required) reports claims that money and politics, not safety are the reason. The public NASA story is clearly nonsense, and if the science from Hubble does not justify a shuttle mission, then it's time to pull the plug on the space station. I suspect that is exactly what will happen after the November election."
These safety issues are just plain silly. It's the same thing as to why we are allowing our privacy and dignity to be invaded when taking a plane somewhere. The columbia crash sucks, yes, but when did a couple of human deaths ever stop human invention. There are still 6 billion people on this planet I don't think we should stop our science because a couple people died. The next telescope to be put in space won't happen until 2012 and it can't even see the same spectrum that hubble can. The new one is going to be infrared, hubble on the other hand uses human visible spectrum. This is a loss that can't be imagined. Stop playing your silly little games NASA and let us use hubble!
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/science/07HUBB.h tml?ex=1076734800&en=f74fc93d9204bbee&ei=5062&part ner=GOOGLE
The astronaughts on board Columbia and all the other NASA astronaughts who're being kept grounded now understand that going into space is risky. They're interested in what they do, they've chosen to take the risks and they're interested in the science.
If the adminstration were to let the astronaughts decide whether to go up to fix Hubble when required, I doubt they would have a shortage of them volunteering to do that. The last thing the late astronaughts aboard Columbia would have wanted was to see their deaths result in the grounding of the space program and the premature death of Hubble.
Engineer's Papers Dispute Hubble Decision
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: February 7, 2004
ASA's decision to abandon its crown scientific jewel, the Hubble Space Telescope, cannot be justified on safety grounds, according to a pair of reports by a NASA engineer that have been circulating in scientific and political circles in the last few days.
The unsigned documents are attracting attention on Capitol Hill, particularly in the House Science Committee, which is expected to discuss the Hubble decision at a meeting on Thursday.
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"We're reviewing the Hubble decision, looking at it very closely," said a spokesman for Representative Sherwood Boehlert, Republican of New York and chairman of the committee. "We're going to be examining the views in this particular document as well as a whole host of others."
The documents have also created a buzz among astronomers, who hope that their wider distribution will help spark a larger debate about the telescope's fate. The reports have deepened astronomers' skepticism that safety and not politics and money was the issue last month when Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator, announced the cancellation of the space shuttle's planned 2006 maintenance visit to the telescope. As a result, the telescope will probably die in orbit within three years, astronomers say, instead of lasting into the early part of the next decade as originally planned.
In explaining his decision, Mr. O'Keefe had cited a recommendation of the board that investigated the Columbia space shuttle disaster last year that NASA must develop a way to inspect and repair damage to the shuttle's thermal protection system.
While the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was committed to developing this ability for missions to the International Space Station, which could serve as a "safe haven" for the astronauts if the shuttle was damaged, Mr. O'Keefe said it was too risky and expensive to develop an "autonomous" inspection and repair capability for a single mission to the telescope.
The new reports challenge Mr. O'Keefe's conclusion, citing data and references from NASA documents in arguing that the administrator's statement "cannot be supported."
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommendations and NASA's plans for "return to flight" include ultimately developing just such an ability to inspect and repair the tiles independently of the station. That autonomous ability is needed because the shuttle might fail to make it to the space station, or the space station may become too big and complex to serve as a repair base, according to the papers.
One of the reports concludes that missions to the telescope "are as safe as or perhaps safer than" space station missions "conducted in the same time frame."
The author is a NASA engineer who wrote the reports based on internal data and who declined to be identified for fear of losing his job. Copies of the documents were provided to The New York Times by an astronomer who is not part of NASA and opposes the decision to let the telescope die.
"Those documents certainly undercut the public position of the agency," said Dr. Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a member of a committee that advises NASA on space science.
Dr. Illingworth added that it was important to open up debate on these issues. "We need to get real information out there, and not just have a few people in NASA saying we know what's best," he said.
A Congressional staff member who was given the documents said they appeared to be credible. "We are taking them seriously," he said. Referring to the requirement of an autonomous repair capability, he said, "NASA's going to have to spend the money to do this" if the agency follows the accident board's recommendations.
The documents also argue that missions to the space station might actually be riskier than going to the space telescope for several reasons. Because of the space
The last few Apollo missions were quietly turned into expensive scrap.
Viking landers where the budget to listen to them was cut before they stopped sending.
Skylab which was allowed to die while waiting for the shuttle to make it better.
Various of shuttle replacement projects that given a half-hearted try and dropped.
And with the amount of continuous program and budget changes, it's a miracle that the shuttle and ISS ever got off the ground. (The slow morph from Freedom to the ISS and now to this is extremely sickening.)
The cut-backs so that manned Mars exploration and a Moon base can go forward are a joke. After the cut-backs have been done, the new programs will never go forward.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Is a promise from President Bush to be taken at face value? From a man that has no qualms about lying to the public with a regularity and a level never seen before from an US President?
There are other alternatives, such as cutting the budget of Cold War-era military projects that offer no particular value.
But in the mean time, humanity really needs a frontier. Our systems have a tendency to slowly but surely become slower and more mired as time passes, in part because power tends to be gravitational; it gets concentrated in the hands of smaller groups of people, who in turn often become more cautious and inflexible with regards to things that would rock the boat. Bureaucracy gets bigger, not smaller, and it becomes harder to try radically new ways of doing things. The best way for change to take place is often for it to be experimented with somewhere else, and then filter back; this is what happened in the past with America. These people, coming to a new place without any entrenched baggage, got to try to start a system from scratch, and when it was successful, other countries could observe and then emulate and improve on it as it filtered back. But there is no frontier to experiment with anymore. The whole world (the oceans don't count, they are too hard/expensive to colonize for now) has people living in it. I think it is important for our development as a species to move on to new places, where new laws can be tried (including new ways of thinking about stuff like IP and citizen participation), and so that no single entity will ever be able to easily control everyone.
For many people, I believe that the excitement, opportunity, etc. are worth the risk and sacrifice that it will take. The Hubble has been one of our most successful and productive projects, and one that wouldn't have been possible without astronauts; the space station, in contrast, has in fact been sort of a waste from the point of view of both science and exploration. But neither should be the sole reason to keep or get rid of the shuttle, or the concept of manned space flight. A certain amount of capital is needed to prime things, so to speak, before enough momentum can develop for space exploration to become self-sustaining without government aid. This large up front cost has been and will be difficult for many to swallow, especially in our notoriously money hungry Congress. But as a country, and a species, we need this, and it will pay back many times over. I apologize for my long windedness, but I am hopeful that eventually some politicians will try to get votes from people with some large vision and dream instead of simply the usual issues.
Except, of course, for the new generation of ground-based telescopes with better resolving power than the hubble. It's silly to spend more money on inferior technology just because it's space-based and therefor "must be cooler".
Lets not confuse space engineering with space science. Hubble is the only platform that can do many of the things it does. Ultra-violet astronomy cannot be done from the ground. And wide field high resolution imaging cannot be done with modern adaptive optics. This combined with its spatial resolution and technical advancements have lead to many of the largest astronomical advancements in past 50 years. No other observatory could have found Dark Energy. No others could have observed the deep feelds HST has and reshaped the entire theory of how the universe aged. And if it were not for the missions to service Hubble, ISS would never have happened. We learn more and more about construction in space with each mission to ISS and HST. So in that sence what we know about practical space engineering comes from HST as well.
Don't get me wrong, new platforms would be nice. Its just we don't have any, and if HST is allowed to die there will be no true replacement. The Web Space Telescope is a successor not a replacement. And the moon base on is so far off that it really isn't a viable option, given the ebb and flow of plans in Washington (Clinton basically killed Bush's original lets go to the moon plan).
Going to the Moon, to Mars, and establishing permenant bases is great engineering. Velcro and Tang for everyone. But pocket calcuators, while essential to doing science in the '70s are not the science. If you look at the proposed plan, science is out the door at NASA. They did this once, flags and footsteps of the Apollo missions. They almost didn't take a geologist to the moon to look directly at it. Lets make sure they don't lose sight of the science and just go for the engineering glory.
Today is a gift. Save the receipt.
Actually, Bush has been increasing funding, and shows no sign of stopping. Tax cuts are an excuse to cut public funding - medicare, education, social security, NASA, intelligence, and the like - while boosting corporate welfare and payoffs to the richest 1% (which compose 99% of the Bush White House - big surprise!).
Hubble's replacement is scheduled for 2012 and it sees in infrared. Hubble uses visible light spectrum. There is no scheduled replacement for hubble.
I don't know the details of the spectrum that the Webb telescope will be able to view. But viewing only infrared is not as odd as it seems. Visible light and infrared astronomy overlap a great deal. The really deep objects are so greatly red-shifted, they are in the infrared when the light gets to us. And since the Webb telescope is primarily for viewing such objects, this makes sense. But you are right in that it will not be a direct replacement for the Hubble, although it is close.
And I agree that shutting down Hubble makes no sense. It is doing great astronomy and could continue doing so for many years. I also think it's a mistake to put the Webb telescope at the L2 point rather than in Earth orbit. Hubble has shown that the ability to do repair missions is invaluable.
One thing I've learned during my relatively short life to date (just over a quarter of a century now) is that things you learn from seemingly unrelated disciplines have applications to one another. Things you thought would never apply to one another have a direct bearing on each other and if you don't understand something about them both, you will flail. For example, prior to 1942 no one knew that the sun was a source of radio noise. This fact now affects the design of a great deal of equipment. Astronomy has a bearing on electronics? How amazing.
It would be great to stick a nice scope on the moon, but we should be going there anyway. The question we have to ask ourself is, how much time will be lost doing research by not fixing it, and where is that money going to go if we don't spend it on hubble? The safety aspect doesn't bother me much so long as there are astronauts willing to take the risks. If you have to force people to go, then I wouldn't do it. It's not worth a single unwilling loss of human life.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Who listens to the engineers anyway?
Come on! This is the new new new economy! All we need is marketing!
</sarcasm>
(This is funny because it's true)
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Compared to new ground-based telescopes, the Hubble is a technically inferior telescope. But it still gets much better images because it doesn't have the atmosphere. It's not just because it "must be cooler" because it's space-based. No amount of telescope can make up for the atmosphere.
To me, this report doesn't really make sense. The current policy is that the shuttle will always go to the space station. There it will be inspected to make sure that the tiles are good before it goes back for reentry. Such an inspection would have detected the Columbia problem. Then in the unlikely case that there is damage, the crew could stay at the station on an emergency basis while another shuttle is launched.
No such actions are possible on a mission to the Hubble. Because of the orbital parameters, it is impossible for the shuttle to be able to go to both places on one mission. So any inspection, repair or wait-for-rescue would have to occur right there at the telescope.
Now, the report claims that NASA plans "eventually" to create additional facilities for these operations, other than at the space station. But that's obviously going to take a great deal of time. For one thing, just consider building the docking mechanism to allow two shuttles to connect and transfer crews from one to the other. No such thing has ever been designed, while such facilities already exist at the space station. Plus, the space station has additional supplies and space to let the crew wait safely for rescue. And it can hold inspection and repair equipment.
So while NASA may eventually create off-station repair facilities, that won't happen for a long time. Their initial efforts will be very properly focused on getting these abilities set up at the space station itself. And that means that no such facilities can be available by 2006, when the mission to Hubble is needed.
I worked on STS as test engineer for several years until the mid 80's. The estimated catastrophic failure rates were then about 1/25 launches, based upon the 5 fleet. We're in the realm of physics here (well within an order of magnitude/factor of two or so.)
The politics has always overwhelmed the science; my pals in the spacelab DESPISED the scientists as eggheads, the scientists loathed the silliness of manned flight programs which bled the fundpot dry, without any real result. As physicist working in an engineering area, I got shot at by both sides. (A former NASA historian wrote a good treatise on that a few years back; can't recall the particulars.) Here we go again, except that this administration goes WAY further with it's hatred of science. In fact, I'll wager to say that it's his faith-based baloney which is behind this move, along with a goodly dose of wanting only manned programs, for the politics of it, and all science be damned.
http://thenation.com/outrage/index.mhtml?bid=6
BTW, I was asked to lecture to our entire department (about 400 engineers and technicians) when I left in mid-'85. The topic: what can we do to improve. Here's what I said: GET SERIOUS ABOUT SAFETY OR SOMEBODY'S GONNA DIE. And STAND UP AND SAY NO TO THE BOSS WHEN HE SAYS IT'S OK, AND YOU KNOW BETTER.
Ames should be cut back to a wind tunnel operation. Slidell (now "the Stennis Space Center", a "multi-agency center for 30 resident agencies"), should be sold off to a private developer. The "Independent Verification and Validation Facility" in West Virginia should be consolidated with some NASA facility that needs its services. Goddard needs some major cutbacks. (Goddard just awarded a $34 million contract for "conference support, duplicating, computer graphics, publication, and documentation" on a cost plus award fee basis. Then they issued a press release about it.)
NASA's non-flight research should be funded through the National Science Foundation. Environmental resarch should be moved to the EPA. In fact, even space science should go through NSF. NASA's job should be limited to flight hardware and support systems.
If NASA got rid of about half its organization, and insisted that the remaining half build stuff that flies, they might get somewhere.
Sure it can--you must not be aware of the advances in adaptive optics. There's a reason that the next-generation space telescope isn't designed for visible-light observations--advances in ground-based technology have overtaken the advantages of a space-based platform. (Specifically, with AO the important factor is more mirror size (to sense dimmer objects) then atmosphere, and a space telescope will never be able to compete with a ground telescope in that area in our lifetimes. Add to that the huge cost savings in not boosting the observatory into orbit --effectively increasing the budget for instruments.) Some informative links:
Keck Observatory
European OWL telescope
People landed on the moon a few years before I was born. I grew up to the early space shuttle program and fantastic photos from Voyager. Back then, I figured we be back to the moon by 2000 and to mars by 2010. Surely the common man would have been able to experience earth orbit by then.
Here we are in 2004 and basically nothing new has happened with manned space exploration. It's depressing to think that it'll take until 2020 just to get back to the moon! Will humans even reach Mars in my lifetime now?
All those dollars wasted on blowing up Iraq that could've been put toward much grander goals in space!
I guess I need to start building a Mars transport in my garage since nobody else is going to bother.
I don't think the issue is actually cost here, the issue is that the shuttle is too unsafe to fly for any reason at all. Clearly if it is safe enough to fly thirty odd missions for the space station it is safe enough to do one mission to save Hubble.
If the issue is cost, it is not Bush behind it. Bush is not Reagan. Reagan cut spending to pay for his tax cuts. Bush has not cut anything, has not vetoed any bill however pork laden. The current plot is to have him veto the highways bill so he looks tough on spending safe in the knowledge he will be overridden.
Hubble is the biggest contribution NASA has made to science in the past decade. There is more science comes out of Hubble each week than will ever come out of the space station. If the issue was cash it would be because the NASA brass either think they can get Congress to pay for an extra mission to save Hubble or they are so committed to the space station they will defend it at all costs.
The Mars crap is an obvious canard, its the 'vision thing'. Like dressing Bush up in a flight suit and landing on the deck of the US Lincoln. It is a typical election pledge and you can tell it is bogus because there is no extra money in the budget to pay for it. The unreported part of the speech gave the end of life date for the shuttle.
The shuttle is not going to fly before the election. Karl Rove is not going to risk having it blow up on the launchpad and have Bush be blamed for an election stunt that cost others lives. To lose one shuttle is a misfortune, two...
So far the shuttle has cost 16 lives. Both disasters showed that the management had failled. The top priority after November is going to be executing Bin Laden and sorting out the CIA. Fixing NASA as well is not going to be ralistic.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Mir. You know, that old space station? The one where people lived for over a year at a time, far longer than any ISS mission?
We already know what we need to know about the long-term effects of weightlessness. The ISS is worthless, simply providing a destination for the shuttle. With 2 crew members aboard, there's not even time for science - it takes 2 crew just to run the thing.
I agree with this article that the only thing worth bringing the shuttle out of retirement for is a Hubble servicing mission. The STS and ISS programs aren't fit to hold the Space Telescope's jock.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Just a thought.....and who, exactly, provides jobs in this country? The lower 20% of the economic scale? Maybe if you're selling drugs, sure. The mid 60%? Right...the working people. The upper 20% are the ones forking out the cash to invest in business and capital to provide jobs (and not JUST in the IT industry). They take their tax incentives just like Joe Six-pack come April 15th. Example: Where I live they are building a HUGE industrial park with extremely attractive tax breaks for big business (and entrepreneurs if they can afford to invest) to bring jobs to the area. They SHOULD get a tax break to invest and give me a job. Jesus, I'm so sick of hearing that only the rich get a break when it comes to taxes. When YOU have $10 million dollars to invest and have the option of going to a state or county that will save you 10% in taxes, which one would you pick? 10% is 10% is 10%; whether you're Joe or GM. I don't have $10 million to invest or create employment so I'll just have to take the job...and I'd rather it be in my community rather than in Mexico.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
If NASA called me up and said, we're going to launch you on the shuttle, are you willing to go. You have a 1 in 50 chance in being killed during the mission, but, you'll get to go to space if you live. I would bet there are easily 100,000 people that would do this. Astronauts know the risks they are taking, and, there are plenty of people willing to take those risks.
It's my understanding that we are going to return to the moon by having NASA join in the military on the costs of an updated EELV. The new Atlas and Delta rockets already can do payload into GEO and LEO orbits for less than a 1/10th cost of the shuttle.
This is my sig.
Actually, most jobs are created by small and medium-sized businesses. Large companies are usually in mature markets where the opportunities for growth are limited. So dropping taxes for the rich who have most of their money invested in large companies does not encourage growth as much. Dropping taxes for small entrepreneurs does.
Dropping taxes on Joe six-pack increases his disposable income and his ability to consume. It provides more opportunities for entrepreneurs to open new businesses. If you have lots of money to invest but no buyers for your product, that money is not going to do you any good.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
"The upper 20% are the ones forking out the cash to invest in business and capital to provide jobs (and not JUST in the IT industry)."
This might have been a valid argument in the past but it doesn't work well any more. Most of the big corporations and the wealthy who have capital are not investing it to create good jobs and have zero allegiance to creating jobs in the U.S. since off shoring and outsourcing became the norm. These days investors are always looking for the cheapest labor they can find, capable of doing the work, in order to maximize their profit. That is a fundemental law of capitalism. That is why the new market bubble, in the post dot com bubble era, is in any stock with a China connection, the largest pool of the cheapest labor.
Jobs and working people in the U.S. are doomed thanks to the advent of:
- cheap telecommunications
- cheap container ships
- massive illegal immigration
- free trade
Cheap container ships allowed moving manufacturing jobs to the cheapest labor market. When NAFTA was first signed manufacturing jobs fled to Mexico and Canada. But even Mexican labor was been undercut by even cheaper labor in China coupled with ever larger and more efficient container ships. When longshoreman were largely removed from unloading of ships, manufacturing jobs in the U.S. were doomed
Cheap telecommunications is doing the same thing to information worker jobs. It started out as call centers, labor intensive programming and is moving into all kinds of information jobs. Paralegal work is an example of the newest wave.
This leaves us with jobs that required a warm body be in the United States to do the job, picking crops, doing the nails of rich laides, etc. This was easily solved. Big business applied political pressure and the government simply stopped enforcing the integrity of borders and in employment. This resulted in many low end jobs going to illegals and massive downward pressure on wages for American's at the low end. Bush's new worker program is ultimately designed to drive down wages. In some respects driving down wages is essential for American competitiveness in the global economy. Problem is it will be ugly for working Americans.
It is a fact of life in the modern capitalist world that capital is going to flee to the cheapest labor market and you can't easily stop it.
The massive stimulus the Bush administration is applying to the economy is doing a few things but job creation in the U.S is not really on the list.
- it juiced the stock market by cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains. The stock market can go up in the current environment even if the underlying economy is not. Lots of ordinary people benefit from the stock market going up today, but it benefits the wealthy much more than the average investor because they know how to play the market and they tend to get lots of edges ordinary investors don't. Small investors were hurt much more severely in the last down turn than large investors.
- its infusing large amount of tax money into the wealthy and large corporations further creating the facade of a booming economy. The massive funds the Medicare "reform" bill is going to pump in to drug companies is a good example. The Energy bill that was voted down would have done the same thing for energy companies. They might create some jobs but they are mostly going to make wealthy the executives and large stock holders of these large corporations who are the benefactors of the Bush administation.
- Its pumped the economy, short term, to help insure the Bush administration is reelected in November at the price of a massive deficit that will haunt us forever. Its simply not sound economics and that is exemplified by the fact the dollar is plunging against the Euro and even the lowly Canadian dollar. Its so unprecedent that the IMF and World Bank, typically lap dogs of the U.S., are raising serious warning flags about the danger of the Bush administrations reckless fiscal policies.
@de_machina