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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!
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.
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.
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.
Or at least I should say, science is not the main point. [snip] We need manned missions, because we need actual manned colinization of space, for a great number of reasons.
The problem with today's manned program is that it has the goal of employing people, rather than colonizing space or anything else high-minded. The politicians who approve major programs like the ISS view this as pork-barrel to get relatively well-paid jobs for their constituents. Haven't you ever wondered why NASA centers for manned flight are distributed across so many states (compared with the unmanned program, which is nearly all at JPL)? Is that any way to foster communication and engineer complex systems? The tragic reality is that the astronauts killed on the Shuttle were not heroes in any scientific or exploratory sense, but were really just innocent bystanders in all of this.
I predict the manned program at NASA will continue to flounder until there is real competition from other nations. Global warming and asteroid impacts just don't make politicians feel threatened, but you can bet this would change if for example the Chinese took real steps toward their stated goal of a colony on the moon.
The other way to rejuvenate manned spaceflight is to do it privately. If the space entrepreneurs out there can bootstrap a profitable use of space (say, tourism for wealthy individuals), then this changes the game completely and creates an economic marketplace that could lead toward large-scale colonization. But this is still many years away.