Nasa Says 'no' to Hubble Reprieve

falconed writes "From the BBC, 'Nasa has given a final "no" to requests for it to change its mind and grant a reprieve to the Hubble Space Telescope.' Not much new info here; canceling the program due to safety issues. This has been discussed on Slashdot before."

Comments

Time it to go down in the middle of Utah......

[ckathens]

Just a thought, kill two birds w/ one stone.

Re:Time it to go down in the middle of Utah......

[Buran]

I know the parent post is a joke and/or troll, but I wanted to reply anyway.

IF a planned re-entry is done, the scope will be guided into the middle of an ocean, preferably the middle of the largest open space available, just as Mir was. (Mir de-orbited sooner than planned, but even so, it hit the water.) The 1979 Skylab crash over Australia was entirely unplanned since it was supposed to have been reboosted by the Shuttle, but delays in the Shuttle program combined with expansion of the upper atmosphere caused it to re-enter earlier than expected instead of being rescued.

Re:Time it to go down in the middle of Utah......

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, I've lived in Utah, and I can assert that there dwells a third madness that could be taken down with the same stone. It actually makes it that much more appealing, too.

Re:Time it to go down in the middle of Utah......

[rickshaf]

Well, the alternative is that, instead of "killing two birds with one stone", we can all flood NASA HQ with letters, say, oh, 125,000 of them. O''Keefe will be forced to extend the life of the Hubble Space Telescope. But, in a fit of pique, he moves it to Friday night....

Why not give it to DoD?

[Pakaran2]

You could point it towards Earth and look for those WMD's. Obviously Saddam won't tell where they are, so we need to get creative.

Re:Why not give it to DoD?

[downix]

You know it wouldn't be used for WMD tho. It would be used to look at topless sunbathers while the manager's in his office.

Re:Why not give it to DoD?

[Anonymous Coward]

snipped from the Hubble FAQ on the NASA website:

Hubble could take pictures of the Earth, but the image quality would be extremely poor.

1. The problems are that Hubble has a fixed focus which is set for looking at the distant stars and galaxies. The Earth is way too close. An object about 2-3 meters across would be one fuzzy dot. This is not nearly as good as Hubble could do if it could be focused.

2. The surface of the Earth is whizzing by as Hubble orbits, and the pointing system, designed to track the distant stars, cannot track an object on the Earth. The shortest exposure time on any of the Hubble instruments is 0.1 sec, and in this time Hubble moves about 700 meters. So a picture Hubble took of Earth would be all streaks in the orbital direction, and pretty fuzzy in the other direction.

Re:Why not give it to DoD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arabic women are pretty hot. You just don't usually get to see anything but their clothing. It's no wonder them youngin males over there are so frusterated.

Re:Why not give it to DoD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pre-marital sex is strictly forbidden. These are people that chop off your right hand if you're caught stealing (since they haven't developed toilet paper, the left hand is used to wipe your ass... an honorable person won't eat with their left hand and will starve), so guess what body part gets cut off if you have sex?

However, according to the Koran, sex with animals and young boys is allowed (it's not considered homosexual). around 60-70% of arab boys between the ages of 10 and 15 have had anal sex.

Re:Why not give it to DoD?

[BigBlackDog]

The Pentagon already knows that Saddam didn't hide any WMD on the roof!

Re:Why not give it to DoD?

[Buran]

Another reason is that the sensors aren't built to look at something as bright as Earth, so they'd be blinded permanently.

The KH-12 satellite is reportedly a modified Hubble (that might even be the other way around) that IS designed to look at Earth, though, so it's been done already. Here's a picture - tiny, but the resemblance is there. Notice that the dish antenna is in a different spot, if this picture is accurate.

Re:Why not give it to DoD?

[faxafloi]

Hubble does in fact take images of the earth quite often. They're used as the basis of flat fields, which are used to calibrate the science data.

Re:Why not give it to DoD?

[JungleBoy]

Hubble was not the first space craft to fly that size lens. When hubble was being built, Lockheed already had the equipment to test and validate the lens. As we all remember, when Hubble was put into orbit, its lens was seriously flawed and a shuttle mission had to go up and add some 'contact lens' to correct it. Now why would NASA fly an unvalidated lens when the equipment existed to validate it? Lockheed offered to do it for them, but the test equipment was in the Skunk Works, so lockheed wouldn't let any of the NASA people in without fairly hi level security clearance. None of the NASA people had the clearance and NASA didn't want to cough up the money or wait the time required to get the clearance, so they just decided not to test the lens.

I'm sure the DoD has had very high resolution stuff flying for decades. My guess is that they resolutions higher than 1cm. I went to a few technical workshops down at JPL a year or two back. There was a software contractor there who worked for the DoD on extensions to the TIFF/GeoTIFF image formats. He said they have added extentions to the TIFF format to be able to store 1PB (Peta Byte) images in a tiff file (through internally virtual images/referenced data). Multiple times he made the comment that the earth at 1cm resolution is about 1PB.

I've talked to people who worked on the Agena satelites from the 60s into the 80s. He said that though he never say the target imagery, he did see some calibration imagry in the early 70s taken over the beaches of Southern California. And yes, he could tell if they person on the beach was a man or a woman, and if a woman whether she wasy laying face up or face down. This was in the early 70s!!.

At this point I'd put money on the DoD having a constalation of satellites with far higher resolution than Hubble. On the other hand, I'm sure hubble has very different types of sesor equipment then the DoD sats.

Re:Why not give it to DoD?

[CaptainAvatar]

Well, since the resemblance comes down to them both being a telescope shaped object with two solar panels stuck on the side, I'm not overly impressed ... more evidence please!

Re:Why not give it to DoD?

[Buran]

Google for 'kh-12' and 'hubble' together, or 'kh-11' and 'hubble'.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/question529.htm

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/kh11.htm

http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/kh-1 2. htm

http://www.janes.com/aerospace/military/news/jsd/j sd011017_1_n.shtml

Actually, that's depressing. We have several Hubble-type satellites up there that our government just flings up there whenever the hell it wants and it won't save the one that people actually care about!? Argh. As if I weren't furious enough...

Re:Why not give it to DoD?

[CaptainAvatar]

Most of those links are just using Hubble as a familar point of reference, but the astronautix one is indeed suggestive. Thanks.

It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[tiktokfx]

Or NASA if you must drop the periods, but never Nasa.

Re:It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[th77]

To the Brits, it's Nasa. They like to make initial caps words out of acronyms, for example Nato. And British English tends to dominate in Europe, and elsewhere around the world, so...

Anyway, this is hardly a surprise from NASA. I mean, the requirement for *every* shuttle flight to be in ISS orbit, so they can get off and crowd into the station if there's an emergency is nice, but not terribly useful. Then again, the shuttle itself is being repurposed as little more than a, er, shuttle (as in shuttle bus) to the station. Grumble...

Re:It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[bobbis.u]

Yeah, I've noticed the BBC do this before with NASA and lots of other acronyms. Like here where they do it with UNESCO and UNEP, even though they capitalise the first letters of the words when explaining the acronyms.

They do seem to keep abbrevations capitalised (e.g. DNA in that article). Strictly speaking, an acronym is an abbrevation that is said as a word, i.e. you say Nasa not N-A-S-A, but you do say D-N-A.

I think I will write to them though because it can't be correct to remove the capitalisation in this way.

Re:It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, ok. N.A.S.A D.A.M.M.I.T. "Say good night gracie" ... "good night Gracie"

=)

Re:It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[bobbis.u]

Actually, I have now checked the "Oxford Guide To Style" (a good resource for typesetting in British English). Firstly, it says "Acronyms take no points, whether all in caps..., in initial capitals with upper and lower case..., or entirely in lower case" so N.A.S.A. is incorrect.

It goes on to say "Any all-capital proper-name acronym is, in some house styles, fashioned with a single initial capital if it exceeds four letters (Basic, Unesco, Unicef). It appears the BBC does this with acronyms that exceed three letters. I'm glad I cleared that up for myself

Re:It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[XaProf]

And British English tends to dominate in Europe, and elsewhere around the world, so...

Actually, when I spent my year in Europe I met a lot of Anglophone Europeans who said they had a choice when they learned English to learn American or British English, and most chose British simply because Britain is closer than the U.S.

But elsewhere in the world? I'm not so sure. Every single Latin American I've met who speaks English speaks American English. The vast majority of Asians that I've met do as well, in spite of the fact that they could be geographically closer to Australia than the U.S.

I don't think it's as much what's the "proper" English as it is about simple cultural dominance. More people watch American movies worldwide than listen to the BBC, after all.

Re:It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[BigDumbSpaceApe]

You notice tho, that they don't call themselve Bbc.

Re:It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good night, G.r.a.c.i.e.

Re:It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[ducomputergeek]

Funny, all the computers spell checkers I saw in germany were always set to English (US)

They should be able to keep Hubble going...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that they have found a good way to reduce costs..

http://www.post-gazette.com/images2/RR012704.gif

Sell it!

[heironymouscoward]

Slice it up into 5" square pieces and sell it to raise money for... uh... it's in space. Damn

Re:Sell it!

[slittle]

So's the moon, but that doesn't stop nutjobs selling off bits of it..

What about the giant ants?

[Lieutenant_Dan]

The ones on the moon? The lens on the Hubble telescope was the only deterrent! Now they will attack us! We are doomed.

Will someone please think of the children!?

Re:What about the giant ants?

[Kosgrove]

I for one would welcome our new arthopod overlords.

Sorry. Couldn't be helped.

Makes no sense

[Wister285]

It really makes no sense that they decided to do this. Sure, it costs money to run one mission, but after that you have years of data collection. While we may be sending up another telescope, it doesn't matter. The James Webb Telescope can do what it is special at and then have the Hubble do some other tasks. Two telescopes means twice as much data collection for minimal investment!

Re:Makes no sense

[Anonymous Coward]

This was discussed yesterday... Buy the telescope and fully fund the mission to take care of it.

Re:Makes no sense

[Buran]

I am a space buff and have been most of my life. I am quite angry at what I see as a cop-out and an unwillingness to accept the risks that have always been there as part of space flight. Why are we suddenly afraid to fly the kinds of missions the shuttle was designed to fly, and has performed quite well for over 20 years? Along the reasoning we're getting from these idiots, we might as well not have bothered, and we were insane to have been doing what we were doing for all that time. These people are now saying that if we didn't have the ISS, we would all be sitting here twiddling our thumbs and driving robots around and never going up for ourselves to see what's up there, and that's going to be important. The ISS isn't even in a good orbit for most of this stuff -- it's in the orbit it's in to placate the Russians. (That orbit is apparently a good one to launch into from Baikonur, but it's terrible for Florida.)

Someone needs to fire this idiot and hire somebody who isn't such a pansy-ass like O'Keefe.

Re:Makes no sense

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm a fan of space exploration. So somebody else needs to risk his life getting his ass up in space to maintain the telescope that I happen to like."

Get real. As somebody else already pointed out: you can get better pictures of space for fewer dollars from ground based telescopes. In light of that, I wouldn't care to risk someone elses' life to maintain Hubble any longer...

New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[Mattb90]

Considering NASA's new rules, I'm guessing that the James Webb Telescope, which is set to replace Hubble in 2012 (which will now be 4 years after Hubble goes out of service) will be 'in range' of the ISS, so that any astronauts working on it will have the ISS as a safety net. Does this then suggest the same orbit for the telescope as the ISS, or at least a similar one?

And if so, does this not mean we are limited to low-orbits for telescopes we want to repair over time?

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[aitala]

The James Webb telescope will not be accessible by anyone - its going to be at the L2 point. There will be no way to service it if anything goes wrong. And it is a very complicated piece of machinery - including a multi segmented mirror which will have to unfold to be useable.

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[stevesliva]

What makes you think the Webb will be in LEO and servicible by astronauts at all?

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[dwhitman]

JWST is being dropped into the L2 point. The space shuttle is not capable of even getting there.

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[Aardpig]

The James Webb telescope will not be accessible by anyone - its going to be at the L2 point.

And the decision to situate the JWST at L2 was made primarily on economic grounds. With no possibility of sending a manned mission to service the telescope, you conveniently avoid any chance of having to meet the large costs which manned missions incurr.

From the economists' point of view, Hubble was a disaster in this respect: a huge amount of money was spent sending the shuttle to service the telescope (a shuttle launch costs c. $500 million).

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[th77]

Oh, so it's like with appliances. "You mean I could take this vaccum cleaner to a repair shop if it has problems? That sounds expensive, so I'll just buy one that can't be repaired."

You make an interesting point, though.

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[GoofyBoy]

the decision to situate the JWST at L2 was made primarily on economic grounds

Really?

http://ngst.gsfc.nasa.gov/FAQ/FAQans.htm#anchor7

Sounds like a good scientific reason to me.

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[ibpooks]

More like, a new vacuum cleaner is only $90; the service to fix my old one will be $50/hour plus parts, and I get back an old, partially broken vacuum.

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[Aardpig]

Really? http://ngst.gsfc.nasa.gov/FAQ/FAQans.htm#anchor7 Sounds like a good scientific reason to me.

And just below the information you cite (http://ngst.gsfc.nasa.gov/FAQ/FAQans.htm#anchor8) :

When JWST is at the second Lagrange point (see previous question), it will be out of reach of the Space Shuttle and repairs cannot be made once it has been launched. This also means that no provisions have to be made to allow astronauts to make repairs.

There's your economic reason.

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[GoofyBoy]

>There's your economic reason.

My point is that its not the primary reason, which is a dumb assertion the first post.

Do you really need a reason not to go out and fix it? Why not just say "Usable for 1 year. If it lasts longer, its a bonus."

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[Disoculated]

Am I the only one who's noticed on this FAQ that they're planning on using a French launch vehicle (Ariane 5)? While I'm not one of those twits eating "freedom fries" for lunch, I'm a little upset that we'd be outsourcing something like a launch vehicle.

That's like the French importing Wisconsin cheese and Californian wines.

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

There's your economic reason.

I think that's stretching it a lot because you don't show a convincing causality. It doesn't show that the decision to go L2 was made because it avoids costs of upgrades vs. technical reasons which happen to avoid any chance of servicing.

The infrared noise issue is convincing enough of a reason because you want everything to be not just cold but damn cold to maintain the lowest noise floor. The telescope will not be able to measure temperatures that are below that of the measuring instrument's sensor temperature.

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[hpulley]

Why is there no possibility of a manned mission to L2? Some people at least are thinking about it. Why not have a station out there? Relatively stable orbit anyways.

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[j-b0y]

That's part of the distribution of costs agreement between NASA and ESA; NASA is paying the majority of the costs (and so American astronomers get the majority of observing time). ESA contributes an instrument and the launch vehicle and ESA member states gets a corresponding amount of science time, through a European Coordinating Facility.

It's not a bad agreement and not all that uncommon.

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[vladkrupin]

In range of what? There won't be no ISS by 2012, at least judging by how things are going now, it'll either fall apart or be abandoned due to lack of money.

Seriously, what do you do if you dump 100 billion into a scientific project, it is falling apart, behind schedule, and hasn't produced any science anyway, what do you do? You count it as loss and move on! It won't take till 2012 to realize that.

Besides, it was my understanding (and please correct me, if I am wrong - astronomy is not one of my strenghts) that the ISS orbit is way too low, and in many other aspects far from an ideal one for a telescope. It's not enough just to put a telescope in space - the space is a pretty big place. You have to choose a place. Choosing an orbit just so you can tie a new telescope to an old piece of junk that is already in space and might be there a little longer is just plain stupid. An orbit should be chosen to maximize its scientific potential.

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[RayBender]

From the economists' point of view, Hubble was a disaster in this respect: a huge amount of money was spent sending the shuttle to service the telescope (a shuttle launch costs c. $500 million).

That's why economists are idiots. You may recall that when Hubble was first launched it had a mirror problem that could only be fixed by astronauts going up there and changing out some stuff. Launching a new HST would have cost at least $1 billion, and probably more given that there wasn't a spare sitting on the ground.

Also, given orbital decay and equipment degradation, there is no way HST would have lasted anywhere near as long as it has without regular maintenance trips. Each such trip costs $300-500 million depending on how you count, and gives you pretty much a new HST (instrument changes). There is NO WAY you could get the same bang for your buck by designing, building and launching expendable spacecraft at the same cost and rate.

Another "Great Observatory" called CGRO was launched around the same time, and it reentered long ago - it was never maintained.

Fact is, the HST servicing missions have actually been a worthwhile investment.

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[Anonymous Coward]

The JWST is going to be much farther from the Earth than HST. It is not going to be orbiting thr Earth in fact and is not going to be servicable.
No new instruments will be added to it later, no mistakes will be fixes (las the HST optics was). You better hope they get it running right the first time. You also better hope that it gets the full 5 nominal years out of its planned life. Yes, that it less than 1/2 of HST's lifetime...

elections?

[cribb]

maybe the elections are just a tad too far away, is suspect that in 6 months or so NASA will have a sudden change of heart, following a generous promise for funding and flying to mars, the moon, and the sun from president bush.

Re: elections?

[Black Parrot]

> maybe the elections are just a tad too far away, is suspect that in 6 months or so NASA will have a sudden change of heart, following a generous promise for funding and flying to mars, the moon, and the sun from president bush.

And another round of tax cuts to fund all of it...

Re:elections?

[BlowChunx]

Hey, if Bush would volunteer to get in a jump suit and fly to the sun, I would pay double the taxes I owe!

Then maybe would could fly that "Mission Accomplished" banner and have it mean something.

Re:elections?

[andih8u]

I'm sure fixing the hubble would garner tons of votes.

sheesh

Re:elections?

[Zilfondel2]

Ooooh...you're right. Let's definitely not save the Hubble then.

Re:elections?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's very genrous of you, offering to pay twice your tax load.

However, I suspect youp ay $0 in income taxes since you live in your parents basement and smell like a pack of zoo monkeys.

Disposable Satellites

[Zilfondel2]

Remember, these things are disposable. It doesn't matter if it's a billion dollar telescope or an $800 million rover on Mars, eventually it will run down and that'll be that.

However, we don't currently have a replacement for Hubble, and even if we are ready to launch one, there is no guarantee that it will surivive launch, or actually work once in orbit.

Re:Disposable Satellites

[andih8u]

No guarantee anyone going up to fix Hubble will survive launch either.

Re:Disposable Satellites

[Anonymous Coward]

"we don't currently have a replacement for Hubble"

What are all these posts about "the replacement isn't ready"? Why should there be exactly one functional space telescope at any given time? It looks like people assume there is just one guy using space telescopes, with 0 he'll get bored, and with 2 he'll be overworked. Not so!

So really the science done is proportional to their number (and capabilities). The rest is just economics. There's no important reason to aim for exactly 1 telescope at any given time.

Re:Disposable Satellites

[egomaniac]

What are all these posts about "the replacement isn't ready"? Why should there be exactly one functional space telescope at any given time? It looks like people assume there is just one guy using space telescopes, with 0 he'll get bored, and with 2 he'll be overworked. Not so!

So really the science done is proportional to their number (and capabilities). The rest is just economics. There's no important reason to aim for exactly 1 telescope at any given time.

Nobody is saying "there should be exactly one space telescope at any given time". What we're saying is "there should be at least one space telescope at any given time".

If something truly exciting, like Shoemaker-Levy or an amazingly bright supernova, happens again, we want to have at least one space telescope out there to watch it.

Re:Disposable Satellites

[timeOday]

However, we don't currently have a replacement for Hubble

Or do we? That ground-based shot actually looks a bit better if you ask me.

Of course, a *new* space-based telescope would presumably be even better, but does that argue *for* or *against* continuing to nurse the Hubble?

Re:Disposable Satellites

[Zilfondel2]

From what I have heard, there is a very long waiting list of scientists waiting to use Hubble for one scientific project or another. Two telescopes will allow double (or better) the science return; zero telescopes will allow science to come to a screeching halt.

Nothing beats having no atmosphere distort your telescope. While fancy adaptive optics and computers can help, building an even larger space-based telescope is even better (Moon base, anyone?).

Foreign nation

[Anonymous Coward]

Could a foreign nation collect hubble as space scrape and use it for it's own purposes. I have no idea about property rights in low earth orbit but i've seen tons of cheesy sci-fi movies that seem to support the possiblity :)

Re:Foreign nation

[stratjakt]

AFAIK, it'll cost more to maintain it (essentially rebuilding the thing in orbit) than it would to launch a new one.

Re:Foreign nation

[introverted]

I have no idea about property rights in low earth orbit but i've seen tons of cheesy sci-fi movies that seem to support the possiblity.

I am not a space lawyer (nor do I intend to play one on Slashdot), but you've now got me thinking about Harry Broderick and the rest of the crew at Jettison Salvage. Maybe The Vulture could do future servicing missions? :-)

Once upon a time, a junkman had a dream...

Guess the Hubble...

[Anonymous Coward]

didn't see that one coming.

Thanks folks, I'll be here all weekend. Try the veal, it's fantastic.

New X-Prize Goal?

[Glock27]

While far more ambitious than the first X-Prize, a privatized mission to save the Hubble would have vast implications for the advancement of spaceflight without the inertia and inefficiency of government. Perhaps robotic missions to a) boost it into a higher, safe orbit and b) at some later time replace the aging gyroscopes and other components.

Thoughts?

Re:New X-Prize Goal?

[Esion Modnar]

a) boost it into a higher, safe orbit and b) at some later time replace the aging gyroscopes

It's space, but isn't it still a very hostile place to be, even for a space telescope? You've orbital junk, radiation, etc., so what is the "shelf life" of a space telescope, even in a higher, "safe" orbit?

So, how long can you wait to do maintenance, before it's just space junk?

Re:New X-Prize Goal?

[Glock27]

It's space, but isn't it still a very hostile place to be, even for a space telescope? You've orbital junk, radiation, etc., so what is the "shelf life" of a space telescope, even in a higher, "safe" orbit?

A "safe" orbit refers to one that's not in imminent danger of reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. The HST was originally in a 600 km orbit, and truthfully I'm not sure that the orbit itself is an issue as much as the probable failure of gyroscopes and other equipment. Replacing equipment, however, is a much more ambitious project whether for robots or humans (different challenges with each).

The HST is quite radiation-hard, on the other hand solid objects could be a big problem. NASA maps "space junk" down to fairly small objects and plans orbits accordingly, but there's always a finite chance that a significant meteor could hit the HST (or anything else in space, such as an EVA astronaut). You pays your money, you takes your chances... ;-)

So, how long can you wait to do maintenance, before it's just space junk?

Quite a while, depending on how much maintenance you're willing to do once you do it....always providing a non-trivial meteor doesn't hit.

The other risk factor is NASA de-orbiting it, for whatever reason. I'm not sure why they'd feel the need to, but I believe I read something to the effect that they would at some point.

Re:New X-Prize Goal?

[the Llama of Virtue]

No orbit short of geosynchronous orbit at 22,000km is anything close to stable. Even at 600km there are a lot of molecules which disrupt the orbit of the space station. Deorbiting is really your only option at the end of service life, or re-boost it every couple of years. Deorbiting is obviously the most cost effective (and ultimately, safest) course of action

Re:New X-Prize Goal?

[TigerNut]

Even if it's a hostile place to be, the cost of boosting a new telescope up into an orbit is huge compared to just getting some replacement parts up there. Also, the gyroscopes that are used in the Hubble telescope are among the most sensitive ever made; but that doesn't mean that their performance won't be eclipsed by new technology in the near future.

I think that an effort by the X-prize contestants to (a) get into space in the first place and (b) collaborate, if possible, to build and orbit a payload booster that can put the Hubble into a higher orbit, would be awesome, and one that would be supported by a lot of folks, probably even by their chequebooks.

If the (eventual) X-prize winner announced a lottery, where the winning contestant (assuming they could pass the physicals and training) were able to accompany the Xtranauts on a Hubble rescue mission, I think they'd sell a LOT of tickets. At any price.

Re:New X-Prize Goal?

[Rick.C]

The down-side would be that just as your rescue mission blasts off, NASA could issue the command to fire Hubble's thrusters to de-orbit it. Even worse, they could do it just as you hook up with Hubble and take you down with it.

It would have to be a stealth project and include a plan to hijack Hubble's radio links, re-do the encryption and steal control away from NASA.

Shiver me timbers, Laddie! I be a Space Pirate!

At least I'm thinking this would be a far better definition of "piracy" than downloading MP3s.

Re:New X-Prize Goal?

[Firethorn]

Even if it's a hostile place to be, the cost of boosting a new telescope up into an orbit is huge compared to just getting some replacement parts up there. Also, the gyroscopes that are used in the Hubble telescope are among the most sensitive ever made; but that doesn't mean that their performance won't be eclipsed by new technology in the near future.

You're forgetting that part of the cost of 'sending replacement parts' is sending a shuttle with astronauts to install them, which adds a huge weight penalty, potential loss of life, and training for said astronaughts to do the installation. And the satellite has to be built so that it can be serviced (weight and size penalty).

If you use a plain rocket to send up the satellite, all you have to boost is the weight of it. Much cheaper than the $500 million cost of just launching a shuttle.

Re:New X-Prize Goal?

[BENAFARMER]

I actually think an X-Prize for a Hubble rescue mission has potential. (enough that I'm delurking here for the first time after several months of lurking) The big problems would be (a) Getting NASA to back off and let someone else come to the rescue (big blow to the prestige), and (b) Liability. If someone tried to do a rescue and failed and then Hubble came down and damaged something, the lawyers would have a field day--even though it was coming down anyway. We might jump through those hoops with enough political pressure and creative insurance arrangements, but who would put up the X-Prize? Pass the hat among space enthusiasts? Maybe make exclusive use of Hubble the prize? That would be worth some bucks. I don't know if it would pay for the mission though. I know: Some news network sets up the prize in exchange for exclusive rights to footage from the rescue and maybe the leadin to it. I could see Fox News or MSNBC doing that. Better yet: the Science Fiction channel puts up the prize for the same rights, plus maybe resale rights to a certain percentage of time on the telescope. Ah--maybe do an extra special Junkyard Wars. (Okay I'm not serious about that one) A mission would probably be more expensive than the average TV series, but I'm guessing that a rescue effort wouldn't be too awfully much bigger budget than some of the bigger budget movies--somewhere between $100 million and $500 million as an order of magnitude guess. If a Cable Network put up the money, they could do a series of little blurbs playing up the race between the X-prize contestants and the race against time. Actually, I like the pure X-prize model best, but if it couldn't raise enough money to make the competition work, the other options might do it. One other option, maybe as one of the contestants for the Hubble Rescue X-Prize: Try an Open Source model to design the mission. Obviously someone would have to actually build the thing, but the design work and maybe some of the simulation/calculation could be done on an Open SOurce model. To be honest I'm skeptical about the Open Source model working on something physical like this, but then again I was very skeptical about it as applied to software and that skepticism seems to have been misplaced.

You're missing the point

[Aardpig]

It costs a not-insignificant amount of money to keep Hubble's support infrastructure at STScI running -- above and beyond the maintenance costs required to keep the telescope alive. This is the principal reason for the cut -- to save money.

The same economic reasons have been used before to cut space-based observatories; the International Ultraviolet Observer is one example.

Re:You're missing the point

[ShadowWarriorOfDeath]

actually, you are wrong... O'Keefe said that money had nothing to do with his decision. but, hey, keep typing whatever comes into your head and don't worry about accuracy...

Re:You're missing the point

[Wister285]

As was said by another poster, "safety" is the primary reason. I think you just have to read between the lines though to see that they really mean they need to save money. This doesn't make any sense though since they are sending a rocket up to help the Hubble get into a better position to fall. Either way, NASA is making a conflicting decision.

Furthermore, if we can't service a piece of machinery in orbit, I don't understand how we are both going to the Moon and Mars. We even made it to the Moon with 60's technology, so there is no reason for why our newer, albeit outdated techonology, won't be safe for something that has been done successfully many times before.

Re:You're missing the point

[Dashing Leech]

Safety is indeed the primary reason. There are a variety of reasons:

The Hubble requires a due-east launch from KSC. The emergency landing sites in Africa are in the process of being shut down, so there'd be no emergency landing sites. (Setting them up again would be quite expensive.)

Return-to-flight rules for the shuttle include the ability to inspect the Thermal Protection System (tiles and RCC panels). As we speak the details of how this will be done are still being worked out. (I am personally involved in this process.) Right now plans include using both Canadarms (shuttle and ISS) to move a boom with a sensor package underneath the shuttle. Another task involves rolling the shuttle and viewing it from the ISS as it approaches. There is currently no inspection concept that would work for a Hubble mission, violating the CAIB requirements for flight. There are future plans for a free-flyer inspector, but that is years away. The ability to fix or patch damage would be even harder for Hubble than ISS.

Hubble is at approximately twice the height of the ISS. It is at the limit of where the shuttle can reach, so if there are problems they're essentially out of luck.

The shuttle can handle a fair number of failures on ISS trips, even including some engines. This is both because the ISS offers extra repair abilities and because of the lower orbit.

For large failures that can't be repair, the ISS offers a "lifeboat" for the crew who could survive there for quite some time until another shuttle or Russian spacecraft can retrieve them. On Hubble, they're screwed. Russians can't even reach them because of the orbital plane.

These are the jist of the safety reasons. But then come the technological and financial reasons. Why should Hubble be kept running? It may have been state-of-the art when it was launched, but there are now ground telescopes that are even better than it due to advances in adaptive reflector control. It's just not worth it anymore. It could probably survive and produce data for another 10 years, but at lower quality and much greater expense than we can get elsewhere.

Re:You're missing the point

[Hays]

What? You're involved in keeping our astronauts safe and you think that there are ground based ultraviolet or infrared telescopes that are "even better than" hubble? That's distressing.

"It could probably survive and produce data for another 10 years, but at lower quality and much greater expense than we can get elsewhere." I'll thank you to tell me where else I can get my high quality infrared and ultraviolet observations (specifically on the wavelengths in which the atmosphere is opaque).

I am not in a position to evaluate the rest of your comments, but I'm skeptical of them now.

Re:You're missing the point

[hpulley]

Safety may be the main reason but it was always risky to do work in space. Perhaps we understand the risk better now and have rethought our risk:reward ratio. Comments on other points:

The Hubble wasn't state of the art when it was launched. Nothing launched is state of the art; by the time it is designed and built with space-hardened parts, it is already out of date, not to mention the actual delay involved in launching and on-orbit activation.

Hubble was flawed when it was launched. Luckily there was a servicing mission or it would have been a practically useless telescope, though today we have deconvolution software which goes a long way toward correcting this and other optical flaws, whether or not you know how it is flawed or camera is moving, etc.

While adaptive optics can compensate for the atmosphere in some ways it cannot compensate in all ways; there are limitations and more limitations, even of multi-conjugate AO. Telescopes in orbit or on the Moon will always have some advantages.

Re:You're missing the point

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Another task involves rolling the shuttle and viewing it from the ISS as it approaches. There is currently no inspection concept that would work for a Hubble mission, violating the CAIB requirements for flight.

Um, Hubble is a telescope. Why could it be inspected using that?

And I'd like an answer from someone who doesn't think that ground-based telescopes do as good a job as the Space Telescope in viewing frequencies (IR, UV) to which the atmosphere is opaque.

Re:You're missing the point

[luna69]

> O'Keefe said....

You believe O'keefe? Really?

He, and countless other nonscientist functionaries at NASA are busily trying to prove to the pResident that they are on-board with his "bold new plan"...and the way that they do that is by "making hard decisions".

Re:You're missing the point

[luna69]

> Why should Hubble be kept running? It may have
> been state-of-the art when it was launched, but
> there are now ground telescopes that are even
> better than it due to advances in adaptive
> reflector control....It could probably
> survive and produce data for another 10 years,
> but at lower quality and much greater expense
> than we can get elsewhere.

Duh, wrong. Adaptive optics can, indeed, do marvelous things. But HST is above the atmosphere, and is used often in wavebands that are don't make it to the surface (UV). Additionally, HST is most definitely still "state of the art", and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which has already been built and is sitting in a warehouse waiting to be installed, will offer spectroscopy of a degree of precision unavailable anywhere on Earth.

Please, check your facts before making sweeping statements about how HST isn't state-of-the-art.

Re:You're missing the point

[lommer]

The reason it can't be inspected using hubble is that hubble's optics are designed for imaging objects at near-infinite distances and are unable to produce clear pictures unless you are at least a certain distance away. I'm unsure of the exact numbers, but I do know that this distance is WAY to far away to be practical.

Re:You're missing the point

[demachina]

"There are future plans for a free-flyer inspector, but that is years away."

One has to ask why NASA is spending a bunch of money for a free flyer that won't be ready for years, for a vehicle that will be end of lifed in six years, and which NASA apparently will refuse to fly anyplace but the ISS where you can presumably inspect it without a free flyer. Classic NASA'think. Whatever happened to the Manned Manuevering Units anyway, CYA NASA decided they were too dangerous after spending massive money to develop them.

I am really at a complete loss to know how NASA is going to do anything in space in the future when its willing to adopt this lengthy and ridiculous list of flight constraints. Sure these are just for the shuttle, because its old and risky, well Apollo was like a hundred times more risky and we would have never gone to the Moon with this brand of hopeless bureaucratic, cover your ass, thinking. You're never going to get back to the Moon or Mars if your going to continue this trend to try and generate a 100% certainty of success.

After all, we are just talking about getting in to LEO here, something we've been for something like 40 years now. You're making this sound like something new and dangerous.

Challenger and Columbia happened because bureaucrats on the ground did stupid things. Fix the organization creating the stupid bureaucratic thinking, don't completely cripple space exploration with stupid flight constraints.

Challenger happened because they had iffy O rings, but it mostly happened because, thanks to political pressure from the Reagan administration, they launched on one of the coldest mornings possible in Florida. There was ice everywhere and it stiffened the O rings to the point they failed. Obvious solution is don't launch on a cold morning just so Reagan could get a sound bite in his state of the union address about a teacher in space.

Columbia happened because the Bush Administration and O'Keefe had a screen saver on everyone's desk pressuring them to keep a string of launches on schedule so the ISS was finished by a hard date. As a result when they had clear evidence of a potentianly serious problem they glossed it over to stay on schedule.

Fix these problems at the source, the hopeless bureaucracy, not with absurd flight constraints that destroy the whole point of the space program in the first place. Constraints that give you false sense of security, that might prevent an accident like the last one but will do nothing to stop a new one due to a completely different reason which is much more likely.

Re:You're missing the point

[Dashing Leech]

you think that there are ground based ultraviolet or infrared telescopes that are "even better than" hubble?

No, I don't think so, I know so. (Well, as long as I trust people, papers, and reports who are the actual experts in the field.) Adaptive optics have generated ground based designs that are several times better than Hubble in infrared. It's not hard to find journal papers on the subject, though I haven't seen them reported much in the press. I'm surprised you don't know about them.

This may not be true for all wavelengths that Hubble can see, but it is true for a large part of it.

Re:You're missing the point

[shawn(at)fsu]

If I understand things correctly NASA has another spaced based telescope for infrared The Space Infrared Telescope Facility, which is the is the fourth and final component of NASA's Great Observatories Program, which includes the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.
I think this cry for the rescue of Hubble is more or less nostalgia for the past. Times change astronomy gets better and the tools get better. I have read many articles that talk about different techniques for lessening the effects of atmospheric distortion.

Re:You're missing the point

[Dashing Leech]

Please, check your facts before making sweeping statements about how HST isn't state-of-the-art.

Actually, I have been keeping up with state-of-the-art for quite some time, and I do know that HST isn't the best out there anymore for a lot of things. However, you are correct that I was wrong to make "sweeping statements", perhaps laziness on my part. There are still a few things Hubble is currently the best at, but much of its designed capabilities can now be done with ground telescopes, and in the near future with even better ground systems and next-generation space telescopes. Whether the remaining features are sufficient for the expense and danger is a matter for debate, one which Hubble proponents have apparently lost.

Re:You're missing the point

[Dashing Leech]

1. The "free-flyer" isn't limited to only the shuttle. That's the nature of a free-flyer. It will be necessary/useful for shuttles/ISS/future spacecraft. Even if not, the retirement date of the shuttle fleet was only just announced (and not even approved yet). You don't cancel all ongoing projects immediately just from a political announcement from the president.

2. Columbia and Challenger happend primarily because of flawed designs. These flaws and problems were well known in both cases. Sloppy analysis and organization were another problem, as well as a series of misunderstandings. That poor managerial decisions were made is only the final step in a series of causes for these accidents. Blaming them purely on "bureaucrats" is ignorant of the facts.

Yes, NASA's got organizational problems. But that's not the whole story.

Re:You're missing the point

[Hays]

This may not be true for all wavelengths that Hubble can see, but it is true for a large part of it.

It is not true for much of the infrared range, because the atmosphere is opaque to some of it. The same goes for ultraviolet. Here's a graph of the infrared part -
http://www.coseti.org/atmosphe.htm

The webb telescope should cover some (all?) of that range when it's eventually launched. The Webb telescope will not cover the ultraviolet range that hubble covers. So your argument is that those ranges are not very important for observation? It's no big deal to lose infrared for the next 5 years and ultraviolet indefinitely?

Re:You're missing the point

[Hays]

These observatories are complementary- not upgrades to eachother. They cover different wavelengths. Gamma Ray (compton), X ray (Chandra), UV, visible, short-wave-infrared (Hubble), and long-wave-infrared (Spitzer / SIRTF)

It's a loss for any of them to go, but hubble is unique among them in its ability to be repaired.

Re:You're missing the point

[Dashing Leech]

I was searching for some papers on the Keck Observatory, and unfortunately I can't find many free ones online. However, here is an interesting story on how the Keck system outperforms Hubble in the infrared (and a few others are mentioned). An interesting point it makes is that Hubble is actually best in for visible light, which isn't opaque in the atmosphere. There's also this story, but it's a lot less informative.

Re:You're missing the point

[demachina]

I'm pretty skeptical a free flyer will be anything but a bunch of wasted R&D money just like the manned manuevering units were. Kind of the same thing except one has a man in it and one has a remote operator. Not sure which is more dangerous. You have to wonder how great the potential is for a mishandled free flyer to cause more damage than it will find. I guess its a plus you don't have to have an air lock for a free flyer but if the flyer actually finds damage I imagine I would like to have the air lock and MMU so an astronaut can go fix it without being completely dependent on the ISS.

Unfortunately all designs are flawed. Two approaches:

You can spend vast sums of money trying to make a flawless design, never succeed, and then fail miserably when a flaw surfaces which appears to be the current NASA.

Or you can have an organization which recognizes flaws when they surface, prioritizes them appropriately, corrects them when possible and learns to deal with or workaround them when things go wrong. NASA's manned space program seems to be completely lacking in these skills since as far back as the end of Skylab.

The fundement problem is not the "flawed designs", it is the failure of the organization to deal with them appropriately. The aging, overgrown bureaucracy IS THE PROBLEM. No one is responsible or accountable. Everything is being bucked up and down a chain of command that is 20 deep and jumping back and forth between Johnson, Kennedy, Headquarters and a half dozen other far flung centers. At a bare minimum shut down Johnson and put everyone in the one place, at Kennedy, Kennedy being chosen out of geographic necessity as long as you use rockets to get to space.

I did read the whole CAIB report. It is an excellent post mortem of what happened technicly. Unfortunately, like the Challenger report before it, it doesn't seem to have solved any of the structural problems at NASA. All thats really come out of these reports is an agency, a manned space program and a shuttle that has become progressively more crippled, expensive and useless. In particular NASA is so risk averse they can't do anything anymore except manage to not have the same accident twice but have different ones instead.

Assuming we eventually throw away ISS and the Shuttle, what exactly is it thats changed that will assure us future programs will work when the same organization is in charge, its structurally unchanged, and its failed on two programs in a row.

Re:You're missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't posted here in a long time, but your post here (and below, as it turns out) has finally kicked me out of my shell.

I honestly think you're pretty far out of line in attributing both the SM4 cancellation (here) and the orbit for NGST (below, in a different post) largely to economic concerns. They were factored in, of course, but they're also prima facie lousy reasons for either course of action. Consider:

"Hubble's support infrastructure at STScI" isn't likely to be shut down, or even significantly impacted by this, unless the launch of NGST/JWST is delayed by a couple more years (from its current 2011-ish schedule). NASA, and the larger astronomical community, is well aware of a few things: support for archival/theory proposals using HST data is expected to continue for a number of years, even after the likely fall of HST in 2006 or 2007 (without the servicing mission). Maintaining/supporting the archive is a nontrivial task that will continue to require substantial personnel. Secondly, STScI has the contract for NGST flight support. Now, if NASA could realistically expect to fire 100 or so top-notch astronomers at the Institute and rehire them in six years or so, then sure, they'd probably do it. But that simply won't happen. The knowledge base would disappear: the best people who work at STScI would be snatched up by universities, and the rest would leave the field. You can't simply pick up where you left off. NASA is well aware of this; in the meeting where O'Keefe initially announced the SM4 cancellation, he specifically noted this issue. It's still not out of the question, but I think it's far, far from a given that StScI will see significant reductions in its scientific staff.

Note also that while NASA stands to save some money by not going through with the mission, it has already invested very, very substantial sums in the development of instruments that, without SM4, will be rendered useless. Specifically, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the new Wide-Field Camera (WF-3) were supposed to be installed; I'm less familiar with WF3, but COS is done, sitting on the ground, built at a cost to taxpayers of many millions of dollars. Admittedly this is a sunk cost, but no one likes to be this vulnerable to the 'ole "you wasted $100 million on an instrument that will never fly" attack.

As for NGST, it's just silly to suggest that the primary motivation for its orbit was economic. It's an infrared telescope. Earth is, relatively speaking, hot. You find me a way to do the same quality of infrared astronomy from the orbit of ISS, or any other Shuttle-accessible orbit, without investing billions of dollars into developing cooling/shielding technology that right now simply doesn't exist, and I'll be happy to pass along your suggestions to the JWST project folks. Honestly, Shuttle flights are expensive, but they're simply not the main reason why we're not putting NGST in an Earth orbit.

Let me be perfectly clear: I am personally and professionally quite devastated by the fact that the next servicing mission isn't going to happen. I think the collateral damage to the field of astrophysics is actually pretty huge, but I don't particularly want to sit here and type for the next hour, so I'm going to leave it at that. However, I do believe that there are real non-monetary issues that are playing at least as big a role in the cancellation as the monetary ones.

Have a nice day.

Re:You're missing the point

[luna69]

> ...but much of its designed capabilities can now
> be done with ground telescopes, and in the near
> future with even better ground systems

The wavelengths in question don't GET to the ground, and therefore aren't observable from the ground, adaptive optics or no.

> and next-generation space telescopes.

The next-generation space telescope in question is the James Webb Space Telescope (formerly NGST, see http://ngst.gsfc.nasa.gov/), which isn't due to launch until 2011 - which suggests that it won't actually launch until 2012 or 2013 (from estimates by people who use HST, Chandra, etc. on a regular basis). JWST is the only significant observatory capable of observing in these wavebands that will be lost when HST dies.

Having infrared or X-ray telescopes in orbit is great - but it doesn't take the place of an optical and UV observatory in orbit. When HST dies, we (astronomers) face as much as a decade without access to observations taken in those wavebands, the very ones that have made HST such a remarkable instrument and valuable instrument.

Re:You're missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

You do not seem to know very much about orbit dynamics. It takes a lot more to get the Shuttle to the orbit of the ISS which is in an highly inclined orbit. I would recommend that you read more on the subject and educate yourself.
You are also quite ignorant about the capabilities of HST and its current instrumentations when compared to ground based instruments. Just peruse the astronomical literature and you would quickly discover that HST has unique capabilties unobtainable form the ground (optical wavelenth adaptive optics is much of a work in process, do not consfuse ground based infrared adaptive optics with optical adaptive optics). Try looking up the work from Mike Disney o the subject. It could help you understand what this is all about. He has a very valid arguements and metrics describing of the merits of different telescopes, both past and future.
You also completely miss the point about the fact that the two new instruments to be installed on board of HST ARE state of the art. May I suggest looking up COS and WF3 in Google and comapre this to anything done before, especially the limiting magnitude, resolution, and "diiscovery space" in general.
In a nutshell. you do not really know what you are talking about, do you?

Re:You're missing the point

[Dashing Leech]

The wavelengths in question don't GET to the ground,

...which falls into the rest of my email.

When HST dies, we (astronomers) face as much as a decade without access to observations taken in those wavebands

...which falls into the "is it worth the expense and danger" part of my email. Obviously, the people who use it would say yes. The people who have to service it would say no. It's an opinion (not factual) issue, and the debate has been decided.

Re:You're missing the point

[Dashing Leech]

I did read the whole CAIB report. It is an excellent post mortem of what happened technicly. Unfortunately, like the Challenger report before it, it doesn't seem to have solved any of the structural problems at NASA.

You didn't read it all then. The tecnical post mortem was only a part of it. There are parts on everything including process, culture, organization, management, and political governance (Congress and President's Office). It does indeed harshly criticize the problems at NASA, well beyond the technical failures. It also has strong recommendations on how to fix this, particularly by looking a other organizations that manage high-risk programs like the Navy nuclear program.

What it doesn't do is blame it all on the "bureaucracy", and backs up the reasons with thorough analysis. Blaming, and fixing, only one component will result in more failures in the future. Things must change at all levels -- political, managerial, and technical.

Re:You're missing the point

[luna69]

1st: I'm not interested in fighting, only debating, so just as a prophylactic measure (I haven't seen or done anything nasty), I'll say it clearly: I'm only debating, not fighting.

> The people who have to service it would say no.

I beg to differ. See the following:

"I can say without hesitation that traveling to space to upgrade the instruments and ensure the future of the Hubble Space Telescope was worth the potential risk to my life."

(src: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=9907)

I estimate that the vast majority of astronaut corps members would jump at the chance to service HST.

These are people who chose careers in space because they love both knowledge and adventure, and were willing to pay the price to participate. Astronaut willingness to service HST is not the problem

Re:You're missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez, where's the crotchety old man to say "Back in my day we sent men all the way to the fucking moon! without no goddamn lifeboats, backups, or rescue ships! we fucking walked on the godamn moon. played fucking golf on the fucking moon! fucking drove fucking cars on the fucking moon! if any single fucking thing went wrong, we were fucked! three men fucking burned in a capsule on a pad! Did we give up? Hell no! Back in my day there weren't a bunch of risk-adverse bureaucratic pussies working for NASA!"

Re:You're missing the point

[instarx]

Let's face it - the real reason Hubble is being abandoned before its time is because G.W.Bush needed a "vision" for his State of the Union address. "Look at me - I'm John F. Kennedy!".

The head of NASA, knowing quite well who butters his bread, cut Hubble AND the International Space Station less than a week later! We are only going to complete our current obligations to the ISP and then devote all our resources to the ill-conceived (and expensive) Man on Mars program. All because G.W. Bush needed a vision for his political speech.

If (Please, God) the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld gang gets kicked out of office in November, all this may change as we get back to doing science and space research for the benefit of mankind and not for the political benefit of our pseudo-elected President.

Re:You're missing the point

[ckaminski]

So, Ms. Astronaut... just what *IS* it like servicing the Hubble? Your jaw must hurt bad...

Re:You're missing the point

[ckaminski]

My god, the funniest most insightful shit I've seen from an AC in a long time... bravo.

Re:You're missing the point

[Dashing Leech]

I didn't mean the astronauts specifically, I meant NASA. I work with astronauts. They often tend to be "cowboys" and want to experience everything. Many (most?) of them would do multiple EVAs every flight if they could, even if it wasn't necessary. But astronauts do not own the shuttle, direct the priorities, or budget the space program. They cannot chose to risk things that are not theirs to risk. If a shuttle was lost on a Hubble mission, not only would the astonauts die (which may admittedly be their choice to risk), but the program would be set back years and may even be shut down, and the U.S. probably couldn't fulfill it's international obligations to the ISS.

NASA, who does the servicing, has decided at the program level that it is not worth it. The political will has also indirectly helped this decision. The new mandate is that the shuttles are to be used to finish obligations to the ISS, and that's it.

Re:You're missing the point

[anser]

DL - since you're working on the TPS inspection thing - what's wrong with using the Aercam Sprint? Isn't it designed for exactly this kind of remote eyeball work?

Reply via email is OK.

A low for a NASA manager?

[Stugots]

"The documents (from the engineers) really did not go into the kind of depth and detail that we already had," Readdy said, who faulted the two engineers' reports for their "superficial" analysis.

This one sentence bloew me away. A NASA manager faulting an engineer for being superficial is just so funny.

Virtually every NASA disaster (and certainly the most emotionally distressing ones, with a loss of life) can be traced to management and not technical decisions.

NASA is full of... well, you know

[rknop]

It's all about politics. The safety issues are largely an excuse.

The amount of money that will be spent on an automatic de-orbiting rocket for the HST to overcome a 1-in-700 (yes, that small) chance of some *property damage* (not even human injury) is going to be huge. Which would seem to indicate an obsession with safety, but really at its core it is an obsession with PR. I simply cannot believe that there aren't engineers capable of coming up with a last-ditch backup plan should a spacewalk inspection of the shuttle servicing Hubble show that there is damage. (And they're going to be spacewalking anyway if they're going to Hubble; not a big deal to go take a look at the bottom fo the spacecraft.) There are other shuttles...!

-Rob

Re:NASA is full of... well, you know

[GoofyBoy]

>The amount of money that will be spent on an automatic de-orbiting rocket for the HST to overcome a 1-in-700 (yes, that small) chance of some *property damage* (not even human injury) is going to be huge.

They are engineers. Thats what they do. Talk to a professional engineer or read up on professional ethics. Public safety superseeds costs.

>Which would seem to indicate an obsession with safety, but really at its core it is an obsession with PR.

Spin and public impression is the obsession of PR. Safety is secondary for PR.

Re:NASA is full of... well, you know

[rknop]

They are engineers. Thats what they do. Talk to a professional engineer or read up on professional ethics. Public safety superseeds costs.

Nothing is 100% safe. Otherwise we wouldn't launch the Shuttle at all. Otherwise you wouldn't leave your house every day.

If professional ethics prevented engineers from doing something that had a 1-in-700 chance of doing property damage, then no ethical engineer would design a road. I guarantee you that many people will die on highways in the next week. That's not a 1-in-700 chance of property damage somewhere in the world; that's a 100% chance of multiple human lives lost.

The risk of damage goes into the equation of costs. If any chance at all is unacceptable, then we can't ever do anything.

-Rob

Re:NASA is full of... well, you know

[tm2b]

Nothing is 100% safe. Otherwise we wouldn't launch the Shuttle at all.

Ummmm... we aren't, and that's why. :(

Re:NASA is full of... well, you know

[Anonymous Coward]

The US is a signatory to a treaty that says we wont allow any space junk over a certain size to make an uncontrolled re-entry. HST is WAY over this size. This is why we have to have an HST disposal mission, unless we want to renounce the treaty. But the US would never ignore a treaty that it signed. Ask any Native American.

Re:NASA is full of... well, you know

[nero4wolfe]

Actually, a spacwalk to the bottom of the current shuttle is a big deal. All they've done so far is in and above the cargo bay. The onboard arm can't be used to get below the shuttle, or even really out to the sides.

To get to the sides and then to the bottom of the current shuttle, an astronaut would need say at least a 500-1000 foot safety tether, a way to pay it out and reel it in safely over the cargo bay doors, and a thruster system with lots of fuel (possibly sent through the safety tether). Remember it's freefall, and there are no handholds, footholds, safety lines, etc. to pull yourself along the sides and bottom of the ship. And if you tried to somehow cling to the tiles you could damage them.

Too much data?

[laetus]

Can anyone answer this? These telescopes (both Hubble and Webb) can collect enormous amounts of data in relatively short periods of time.

That said, could one possible reason be that the astronomical community at large simply doesn't have enough resources to interpret both sets of data?

Re:Too much data?

[Aardpig]

That said, could one possible reason be that the astronomical community at large simply doesn't have enough resources to interpret both sets of data?

Data management has been a problem in the past, but storage and computing power today are both so cheap that it is rare to run into a problem. Even on my el-cheapo Linux box (Athlon XP 2600+, $600), I can quite easily crunch through gigabytes of astronomical data.

Re:Too much data?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the difficulty in getting time with the Hubble, I think it's safe to say that there is enough demand to utilize two telescopes.

Re:Too much data?

[rknop]

That said, could one possible reason be that the astronomical community at large simply doesn't have enough resources to interpret both sets of data?

Given that the Hubble Space Telescope is oversubscribed by a huge factor-- that is, there are many more astronomers wanting to use it than there is time-- this sounds pretty unlikely.

Plus, nobody's talking about having the HST remain online after the JWST is launched. At best, the HST will last until the JWST's ostensible launch date, and we all know that the JWST's real launch date is going to be long after today's ostensible launch date.

-Rob

Re:Too much data?

[Fnkmaster]

No - generally Hubble data is highly prized - in my experience working in astrophysics (quite a few years back), when we had data from a Hubble run, we'd eek as many papers and as much good stuff out of it as possible. No, astronomers put an absurd amount of time and effort into analyzing their data, or rather there are always a couple of grad students and undergrads around to run data through the ringer.

Especially since data is generally so incredibly noisy it takes huge volumes of it to get a reasonable S/N to create convincing evidence of anything. Unlike laboratory sciences where you can run controlled experiments, your lab is trillions of miles away and you are relying on lots of hacks with optics and data processing to figure out what the hell is going on. Oh yeah, and you have to remember to be pointing your measuring equipment at the lab at the right moment when interesting things are happening, or you can forget about useful data. :)

Re:Too much data?

[Anonymous Coward]

There hundreds of terabytes of HST science data. Kinda hard to store that on your linux desktop.

The plan has always been to keep the online archive available for two years after the end of mission. That, like everything else related to HST today, is subject to change.

Re:Too much data?

[Alpha_Traveller]

They most certainly do have enough resources...they're called "STUDENTS".

Re:Too much data?

[niall2]

One more point. Unlike most data archives the HST data are really reused. On average each data set is retrieved 3 or more times during its life. This meens the data, which become public after 1 year, are used by people other than those that proposed to take it. As far as I know, no other astronomical archive can come close to making that claim.

a pitty

[cribb]

I still don't understand why NASA will be flying to the space station, but will not service Hubble which has done, and has the potential to do hundreds of times more science than the space station ever will. Besides, the ISS is currently serviceable as it is, with a bit more money even 3 people could be sent up and serviced with more soyuz aircraft.

but instead we have a prematurely scrapped Hubble, a disfunctional ISS that doesn't do anything anyway, and NASA with promises to fly to mars and build a "space plane" that is currently in pre-planning stage.

Re: a pitty

[Black Parrot]

> but instead we have a prematurely scrapped Hubble, a disfunctional ISS that doesn't do anything anyway, and NASA with promises to fly to mars and build a "space plane" that is currently in pre-planning stage.

Looks like bye-bye for NASA... until a few years from now when it looks like some other country is on the verge of doing something great, and then we'll pour a trillion dollars into a deathmarch program, after all the remaining expertise has been dispersed and the physical infrastructure has decayed.

Business as usual.

Re:a pitty

[Planesdragon]

I still don't understand why NASA will be flying to the space station, but will not service Hubble which has done, and has the potential to do hundreds of times more science than the space station ever will.

Because we don't have a space program for scientfic achievement. We have a space program for human and national accomplishment.

Make up thier damn minds please

[Phoenix]

I swear, the Hubble repair mission is up and down more times than a pair of kangaroos in the mating season.

When you have as much money as NASA

[reverendG]

It's ok to let a few billion burn in.

I have solution, I are genius

[GonzoDave]

Pay for the Hubble funding by making the ISS into a data haven

No good for the astronomical community

[fee79]

This means that there will be at least 2-3 yrs before we have an active optical telescope. Sure there's Spitzer but it can only see in the infrared spectrum. I think the hubble's time is up too, but I don't think it should be allowed reentry until we have another visible light telescope in place.

Re:No good for the astronomical community

[Eccles]

I think the hubble's time is up too, but I don't think it should be allowed reentry until we have another visible light telescope in place.

Can't visible light be well-served by proposed ground-based telescopes like OWL? Given a choice between keeping Hubble going a couple more years or building an even higher-resolution, ground-based scope that can be maintained/improved, I'll go for the ground-based one.

Re:No good for the astronomical community

[fee79]

I see your point, however, ground-based telescopes have one major disadvantage over telescopes in orbit, they have to look through the atmosphere. This is the beauty of orbiting telescopes, plus you can get away with more if your equipment is operating in a near zero gavity environment. Of course its more expensive to maintain, but the results cover it.

It's obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as Hubble is working, there'll be less motivation for the "powers that be" (non-NASA) to fund the "next generation". "Hubble works so why do we need another telescope?" will overshadow any [other] requests. If Hubble were to suddenly stop working finding|funding, the next one [using today's technology] would be much easier to get into motion.

In capitalist Russia...

[Wister285]

Space satellites deorbit themselves!

Well, that wasn't as clever as it first seemed.

Loss if credibility

[kippy]

How does NASA expect us to take it seriously with the new Moon/Mars push when it says that the Hubble repare is to dangerous. I'm pro-Mars but I'm betting it will be a lot more dangerous to do those manned missions than to fix Hubble.

If saftey is an issue now, won't it stop them later from doing everything they're promissing for the next 20 years?

Re:Loss if credibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Pro-Mars? Do you really think OJ[1] is up for another "trip" to Mars? Then again, do suppose we could at least let him blast off this time? (and if he doesn't make it back, "oh, well.") [1] "Capricorn One". Another movie destined to be ruined by a [current] generation of schlock. Rollerball has already been ruined. The first (in the 70s) was great, they schlocked it within the previous few years, and it'll be 20-25 years before they can remake it, but correctly. I expect to see Capricorn One ruined very soon.

Re:Loss if credibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me, but did you mean "to" dangerous or "too" dangerous?

Re:Loss if credibility

[the Llama of Virtue]

its a safety issue with the current tools ie, the space shuttle. Current proposals are leading towards a apollo-style booster with a capsule, which has a nearly flawless service record. With the right tools you can get the job done.

Re:Loss if credibility

[kippy]

New craft won't be ready for quite a few years. Hubble will degrade long before that. Besided, this is the same agancy that's saying that we'll finish building the doomed ISS. How is that any different than fixing hubble? by the way, the ISS is hardly a "safe haven". If they mess something up while building it, there goes your safe haven.

Lagrange points

[reverendG]

I've seen a few people suggest that not having the Hubble will be okay, because it's going to be replaced by the James Webb Space Telescope. There was a good discussion on slashdot about this before, however, that led me to this site that explains the Lagrange points.

The Lagrange points are so far away from the earth that there are no reusable space craft that can reach them. This will make it next to impossible to service the JWST should something malfunction or fail (like the Hubble did so notoriously).

Re:Lagrange points

[TigerNut]

So one of the reasons to park the James Webb Telescope at L2 is that it's 'in the shadow' since Earth will be between the JWST and the sun. Has anyone worked out just how big the shadow spot (and the penumbra) is, and whether or not the periodic passage of the Moon between the Earth and JWST will drag it out of the shadow? I would expect someone at NASA to have worked this out, but they also forgot to compensate for (the lack of) gravity when designing the HST mirror geometry...

Take it international

[-tji]

The knowledge gained from the Hubble is certainly not a US-only thing.. Open it up to all nations to maintain it. I'm sure that among Japan and the various European contries they could get enough $$ to run a repair mission.

Re:Take it international

[niall2]

The Europeans and Canadians already do support it (ESA supports Hubble to about 15% of it anual opperating budget). However none of them own it, nor can they go and fix it.

And none of them pony up for the $500 million shuttle launches. That falls fully on NASA. Is kind of like being a teenager and having your parents not give you the keys to the car to go on a date on Saturday night. Your not getting very far without them.

Re:Take it international

[Patrice]

The Hubble Space Telescope is already an international project: it's a joint NASA-ESA cooperation (well, 85%-15%, but still).

European astronomers get a 15% time share for observations.

Re:Take it international

[-tji]

Okay great, the precedent is there.. The concept still stays the same. Ask the Europeans and Canadians to kick in more.. enough to cover the launch. Open it up to other countries for involvement, giving them access to the telescope in return.

Do the Russians have a vehicle capable of this sort of rendezvous while carrying the necessary parts/supplies/tools/crew? Maybe they could provide a cheaper launch option.

The Russians could provide their valuable experience from the Mir.. Their unique brand of duct tape engineering would do wonders for the Hubble. :)

When did the US turn into such pussies?

[KlomDark]

Yes, the death of the astronauts last year was very sad, but even sadder is that now they are so worried about someone getting hurt that even willing participants are not allowed to go fix a damn telescope!

And people got killed in the WTC, and we do nothing but make it tougher to get on an airplane. It's all gotta be perfectly safe!

Don't worry, nobody lives forever... Take some risks while you can. Die on your feet instead of your knees.

Re:When did the US turn into such pussies?

[Zak3056]

Yes, the death of the astronauts last year was very sad, but even sadder is that now they are so worried about someone getting hurt that even willing participants are not allowed to go fix a damn telescope!

It's an excuse.

The idea is to cut costs by removing the large hubble ground support--and the $500 Million cost of a shuttle mission.

"Safety" is a bullshit reason to avoid the PR disaster of saying Hubble is too expensive while ISS continues to soak up money and produce no science.

Re:When did the US turn into such pussies?

[tr0llb4rt0]

The extremes of litigation and blame culture.

Brought to you by the country where fat people sue fast food firms for making them overweight!

Not really the peoples fault - blame the lawyers.

Infact pile all the lawyers into the last two shuttles and fire them one-way into space. Then we can get on with free will, personal acceptance of risk and the exploration of the great unknown.

Not a flame or troll - just an opinion (and I hope I haven't plagarised Bill Hicks too much) :-)

Re:When did the US turn into such pussies?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Safety" is a stall tactic. They [NASA] don't want to invest any more money into Hubble. It's like hiring a carpet-cleaning crew for carpet which will be ripped up and new put down next week. If too much money is invested in Hubble, the funding will remain committed to Hubble and the nextgen will not get funded|built. They *NEED* (want - but they think they need it) that next gen 'scope and will play whatever sort of monkey games they can to make it happen. Anyone thinking otherwise is fooling themselves.

Re:When did the US turn into such pussies?

[0123456]

"The idea is to cut costs by removing the large hubble ground support--and the $500 Million cost of a shuttle mission."

In reality though, cutting a shuttle mission saves you at most about $150 million in per-flight costs, plus a few million in training costs. The shuttle program costs something like $3 billion a year to run regardless of whether a single shuttle flies, plus about $150 million on top for each launch, plus the costs of training and special equipment and payloads for each mission.

Re:When did the US turn into such pussies?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be awful if astronauts died while servicing the Hubble, but at least we would be able to say that they died for a good cause.

I cannot say the same about the ISS, all the money goes in building it and maintaining it, no science is ever done there.

The shuttle safety is as high as it has ever been, yet it was ok to send it to the Hubble before, but not any more, very logical!

After years of being in space, I still regularly hear about the pictures that the Hubble, and how it helps our understanding of the universe. Few project brought so much dividend, and still does.

When I compare that to the current rovers on Mars: fantastic, we managed to turn the rover!!! Oh, super duper, it moved 3 feet!!!! Oh, fabulous, it drilled a hole. Their super inflated commentary for so small steps are getting on my nerves.

Blame manned exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously a bunch of humans jumping around and planting flags on the martian wasteland is worth more to mankind than the immense insights the Hubble telescope provided.

Each time the pictures from mars come back i ask myself "why the hell?". The sahara is more interesting. *FAR* more interesting.

Re:Blame manned exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding! (seriously)

For the sake of discussion, let's suppose it's determined some germ lived on Mars eleven million years ago and died.

Now what? No, seriously. Now what?

I'd like to hear from the pro-Mars folks explain what they're going to do with enough money to take care of a good share of the famine-hit population of the earth, fund enough research to prevent|cure most of the major diseases known today, and just plain not need to raise everyone's taxes because something whose body structure which is less complex than something you sneeze out of your nose should require us to say, "hurrah! we find extinct life on Mars!" Now what?

Re:Blame manned exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Having enough food to feed the hungry is not a problem - in the US, we've been known to pay farmers *not* to grow any food. The problem there is political, as in convincing all parties involved that feeding their hungry is important, and greasing the right palms to allow that to happen, etc. Taking money away from the space program will not put a single bean in a single person's mouth.

2. Throwing money at research into a disease does not automatically lead to successful research. There's not a threshold, where the Great Designer In The Sky decided that $1.4 Trillion would cure cancer. Is it a good idea to increase funding of disease research? Yes. Does that guarantee a prevention / cure? No. Should that money be taken from the space program? IMHO, no. There is plenty of other pork to be harvested.

3. Life on other planets IS important. Finding it probably won't get you laid (you ARE an AC on /. , after all), but it will help answer one of the Big Questions. Yes, basic scientific research IS important. It's very important.

Look, this isn't a zero-sum game. The space program does not exist at the expense of all other federal spending.

Personally, I'm not aware of a lot of famine-hit Americans who get first dibs on Federal money. IF there were any, that would be one thing. But getting food in the US is not a problem, in general. Oh, wait - you wanna spend money feeding famine victims in foreign countries? Fine. Instead of taking the money away from the space program, which HAS HAD POSITIVE, TANGIBLE BENEFITS FOR EVERY SINGLE HUMAN INHABITING THIS OR ANY OTHER PLANET, take that money away from the immense amounts of foreign aid the US doles out every year - $17 Billion (that's 17 thousand million for you Eurofolk). Hell, Israel alone gets better than $3 Billion per year. That's enough to feed all the starving people *I* know, for sure.

Re:Blame manned exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what was being said (if I can put words in his/her mouth) is that there are incredible things here on Earth which can be done with the money. You cite the importance of finding life elsewhere but point out medical research is a crapshoot. If so, what's the percentage of finding life on Mars? I'll wager Mars has a much less opportunity. Besides, as they pointed out, what happens if nothing more than a germ was there and died? What does that do for Earth other than to find a way to get someone to/from Mars (although some have suggested the best method is a one-way ticket).

In terms of not being a zero-sum game. That's just plain silly. When everyone pays their taxes, there's a fixed amount in the kitty. Whatever is spent on one issue is not spent on another - that certainly seems to be zero-sum.

BTW, you don't have to shout. It tends to make us believe you're about ten years younger with each four or five words. By now, you're probably into your mid-teens.

Why not REALLY sell it as surplus?

[spidergoat2]

Have they considered that perhaps another country might want to take it over for a few more years? Maybe India or Japan or England or another country would buy the rights and get some kind of value out of it. Oh, if you're paying attention George Bush, it might be a way to knock a few bucks off the national debt.... Whatever.

Re:Why not REALLY sell it as surplus?

[CompressedAir]

What exactly are you suggesting? That NASA lift the Hubble and then sell it, or that some other country lift it?

Either one is just silly. If we lift it, then we'll keep it. If we don't, no one else can.

That's just cold, hard facts. The Hubble has had an awesome run, but it is time to let go.

Re:Why not REALLY sell it as surplus?

[Kaki Nix Sain]

Why is the idea of another country lifting it silly? The U.S. isn't the only country with orbital technology.

Re:Why not REALLY sell it as surplus?

[firew0lfz]

Yes, but do you seriously think (without major shouting from the general public) that the US with it's ego would do such a thing?

Unless someone wants to start a public campagin and get the public to start writing congressmen...

Earth to NASA

[Loki_1929]

Earth to NASA - come in NASA...

You're a publicly-funded, publicly-mandated government agency. If the public tells you to go to the moon, you go to the moon. If the public tells you to land on the sun, you'd best figure out some damn good materials that'll hold up.

If the public tells you to save a telescope that's told us more about the universe in the few years it's been active than we've learned in the previous 2,000 years, you save the damn thing. When you have 300,000,000 bosses, telling them all 'no' is not a good plan. The eggheads are saying safety isn't an issue, and the public is saying money isn't an issue. Hubble's budgetary requirements are infintesimal compared to its value to mankind and the three hundred million people who sign your damn paychecks.

Don't reconsider your decision, change it. Otherwise, you'd best get started calculating the trajectory for optimal burger flipping; got it?

Re:Earth to NASA

[CompressedAir]

What the hell is this?

Yes, NASA is a federal agency. That means it answers to the President and Congress.

Why do I never see people on Slashdot posting crap like this to the State Department?

You don't like what NASA does, vote for a senator or congressman with a new vision. Other than that, NASA does not and should not listen to you. NASA does the job they are instructed to do.

The Army does not make policy decisions, they fight wars. Don't expect NASA to make policy decisions about space. They do the job that elected officials tell them to do.

Re:Earth to NASA

[bware]

NASA to Earth:

Give us more money.

It costs $1B to keep Hubble up. What programs are you going to bitch about being cut if that money is spent keeping an old small telescope in orbit?

And then will you bitch about your taxes being higher?

Re:Earth to NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

"It costs $1B to keep Hubble up. What programs are you going to bitch about being cut if that money is spent keeping an old small telescope in orbit?"

As posted elsewhere...

Cut foreign aid. Say, the $3+ BILLION per year that Israel gets. Go buy yourself a couple more Hubbles with that.

I won't bitch about that at all. Any more questions?

Re:Earth to NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA doesn't have a foreign aid budget, dork.

Re:Earth to NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't? Wow!

"What programs are you going to bitch about being cut..."

Didn't say, "What NASA programs, etc...."

I personally would welcome cutting some foreign aid and spending that money on existing, proven scientific NASA missions. Sounds pretty on-topic to me.

Re:Earth to NASA

[Loki_1929]

"That means it answers to the President and Congress."

Who answers to us (the people/voters/whatever). A programmer may have his mid-management boss, but when the CEO comes down and tells him to get a cup of coffee, his ass better respond with, "cream or sugar?" or expect to be out in the street.

"Other than that, NASA does not and should not listen to you."

Not to me, but to the vast, vast majority of the American public. If they can come out and get every shuttle-ready astronaut to say publicly that they're not up to the job, or that they're unwilling to do the mission because of safety concerns, then I'll let it be. No one should be put into a life-threatening situation against their will as a matter of policy. That being said, if we have astronauts ready to go and the eggheads tell us it's safe, then what we're looking at is a simple middle-management policy decision - a bad one. NASA doesn't answer to me alone, but you bet your sweet bippy they answer to the American people.

"Don't expect NASA to make policy decisions about space. They do the job that elected officials tell them to do."

That's odd, did you see anywhere that someone instructed NASA to not save the Hubble telescope? What I've seen and read is that some idiot managers made a decision to let the thing fall into the ocean - nay - to force it to fall into the ocean at great expense and then hid behind safety concerns. Now that this ridiculous assessment has been debunked by the egghead community at NASA, they've responded with a simple 'no'. NASA even admitted that they 'reconsidered' ditching the Hubble and looked at possible plans to save it. Gee, does that sound like they're not able to make decisions? Or rather, does it perhaps sound like they made the decision?

The President has signed no public Executive Order forcing NASA to ditch the Hubble.

The Congress has passed no law, and the President has signed no law that forces NASA to ditch the Hubble.

NASA (or rather managerial elements therein) decided to ditch the Hubble.

Next question.

Re:Earth to NASA

[Ateryx]

You're a publicly-funded, publicly-mandated government agency. If the public tells you to go to the moon, you go to the moon. If the public tells you to land on the sun, you'd best figure out some damn good materials that'll hold up.

You are paying rent for an apartment. The landlord periodically gives you new carpet, bathrooms, and applicances (which you at least partially fund, you're paying the rent). But the truth is, if the landlord decides he doesn't want to be in real-estate anymore, he can tear down your apartment and kick you out. You have no say in the matter unless you can shell out the $$--which we'll assume you don't have if you're living there--to buy the entire property.

I this is similar to how most government organizations work. We're paying taxes, and definately get some good rewards, but the truth is the government owns it all and can tear it down/repair/replace at its own will. I'll be the first to bitch about beuacracy in NASA, but I'd be willing to say less than 3/4 of the people here have any clue what NASA does/costs on a daily basis (myself included). At least we have a new 'scope coming, and as long as it doesn't go hubble before it gets to L2, I'm happy.

Re:Earth to NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

NO SHIT.
It's more like $8 billion.
Plus they get all of our latest military gear to test on the Palestinians, for free.

I don't think Israel has ever done much for us, we didn't cause wwii or the holocaust. We ended it, they should be paying us. But that's another subject altogether.

Time to cut the guilt-cord and spend all that extra money on telescopes. I have heard many private Israeli citizens state that they don't want or need our money anyway.

Give them what they want!

Re:Earth to NASA

[mrscorpio]

That is NOT an accurate analogy, not in a democratic republic. Replace "Hubble Telescope" with "Interstate 90" in your essay above, and you'll see how ridiculous that is.

"You are paying taxes for an interstate. The government periodically gives you new pavement, signs, and rest stops (which you at least partially fund, you're paying the taxes). But the truth is, if the government decides they don't want to be in the road-making business anymore, he can tear down the road and block your access to it. You have no say in the matter unless you can shell out the $$--which we'll assume you don't have if you're living there--to buy the entire road."

Chris

Re:Earth to NASA

[Ateryx]

Replace "Hubble Telescope" with "Interstate 90" in your essay abov

I thought of the same example which is why I said "most government programs" in my comment. Obviously there are several things that don't fit my analogy (mostly the illogical ones--no more welfare, roads, etc...), but almost any analogy is partially flawed and can be shown as least partially incorrect by any devils advocate.

New Reality TV Show

[stuffduff]

Space Salvage (Shades of Salvage 1)

Where cute incompetent teens try and rescue a multi million dollar space tellescope. Starting with 24 teens, the rigors of Network Space Training whittle it down to a crew of two, who use a decommissioned shuttle to retrieve the Hubble.

Note: Orbital Sex Scenes a must for ratings week!

NASA = safety or bust

[Dethboy]

Basically I think in the future you'll see NASA shying away from anything even remotely risky.

"He added that Hubble offers no "safe haven" for astronauts seeking refuge from a damaged shuttle, while the ISS does."

Oh good grief. What's next airbags and OnStar onboard the Shuttle?

It's space dammit. If you can't accept the risks then give the money to someone who does. Personally I'd fly to the freakin Hubble just so it can beam me back these bitching desktop images.

jim

Re:NASA = safety or bust

[M-G]

Oh good grief. What's next airbags and OnStar onboard the Shuttle?


Heh. Funny, but unfortunately, looks to be true. Crew safety should always be a high priority, but you can never eliminate risk.

Your car is a lot safer if you never leave the driveway, but you obviously won't get very far.

So when/if we go to Mars, are they going to be towing a little space dinghy behind them, or are we going to have to build a duplicate ship to fly alongside in case of an emergency?

about the veal..

[Anonymous Coward]

good joke, but why do these jokes always end with a comment about the veal? i'd like to know :)

Re:about the veal..

[ISPpfy]

It's a line from Shrek, mimicking the line used by lots of "lounge acts" in Las Vegas and similar.

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

...this seems to be the proof that a telescope that does something isn't as useful as a american flag n Mars to keep the american penis erected.

A great day for all american tax payers and people who confuse their denial of truth with good and clean patriotism.

what if columbus said no?

[oogoody]

Sorry man, those ships are dangerous.
And we might drop off the edge of the earth.
Way staying home.

typical NASA

[xeeno]

The original decision to kill hubble wasn't made by a group but by one person, Sean O' Keefe. The official reasoning is that it's too risky to keep sending people up to do trivial things like maintenance because the shuttles are old and dangerous. The real reasoning is more likely along the lines of "if we lose another shuttle people will get fired over it."

If NASA was so concerned about safety then they would have learned from the original shuttle disaster.

The truth of the matter is that when you strap your ass to several kilotons of explosives with the intent of blasting yourself into orbit there is always the chance of fatality. Sure, the shuttles are old and rickety. We knew this 10 years ago. So, NASA. What have you been doing in the last 10 years about it? Answer: nothing.

The cost per shuttle in maintenance is amazing, but if you get rid of the shuttles in favor of something more efficient then you lose money and jobs. It's the same way any other monolithic government organization works - the more crap you put between yourself and the project = more money and jobs are created.

So, people. Are you willing to put people out of work to make a more efficient space program? Are you willing to get rid of the head of NASA because he likes his job and doesn't want to lose it? Would you do the same thing if you were in his position? Can you think of a way that you can maintain the job number and the influx of money while actually getting things done?

I'm not defending NASA, believe me. I work with people that work for NASA. They work 30 minutes a day and take 3 hour lunch breaks, just like the .com people did before the bottom of the market fell out. And we all know how much work got done then, don't we? Zilch. There's a reason why the running joke is that NASA is welfare for scientists. But then again, can you think of any alternatives?

Re:typical NASA

[1029]

But then again, can you think of any alternatives?

Yes. Loosen up the gov't monopoly on space flight and let the private sector take over.

Re:typical NASA

[xeeno]

That's not an alternative. There's no immediate money to be had in the space industry, everything takes a gigantic initial investment. How many companies do you know of that are willing to dump untold billions into something that may or may not pay off 20 years down the line?

Re:typical NASA

[1029]

At least 27 or so as of now. And if the gov't got the hell outta the way so it was easier to get up there privately, who is to say that number wouldn't grow?

Just remeber, there is no problem the gov't can't make worse.

Re:typical NASA

[karnal]

I'm not so sure that the private sector would be that good.

For instance, in my current job responsibilities, I have "Other Duties as Assigned" at the bottom. I wouldn't want to work as a network admin for a "space corporation" and sent up on a "test rocket". :)

Re:typical NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

>There's a reason why the running joke is that NASA is welfare for scientists. But then again, can you think of any alternatives?

Sure! Outsource all the science to India with everything else. Maybe China or Thailand could even under cut them.

Nasa would have huge pockets then. Their satellite tests would go from costing $800,000 per 1 day test, to $100,000.

We can get outsourced shuttle crews too. Maybe we should outsource our entire military and government to India. That would really cut costs and put some of that tax money back into the pockets of the out of work Americans.

Shoot, if we can get multiple kills per day, for $100 per week instead of those arrogant expensive American soldiers who want $800, the possibilities are stupefying. I am sure that outsourced soldiers could aim just as well as Americans.

I say outsource NASA. Let Sean O'Keefe just be the project manager. There are plenty of Indian scientists who can use a slide rule.

We need to be an intellectual economy and become employed with the next big thing. Leave all that science, engineering, innovation, and money for the suckers to toil over.

If our government supports globalization, they need to put their jobs where their mouth is too. If they gonna talk the talk, they gotta walk the walk. They need to save money, why not?

Re:typical NASA

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Just remeber, there is no problem the gov't can't make worse.

How about anarachy?

(Sure, what the government does may be worse than anarchy -- but it can't make the anarchy any worse, since any governmental intervention into a state of anarchy by defition reduces the anarchy.)

Re:typical NASA

[xeeno]

I can just imagine outsourcing ground control to india.

"Houston, this is Enterprise. Can you give us an ETA on the next window for landing?"

*shshSHHSHhs* "AM NOT UNDERSTANDING CALL BACK PLEASE " *click*

"Houston, this is Enterprise. We need an ETA on the next window for landing."

*SSHshsshHSSH* "PLEASE REBOOT AM NOT KNOWING" *click*

"Houston, we need an ETA on the next window for landing."

*SHshshS* "WE ARE AWARE OF YOUR PROBLEM THANKING YOU PLEASE CALL EA GAMES AGAIN" *click*

Re:typical NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as alternatives, I found this article quite interesting, though I cannot verify the figures quoted. www.rocketmanblog.com/2004/02/a_readers_rebut.html

Re:typical NASA

[luna69]

Bordering on racist.

And not even funny in the bargain.

Re:typical NASA

[llefler]

It's time to kill the current shuttle. It was poorly concieved in the first place. Maybe we didn't know it then, but it's obvious now. Use a shuttle to launch people, and rockets to launch payloads. Reducing the size reduces the complexity and risk. Not to mention the launch costs.

Replacing the shuttle with something more efficient doesn't necessarily mean few jobs or smaller budgets. Retask the savings to other projects. Like actually finishing the ISS, building an orbiting launch platform, and robotic missions on the moon and Mars.

Re:typical NASA

[mike77]

I work with people that work for NASA. They work 30 minutes a day and take 3 hour lunch breaks...

I work for NASA myself, and I don't know who you work with, but the people who belong at NASA put in long hours. I put in 10 hour days on a regular basis. Admittedly I don't work at one of the major centers, but I find your generalization to be rather unfair to us folks who care. Sure there are poeple who do what you say, but I'd argue that's not the norm. Maybe it is for the pencil pushers, but the engineers and scientists I know work their asses off.

Re:typical NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps there are better ways to spend our research dollars now: http://medusa.as.arizona.edu/lbtwww/lbt.html

Re:typical NASA

[RodRandom]

I worked nearly five years for NASA as a consultant and consistently found that NASA people were as hard-working and tireless as anyone in the private sector (and I have the experience to back that up). The head of the division that employed me literally worked himnself to death trying (successfully, if temporarily) to bring about consensus on an experimental program. NASA has enabled breaktrhough science that continues to revolutionize our view of man's place in the universe (think of the Cosmic Background Explorer, to name only one instance). If all this is steeped in political corruption--for example, the whole sales pitch for "clowns in space" as a loss leader in the struggle for prestige during the Cold War--this simply makes our time no different from any other. What scientists actually do for a living is much dirtier that anyone steeped in Thomas Kuhn is likely to realize--and when has it ever been different? A little realism, please, folks. We are all supposed to be adults here. Having said so much, one wonders whether O'Keefe's decision was based on the fear of another shuttle disaster as much as on a desire to exploit Bush's Mars-inspired political infatuation with the space agency. Wouldn't it be nice to have a suite of new Great Observatories, not just another repair mission?

Re:typical NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never had to deal with overseas tech support. Try getting anything even remotely helpful or intelligible out of, say, Linksys (which outsources to the Philippines).

I'd say that was pretty goddamned funny and right on the mark.

Re:typical NASA

[Threni]

> The truth of the matter is that when you strap your ass to several kilotons of
> explosives with the intent of blasting yourself into orbit there is always the
> chance of fatality. Sure, the shuttles are old and rickety. We knew this 10
> years ago. So, NASA. What have you been doing in the last 10 years about it?
> Answer: nothing.

Weren't the astronauts alive in both cases of the shuttle exploding until they hit the earth extremely quickly? Isn't there a case for them having parachutes or some other way of getting out of their before that happens. Terminal velocity and all that.

Re:typical NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course this is funny/true. The only reason you don't like it is because you are stuck behind your "Quick-E-Mart" counter.

Now go re-stock the shelves Habeeb.

Re:typical NASA

[ThePlague]

Anarchy isn't a problem, it's the solution.

Re:typical NASA

[The_K4]

I don't know about you but I would take the job just because of the "might get sent up on a test rocket" clause!

Re:typical NASA

[pla]

Weren't the astronauts alive in both cases of the shuttle exploding until they hit the earth extremely quickly?

In the Challenger explosion, yes. The actual "explosion" made a big fireball but packed little destructive force. Other evidence, such as the use of emergency oxygen masks, indicate that the crew survived the initial blast.

For the Columbia, I haven't heard one way or the other, but considering the ship actually broke up (rather than just the fuel tank rupturing, causing a fireball)... And then also considering the lack of oxygen or a pressurized atmosphere... Well, they most likely died rather quickly.


Isn't there a case for them having parachutes or some other way of getting out of their before that happens. Terminal velocity and all that.

That might have applied to the challenger crew, although I doubt they had time to figure out what happened, go for the parachutes, properly equip them, and find a way out of the ship.

Once you hit orbit, however, not even any point in trying to escape. Even in a pressurized suit, the lack of air means that a parachute will do very little. The idea of "terminal velocity" only applies when you have friction from air resistance. Even with a suit and a parachute, they would have burned up just like any other object entering our atmosphere at a few thousand mph.

Re:typical NASA

[ckaminski]

That's bullshit. NASA spent money on the X33. NASA spent money on DCX, and nearly half a dozen other space launcher projects over the past ten years. Guess what? They were all eventually cancelled by Congress. Cost overruns, sure. Shit like that happens when you push the envelope (building composite fuel tanks capable of holding liquid hydrogen without self-destructing).

Congress has killed NASA.

Someone else would have gone

[HarveyBirdman]

And no one really thought the Earth was flat. They even had a rough estimate of its diameter.

pointy hair

[kippy]

The astronauts who would repair Hubble are all chomping at the bit to get up there. It's NASA's mismanagement that is denying them the chance. This is mismanagement, not cowardliness. Well perhaps it is but it's all on the side of the administrators.

Um

[Anonymous Coward]

And people got killed in the WTC, and we do nothing but make it tougher to get on an airplane.

Uuhh.... the Taliban might have a difference of opinion here.

MOD PARENT INSIGHTFUL

[kippy]

This is right on. Our tax money is paying for it and the overwhelming voice of everyone who knows about this is to save Hubble. Pro-Mars, Pro-Robot, Anti-nuclear, everyone who is into space stuff and millions who don't are calling for them to change their minds.

Pitch it in a way Bush can understand....

[Astroboy!]

"You see, Mr. President, if we just attach missiles here, here, and here, we have an effective deterrent to any possible terrorist threat from a space-based attack."

"Fundin' ahproved!"

The Three Biggest Lies

[Detritus]

• The check is in the mail.
• I'll respect you in the morning.
• It isn't about money.

NASA's priorities are confused

[dtjohnson]

Apparently, the Hubble mission is now considered too dangerous because there would be no backup shuttle available to rescue the Astronauts if their shuttle developed a problem. Space travel is inherently dangerous but the margin of safety with only one shuttle seems acceptable given the number of successful shuttle missions that have already been accomplished. It is financially and technically unrealistic to have a backup spacecraft available for every mission. The space station continues to be supported with the Soyuz capsule for which there is also no backup since the backup spacecraft docked at the space station was used by the last occupants to return to earth after the Shuttle crashed. The Hubble mission is far more important to science and mankind than the space station and should be given a very high priority by NASA. If NASA is unable to support a mission like Hubble, they need to ask themselves what their reason for even existing is.

it is a shame...Enjoy the pics while you can

[seriv]

I think this is on of the worse choice that Nasa could make. It is about the final choice to make science no longer an issue. Even if it is a saftey risk, so is going to the ISS, they are just sitting on a big bomb if something goes wrong. Safety is not the issue, engineers are saying so. But we should enjoy the pics while they are still around, this website is a news release center with high res pics of hubble pics. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/year/

Re:Let Hubble rot

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the name has no effect on the functionality.

Petition to save the Hubble

[fireacc]

If anyone is particularly passionate about saving the Hubble, there is an online petition here:
http://www.savethehubble.org/petition.jsp

Re:Petition to save the Hubble

[/dev/trash]

No one puts faith in online petitions.

Re:Petition to save the Hubble

[Peldor]

If anyone is particularly passionate about saving the Hubble, do something more than sign an online petition.

Such a shame...

[Mondoz]

I know several people who have spent the past few years writing software to greatly improve the control that shuttle astronauts would have over the HST while docked with it...
Now it's scrapped.

How sad.

After using HST as a proving ground, this software would have been used to interface with many different hardware payloads... I don't know what will happen to their project now...

Engineers don't make decisions!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtually every NASA disaster (and certainly the most emotionally distressing ones, with a loss of life) can be traced to management and not technical decisions.

How many times does engineers get to make decisions? How many times decisions are made based on money, and not technical validity/superiority/greatness/etc?

I'd like the world to be different. Think technology and people first, money then. Who is with me?

Now-Afraid-of-Space-Agency

[peter303]

What does that acronym spell? NASA!

Re:Now-Afraid-of-Space-Agency

[clyde_c]

Not A Science Agency

or...

Need Another Seven Astronauts

...due to safety concerns?

[WheelDweller]

If we can't maintain a satellite (with no explosives or radiation or whatever) how can we be expected to start a moon-colony or anything else?

The Hubble's been one of the most successful programs we've had; other than a bug in the first mirror, we got it patched and it's show us things we never would have seen otherwise. (And it'd be very useful for spotting extinction-level asteroids.

My bet is that politics got involved and NASA's never been a PR-savvy organization. Shame, really. When you have problems and need to rally around something, you don't just dump a rare success.

The Russians, people really good at rock-simple boosting of many, many tons at a time, could use the business. Now that the whole cold-war thing is over, I'd see reinstatement of this program as big an event as all the detant meetings they ever held.

Back before Britian was attacked by Germany, someone was smart enough to do an "X-pize" kinda thing: they held a prize for making floatplanes to race. Political uproar was surprizingly vocal: "We might head into a war- why does the government want to mess with sea-racers?" Well, take the floats off and replace'em with bombs, and the fastest plane became the Supermarine Spitfire: a plane that very likely saved their lives.

I think the X-prize is a great idea. Maybe let NASA do the core research- let private companies compete on the transportation side. Then we'll be able to fix things like the Hubble and that industry can start making some real progress.

But if not, "Hubble, we barely knew ye."

combined with ISS

[Major_Small]

when I was reading the article, this thought came to mind: is there any way to append the hubble space telescope to the ISS? that way the astronauts can have a 'safe' place to stay if the shuttle is damaged, and the telescope can be fixed as soon as there's a problem...

Re:combined with ISS

[egomaniac]

For all intents and purposes, no. They are in completely different orbits, with Hubble hundreds of kilometers higher. Neither one has the ability to maneuver itself to match the other's orbit, even if they wanted to.

It takes an absurd amount of fuel to substantially alter an orbit, which is why it is never done: we launch something into a particular orbit and more or less just keep it there.

Re:combined with ISS

[StewedSquirrel]

I think they're thousands of miles apart. I would imagine that overcoming centripidal force (IE, slowing orbit) while dropping the altitude of the orbit would require a good deal of thrust. Getting that much fuel to that altitude and "attaching" it somehow to the telescope would be tricky. Moving the thing would then be slow... getting it to move fast enough for it to travel thousands of miles in a reasonable amount of time would require MORE thrust. Then, getting it to STOP within feet of the space station... would require uhm... well it'd be hard without smacking into the ISS. (and it would require an equal amount of fuel as was required to get it moving in the first place.

Sounds like it would be cheaper to build a new one and launch it from scratch. :-)

Stewey

Well if they must bring it down at least do this:

[Bob Bitchen]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=95894&cid=8213 447

Killing the whole space program

[Anonymous Coward]

Dubya's whole purpose concerning NASA is to disamantle the entire space program, using an unrealistic and long-term goal (Moonbase and Mars) to justify killing funding for, and discontinuing, everything else, manned and unmanned.

The closest he wants us to get to space is old Trek reruns!

except for the fact that

[ShadowWarriorOfDeath]

NASA has an $11 billion budget and ST's anual budget is roughly $60 million (http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/health/bal-te.hu bble30jan30,0,5789060.story?coll=bal-health-headli nes look at the bottom of the article). Operating HST is a lot less exepnsive than developing manned space flight. Also, do not forget that ST will run James Web Space Telescope, so not all of those dollars will go away, especially not in in the long term.

Didn't the Christian-Right zealots not want Hubble

[Bob Bitchen]

up there at all? I have a vague memory of the Christian zealots pronouncing the Hubble as bad and that it shouldn't be launched. Something to do with witnessing creation and how mankind should not tamper with God's work. And now here we are with Bush and his right-wing zealots taking it down just when it's at its prime. This may sound crazy but consider what the current administration has done so far. Ashcroft probably asked to have the Hubble taken down as a favor to his Christian zealot pals.
More proof that the Republicans are scared that Bush is done. He's not getting 4 more years so get your favors in now.

When did we start giving up?

[Buschman]

Back in the day, people strapped on things like the Wright Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, the Bell X-1, the X-15, numerous Mercury/Gemini/Apollo craft, to name a few. There were tremendous risks associated with all this, everyone knew it, everyone accepted it, and not all lived to tell about it.
Because of these advances and the sacrifices made along the way, we made myriad technological advances in engineering, medicine, chemistry, electronics, computer science, and of course haberdashery (velcro).
The astronaut pool is full of folks brave enough to risk their lives in the name of exploration and science. We should be careless or reckless, but we shouldn't be a bunch of agoraphobic pansies either.

Re:When did we start giving up?

[Buschman]

Back in the day, people strapped on things like the Wright Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, the Bell X-1, the X-15, numerous Mercury/Gemini/Apollo craft, to name a few. There were tremendous risks associated with all this, everyone knew it, everyone accepted it, and not all lived to tell about it.
Because of these advances and the sacrifices made along the way, we made myriad technological advances in engineering, medicine, chemistry, electronics, computer science, and of course haberdashery (velcro).
The astronaut pool is full of folks brave enough to risk their lives in the name of exploration and science. We should NOT be careless or reckless, but we shouldn't be a bunch of agoraphobic pansies either.

Religious?

[Some guy named Chris]

I can't help but think that maybe it's because we have a fundamentalist Christian in the Whitehouse. Hubble has shown the universe to be several billion years older than many fundamentalists like to believe

Disclaimer: I'm a Christian. I believe the creation story to be allegorical.

Slashrot.

[Chess_the_cat]

Not much new info here

So let's talk about it some more.

Don't just run it into the ground now...

[Mulletproof]

"This has been discussed on Slashdot before."

Can we make it the last time???

you don't see what is really taking place

[GoldenBB]

Folks, I don't think any of you see what is taking place here. My suspicion is that they know the shuttles are too dangerous to use and that there is no money for repairs or replacements. Bush made that grand speech about the moon and Mars, but all that was was PR--manned missions are over for the forseeable future and the spin has begun. Clinton made the same idiotic speech about Mars, it is never going to come true given the current bureaucracy and cost and international situation. The decision to not fix Hubble is just another clue about what is really taking place here.

I'm all for manned space flight, but not using money that was forcefully extracted from the citizens of the US. No matter what good comes from these missions into space, the coercive nature of how the money was gotten makes these missions of "peace" a joke.

I await the coming age of private space flight ventures.

Just wait till the elections are over

[vladkrupin]

Ah, don't worry. Hubble will be just fine. It's not how, but when you approach NASA asking for it not to be killed - just wait till this fall.

Right now NASA is wasting all its resources on ISS, which is starting to look more and more like a dead end. Right now we need to keep it alive and every shuttle when (and if) they ever fly will be used to haul stuff up to the ISS, instead of fixing some silly Hubble. Why do we do that? Because it's too hard to accept that we wasted billions of dollars on a station that's worthless. Well, not really worthless - if nothing else, we proved that we could have a space station just like the Russians did, even bigger and beter. So, now we can't accept the obvious fact that we wasted so much money irresponsibly, and our pride is not letting us part with the ISS.

When Bush wins the upcoming elections, that pride can go down the drain. However much I dislike him, I must admit that he's capable of making significant decisions, including unpopular ones if he feels like they are the right ones to make. Right any unpopular decisions that hurt American pride are out of question. But after the elections... start making your bets on how many weeks it'll take to abandon the project. He's already omitting ISS from his speaches about future space exploration.

Now, when we abandon ISS, and if the Shuttles fly (and I hope they will), there will be a few flights that NASA can dedicate to some real science, like servicing Hubble. So, keep pestering NASA bit by bit continuously about the Hubble - that way they'll remember it is a priority. And once we abandon ISS, really start reminding them that Hubble is too valuable to be trashed, and now we have some Shuttles to spare.

It's not about safety, or value to science. It's about money and timing. So, you know how they say 'pick your fights carefully'? Well, in addition to that, pick their timing carefully too! Just wait till the elections are over.

Does Maritime Salvage apply to space?

[devaldez]

If so, then whomever decides to go up and save the 'scope will be entitled to ownership...that doesn't necessarily give them access to communications methodology, but it is certainly more than a start.

Could PRC or Russia claim salvage rights?

dave

Re:Does Maritime Salvage apply to space?

[Cycloid Torus]

I'm wondering if private enterprise could "claim jump"? I believe the commercial space companies could find a use for anything lifted pretty much out of the gravity well. Could it be maintained by robots?

NASA must be political by the very nature of its funding. Sale for $1 could lead to a second and possibly more interesting use.

Paging Alanis Morrisette

[gilroy]

The irony here, of course, is this: One of the major justifications for the Shuttle program in the first place was to allow on-site servicing of satellites so as to extend their useful lives. Now we're being told that the Shuttle is good only for building the ISS -- and we already know that the ISS is good only for justifying Shuttle missions.

I try to be a space advocate, but it's so hard playing my best when there are blockheads like this on the same team...

This is funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody puhleeeze mod this up. It made my drink shoot out my nose.

boo frickin hoo

[Anonymous Coward]

we all knew it wouldnt last forever...

but check out the new Mars Express photo released today:

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cf m? fobjectid=34626

Nice explanation, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

All those "problems" that you list were problems 10 years ago too, but I didn't hear Nasa telling us that it was "too dangerous".

Don't play this bureaucracy game with me. I'm better at it and know this kind of bullshit because I deal with it on a daily basis.

The real reason you're doing this is to put pressure on congress to spend more money on "space". Its a dangerous game and I'm not sure the subcommittee is all *that* stupid about your real motives.

But at least we know the flavor of B.S. you'll be using on the hill next year.

Re:Nice explanation, but...

[Dashing Leech]

Wow, who exactly is this troll directed at? (Who is this "you" you are talking to? I'm couldn't put pressure on Congress if I wanted to, and I won't be on any hill next year. Well, maybe having a picnic or something.)

No, actually they weren't all problems 10 years ago. The eastern landing sites were not closed. There was no flight requirement for the inspection of the thermal protection system. And the safety requirements were not the same.

You seem to be suggesting that if things were done unsafely in the past, they should be done just as unsafely now. Have you even read the CAIB report? It clearly points out that NASA has been operating as if the shuttle is an operational vehicle, not the prototype that it really is. Now that NASA is finally taking safety as seriously as it should, it's getting criticized for it. I'd find it highly amusing if some people weren't so serious about it.

Re:Nice explanation, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

If the shuttle CAIB report is now your new gosperl instead of what it is meant to be, i.e. a set of *recommendations*, then would you take to tell me why the hell you think it is worth squandering the precious commodity that the shuttle is by launching it 26 times to build the ISS?
Of yes, international *agreements*, with the US aeorspace industry getting most of money, in an election year, surprises surprises...
All of this safety issues are complete crap. People might be used to be getting probed up their a** every time they board a plane so that they fell safer from terorism, but the fact is that this is another example of a unilateral decision made by a completely ignorant bean counter (O'Keiffe), who was appointed by an completely incompetent administration (that would be YOU, Mr Bush).
Wake up! Going to space it not like going to your local 7/11 to go get a pack of condom. Astronauts know it, scientists understand it, engineer have to live with it. Administrators do not, the Bush administration certainly has not clue. And neither do you... If you are going to whimper every time something goes wrong when we try to get into space, then start burying your head in the sand, because more accidents WILL happen. And they should. You know why? Because it is HARD getting there you moron!

Let me get this straight...

[No. 24601]

we plan on building a manned space craft that's never been tested, flying to Mars on a mission in which even robots have been lost, launching back into space from Mars and getting home... when it's still considered "unsafe" to repair a piece of equipment in our own orbit. Hmmm

Invented by AMERICAN scientists

[Anonymous Coward]

By the two brothers, ZZ TOP.

They discussed it at length in their public journals:

Rumor goin' round
In that texas town
'bout a point they call lagrange

Make Love not War

[SilkBD]

So.... it's perfectly acceptable to spend huge amounts of our taxes on multi-million dollar to kill brown people... but for knowledge and science it's too much to spend a fraction of that amount?

You just gotta love the priorites here.

Paging Admiral Gehman

[applemasker]

When the uproar first started, O'Keefe requested the Adm. Gehman, Chairman of the Columbia Accident Review Board, look into the matter and produce an advisory opinion as to the safety issues.

As far as I have researched (albeit, quickly) Gehman hasn't made any recommendations yet. Could it be that O'Keefe is... backpedaling?

Call me a cynic, but I have the feeling that Gehman's response ("Hey, it's safe enough to fly HST") wasn't going to be welcomed, so he's been pre-empted by the bean-counter Administrator.

Overlooked in the earlier posts/threads in terms of safety is the possibility that instead of relying on the ISS "safe haven" rationale, a second Orbiter could be prepped and on "Ready Hold" during the HST SM-4 mission. If on-orbit imagery/inspection indicated a problem, launch the second Orbiter and transfer the crew. Instant safety margin. Or, launch the crew (Soyuz) and equipment separately (Progress) to service HST.

What where we thinking when we went to the moon

[nexusone]

Using their logic we would have never went to the moon, with out risk we would not have advance as we have.

NASA has become a politcal pig, don't want to take risk. Could be unpopular with the politicans and loose funding.....

Design objectives for Hubble 2

[emil]

I don't know beans about astronomy, but:

• Hubble should have been designed not to require servicing missions (never again should we risk lives to fix broken optics)
• We should have launched two of them
• The optics should have been tested more thoroughly (this English-Metric thing is getting old)
• We should have a roadmap of Hubble 3, 4, 5. These should be launched every 5-7 years, with the most cost-effective technologies

We did with Hubble what we did with the Shuttle: we stuck with a bad design for far too long.

Never develop a sentimental attachment to technology.

Re:Safty my ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone ever suggest that the manned space program was as safe as walking down the street?

Shouldn't that be: "Did anyon ever suggest that the manned spac program was as saf as walking down the street"?

Is this the beginning of the end of Nasa?

[cdn-programmer]

Some people have proposed that this is the beginning of the end of NASA. There is quite a lot of merit in this idea.

First you redirect the efforts into a direction that is going to be hideously expensive. In order to achieve this goal you abandon pretty much everything else. Then when the elusive goals of landing a man on Mars clearly are seen for what they are - an expensive boondoggle - you simply abandon that project and since there is nothing else left you can shut down all of NASA.

The problem with this future for mankind - one firmly planted on earth - like the proverbial ostrich is this:

There is a lot of energy in space and it can be harvested quite inexpensively. This has been known for decades, but with oil and gas cheap and plentiful on planet earth - space based energy systems really never were explored, much less exploited.

This is now changing. Is it really cheaper to fight wars in the middle east than to harvest energy from space? What of the lives lost? Is it really the case that anonymous teenage boys dying in a desert in Iraq is ok because:"----" You fill in the blanks. With enough creativity pretty much anything can be justified.

--------------

The nuclear program was set back decades through carefully crafted fear mongering. The movie "China Syndrom" is an excellent example of this. I wonder how much influence wealthy Texas oil barons had in this. Their oil would not nearly have had the value it has were a strong nuclear energy industry around. So instead of cheap reliable energy, we end up with such a regulatory mess that even huge corporations are afraid to propose a reactor. The latest example of this is Exelon (EXC:NYSE) who invested with the South African firm, Escom, in the development of the pebble bed reactor. Clearly they felt that the manufactured opposition to nuclear power would be great enough that it is not feasible in the USA to consider building a plant, so they dropped the idea.

I personally think it is rather sad that the USA considers fighting a war so they can grab Arabian oil and gas is preferable to building safe nuclear power plants. But then what would a Canadian know of USA politics?

Thankfully the rest of the world doesn't seem inclined to play along with these mad ideas and France and South Africa as well as India, and several Asian countries have vibrant nuclear programs.

But even this is twisted in the USA disinformation machine. Under the guise of nuclear non-proliferation it is suggested that since a power plant can produce Plutonium, that nuclear energy is inherantly unsafe. Then the USA goes off and builds reactors specifically designed to produce the plutonium. While the rest of the world is told to not use nuclear as a source of energy the USA meanwhile builds and deploys an arsenal of weaponry that boggles the imagination.

Of course while all this is taking place, the peaceful use of nuclear power is discouraged because of the "long lived wastes which take centuries to decay". Of course, there is no real effort to develope scintillation technology that will burn the wastes and turn them into electricity, and in fact, the vast majority never even hear that such technology is possible!!!

How is this any different than the politics that took place when DuPont brought out synthetic fibers and meanwhile Congress passed legilation that outlawed Hemp? They were so crafty back then that they employed the spanish word Marijuana rather than the common English word - because they bloody well knew that if the average joe sixpack knew what they were up to that they would never get away with it!

But since then, how many kids have been jailed and have criminal records because of these insane laws? How many kids have now lost their parents and are growing up in foster care and orphanages because of the antics of the DEA?

--------------

Well - this story is about NASA and decommisioning the Hubble. I personally think we need to be very vocal about

What about the review?

[M-G]

This article makes no mention of the review by Adm. Gehman. So this sounds like just a restatement of NASA's earlier position, by Weiler, who has been repeating the same thing over and over.

O'Keefe appointed Gehman to study it and report to him, so until O'Keefe comes out in a press conference and announces the results of the study, I think the BBC used the word 'final' a bit prematurely.

When you have as much WHAT as NASA?

[Anonymous Coward]

If NASA gets it's 2004 budget approved, it will have a whopping 0.7% of the Federal budget. The equally stunning 1% increase over last year puts them behind the inflation rate.

People need to understand that NASA competes for a few squishy berries in the Federal pie.

Astronaut safety reasons

[speedbump]

Hubble is being shut down for 'astronaut safety reasons'?

We might as well not implement a police force because some of the officers might get killed.

Ummm...

[sean.peters]

As long as Hubble is working, there'll be less motivation for the "powers that be" (non-NASA) to fund the "next generation". "Hubble works so why do we need another telescope?" will overshadow any [other] requests.

And wouldn't they be correct in taking that position? Speaking as one of the taxpayers involved in paying for NASA, I hope so. This is not to be taken to mean that I'm not in favor of space exploration - I am in favor of it. But any money sunk into to a replacement for Hubble (as opposed to a presumably more economical refurb of Hubble), is money that's not available for other space projects.

Sean

I have supported NASA....

[UrGeek]

...since I first watch Alan Shephred take a 15 minute ride in a Mercury capsule atop a Redstone rocket. But crap this this just reeks - they can not longer be justified. Disband them now!

2-3 years???

[MattHaffner]

Er, no. The Webb telescope will not be up before 2011. So, we're talking a minimum of 7. Likely, that will slip.

Without a boost, I believe Hubble will be down or need to be brought down before then.

The real shame, in addition to loosing UV astronomy--especially spectroscopy, which was planned to be a focus after the servicing mission with COS (Cosmic Origins Spectrograph)--is that there will likely be no overlap between JWST and Hubble. That's a real missed opportunity for interesting joint observations of the hot topics of the day from two instruments with slightly different instrumental focuses.

Remember, we're talking about science nearly a *decade* from now. FUSE (a far-UV spectrometer) has a current end-time around 2007 if everything goes smoothly. Spitzer has about a 6-year lifetime just from the cryostat, so even that might not make it past 2010. Chandra has a max of 10 years that people will mention, but it is nominally 5. Again, it will be tough to make 2010.

We face a real possibility that *no* major US space observatory currently in orbit will make it to overlap with JWST.

china hijack

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking it would be kinda
funny if china used its new orbital
capabilities to boost hubble into
a higher orbit. What are we going
to do complain that they stole our
trash??!

exciting future

[humankind]

Someone sent this to me in e-mail. It seems to sum up the issue nicely.

"We Live In Exciting Times"

I just heard that yet more funding is planned on being cut from NASA, the organization responsible for space flight, exploration and related technology.

All I can say is, "It's about time!"

Is all this NASA stuff really "science?" You people just don't get it.

Space is not the new frontier.

Creating new technology that can slice onions and potatoes into neat shapes, the ability to organize large quantities of neckties utilizing a single closet hanger, a hard taco wrapped inside a flour tortilla with ranch-flavored "Rio Grande Sauce", a new non-stick frying pan coating, penis enlargement vitamins, a chocolate-covered candy bar that will make you lose weight, a light beer "that doesn't taste like a light beer"... now THAT'S science! These amazing advancements immediately enhance the human condition(tm). But there's much more work to be done!

Why, why, why? Why do we insist on exploring the heavens when we have so many challenging frontiers upon us here in the real world? At least GW Bush agrees with me. It's time for the rest of the populace to take off their blue-blockers.

We live in an exciting time. I can't think of another time or place I'd rather be. While our parents and peers might have pondered the enigma of landing on the moon, we have much more pressing concerns: Will Richard get voted off of Survivor:All Stars? Is Michael Jackson going to jail for real this time? Will the seventh Harry Potter movie be as good as the sixth? What more can we learn about Janet Jackson's right breast? The Dukes of Hazzard is being made into a movie! Did you hear me? The DUKES OF HAZZARD! Will it be true to the original? We'll have to find out, but all I can say is, the anticipation is killing me!!

We've given a lot of "science" a try over the years. There's still no cure for cancer; clean-burning fuel technology isn't here; poverty and hunger continue to dominate regions and cultures. Surely after all this time, we should just admit that our resources need to be diverted to more immediate concerns that have the potential to reward us more quickly and efficiently?

Somewhere out there, a person still doesn't have the lowest interest rate on their fourth mortgage! In someone's backyard in Cleveland, there's a plant whose leaves may offer a slight reduction in hair loss among a small sampling of people in a clinical trial. And what are we doing? We're taking pictures of little spots of light millions of light years away. What's the point? If we still cannot produce a triple cheeseburger with "Swiss-flavored" cheese and "smoke-flavored" sauce for under 79 cents, something is wrong. Very wrong.

It's about time we got our priorities straight as Americans, the true superpower and leader of the free world and capital market.

We are wasting precious time and money staring into the heavens while other nations are rapidly approaching our advances in superior low-fat grilling technology. Somewhere out there, much closer than the moon or Mars, is the technology we need to make our clothes smell "winter fresh"; there's a new drink that's a cross between a Martini and Hawaiian Punch -- AND WE NEED TO FIND IT!

How much longer can we afford to spin our wheels with pointless interstellar pursuits when there are still movie scripts about rogue cops and cartoon characters that need to be green-lighted?

So we landed an RC car on Mars. Are you happy? Did we get any high-speed footage of this car in a chase sequence in which it flies into the air and explodes? No! What a total waste!

People, we need to get our priorities straight. Thank God for the Bush Administration!

Ok, ok, I do need to be fair to NASA. The organization did come up with the amazing "Contour Pillow(tm)", but I still sense that the NASA is being distracted with counterproductive ideals when an even more superior mattress technology is i

Hubble Rescue and X-Prizes

[BENAFARMER]

You know, Hubble Rescue might be a good subject for an X-Prize. I'd be willing to bet that there are companies out there that would be willing to give it a shot if they had a chance at $70-80 million--or maybe the prize could be ownership or operating rights to Hubble itself. Hmm. Liability would be a problem though. If something went haywire and Hubble landed on someone's SUV--Not good. What do think? Any potential here?

Re:Hubble Rescue and X-Prizes

[BENAFARMER]

Looks like there is another chain of comments on this. Somebody else came up with the idea of an X-prize to save Hubble and posted it about 4 hours before I did. (And I thought it was such an original idea) Oh well. I'll move further comments down to that chain.

The DoD?

[Pentagram]

Anyone else have a thought of ants under a magnifying glass?

Turn it into a web cam!!

[rupert2000]

The ad revenue should pay the bills.

super web-cam!

[parawing742]

If there are going to take it out of commission, can they give semi-public access to the camera. That would be one super web-cam!

Lens?!?!

[astroboscope]

Like all large telescopes, Hubble uses a mirror, not a lens.

Thanks Dubya !

[Anonymous Coward]

You suck Bush. That's right YOU SUCK.

Another program dead. Why? Because he has a freaking pipe dream to go to Mars.

Unlike his previous pipe dreams that involved base and hookers, this pipe dream won't come true.

So thanks Bush, for killing the most successful programs in NASA's history - namely the "still safer than flying" Shuttle, Hubble (which we already paid $200m in unused upgrades), ISS and unmanned exploration.

He's going to give his ol' buddies in aerospace a field day, designing systems that will never be used for a program that will never go live, yet go overbudget the day its announced.

You see, the aerospace industry doesn't get rich building anything - they make all their money in development expenses, for all kinds of truly useless stuff. Like the Osprey - which had to go live because they simply spent too much on it.

TO any fighting men or women about to enter an Osprey - did you sign your organ donor card?

Value of life?

[Oakey]

So let me get this straight, they won't repair Hubble because they're worried about risk? They're worried they might lose lives? Um, okay, yet on the otherhand it's okay to send people to Iraq? All of a sudden risk isn't relevant? We've lost more people in Iraq then any Shuttle failure has brought us, but hey, all for a good cause right?

::sigh::

[Tukla]

So, when is the execution?