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

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?

[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.

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 :)

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?

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

[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

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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: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.