Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the no-shocker-here dept.
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 hasbeen discussedonSlashdotbefore."
Time it to go down in the middle of Utah......
by
ckathens
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· Score: 5, Funny
Just a thought, kill two birds w/ one stone.
Why not give it to DoD?
by
Pakaran2
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· Score: 5, Funny
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?
by
downix
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· Score: 4, Funny
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.
-- Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Re:Why not give it to DoD?
by
JungleBoy
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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.
-- "You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
They should be able to keep Hubble going...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Funny
Now that they have found a good way to reduce costs..
http://www.post-gazette.com/images2/RR012704.gif
Makes no sense
by
Wister285
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· Score: 4, Insightful
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!
New Telescope in ISS orbit?
by
Mattb90
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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?
by
aitala
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· Score: 5, Informative
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.
--
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?
by
GoofyBoy
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· Score: 5, Informative
the decision to situate the JWST at L2 was made primarily on economic grounds
-- The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Disposable Satellites
by
Zilfondel2
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· Score: 5, Informative
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.
Foreign nation
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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?
by
Glock27
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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?
-- Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
You're missing the point
by
Aardpig
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· Score: 4, Informative
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.
-- Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Re:You're missing the point
by
Dashing+Leech
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· Score: 5, Informative
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.
A low for a NASA manager?
by
Stugots
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· Score: 5, Interesting
"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
by
rknop
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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
by
GoofyBoy
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· Score: 4, Insightful
>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.
-- The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Re:NASA is full of... well, you know
by
rknop
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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?
by
laetus
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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?
--
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Re:It's N.A.S.A., dammit.
by
th77
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· Score: 4, Informative
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...
-- Your favorite sig sucks
It's obvious
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
Loss if credibility
by
kippy
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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?
Lagrange points
by
reverendG
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· Score: 5, Informative
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).
--
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
Why not REALLY sell it as surplus?
by
spidergoat2
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· Score: 5, Interesting
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.
Earth to NASA
by
Loki_1929
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· Score: 5, Insightful
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?
-- --
"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
New Reality TV Show
by
stuffduff
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· Score: 5, Funny
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!
-- "Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
NASA = safety or bust
by
Dethboy
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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
what if columbus said no?
by
oogoody
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· Score: 4, Funny
Sorry man, those ships are dangerous. And we might drop off the edge of the earth. Way staying home.
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:When did the US turn into such pussies?
by
Zak3056
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· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
-- What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Petition to save the Hubble
by
fireacc
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· Score: 4, Informative
Now-Afraid-of-Space-Agency
by
peter303
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· Score: 4, Funny
What does that acronym spell? NASA!
...due to safety concerns?
by
WheelDweller
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· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
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
Slashdot Mirror
Just a thought, kill two birds w/ one stone.
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.
Now that they have found a good way to reduce costs..
f
http://www.post-gazette.com/images2/RR012704.gi
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!
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?
Mattb90
Editor, allaboutgames.co.uk
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.
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 :)
Thoughts?
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
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.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
"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.
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
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?
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
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...
Your favorite sig sucks
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.
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?
Blaze a trail to the New World
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).
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
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.
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?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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!
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
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
Sorry man, those ships are dangerous.
And we might drop off the edge of the earth.
Way staying home.
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."
.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?
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
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.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
If anyone is particularly passionate about saving the Hubble, there is an online petition here:
http://www.savethehubble.org/petition.jsp
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What does that acronym spell? NASA!
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."
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
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