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
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Just a thought, kill two birds w/ one stone.
Why not give it to DoD?
by
Pakaran2
·
· 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.
They should be able to keep Hubble going...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Now that they have found a good way to reduce costs..
http://www.post-gazette.com/images2/RR012704.gif
Disposable Satellites
by
Zilfondel2
·
· 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.
Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?
by
aitala
·
· 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
A low for a NASA manager?
by
Stugots
·
· 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.
Lagrange points
by
reverendG
·
· 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.
Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?
by
GoofyBoy
·
· 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.
Why not REALLY sell it as surplus?
by
spidergoat2
·
· 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
·
· 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
·
· 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?"
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:You're missing the point
by
Dashing+Leech
·
· 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.
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
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
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?"
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
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.
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