A Way to Save Hubble?

An anonymous reader writes "The maintenance flight to give the Hubble Space Telescope a few more years has been cancelled, even though everyone agrees that HST does good work. But this article offers a way to save the space telescope, and to give those who think the space program should be privatized a way to prove they can do it."

Comments

Typical and misguided

[JackBuckley]

So, as always in America, we turn to privatization as solution for the failure or unwillingness for the government provision of goods and services. "If science is so valuable," the argument runs, "private industry can and should provide it."

Rather than hope that some small or large corporation agrees that a profit can be made off of Hubble research, the government should take a stand and finance basic science for its own sake, instead of ruminating about a massive aerospace industry welfare program under the cover of an exciting bunch of missions to the Moon and Mars.

Of course, I'm not so naive as to think that the government actually would change their priorities on this. After all, with all the tax cuts to the rich and a couple of expensive wars to fight, hard choices have to be made, right?

And we still need our Federal mohair subsidy program, so it's time for Hubble to go!

(I'm not bitter or anything)

Re:Typical and misguided

[kinnell]

the government should take a stand and finance basic science for its own sake

You're forgetting that the US has a dwindling shuttle fleet. Apart from the cost and safety arguments, they're probably considering whether the scientific grounds outweigh the risks of losing manned access to space for strategic reasons.

Re:Typical and misguided

[Snerdley]

I realize that I'm going to be hammered as a right-wing nutjob for this one, but I really can't let this pass.

Professor Buckley, I have a big problem with a person such as yourself pontificating about how horrible privitization is, and how terribly the American government is treating scientists and researchers.

Don't get me wrong: I agree with your line about the mohair subsidies.. and I hope everone here votes out the pork-barrel weasels in their districts.

However, just once, I wish that a chronic academic such as yourself would realize that the government is not a source of money!

Before I wrote this, I took a look at your Vitae and confirmed what I suspected: You have always been payed by taxpayers! I found no private sector experience at all!

Thank you for your service in the Navy! And I don't doubt that your service to your country/state/school/students in your other positions has been admirable. However, from what I have seen on your vitae, you have never:

• Created Goods/Products
• Started a business
• Created a Job
• Laid off an employee
• Generated Revenue (other than for yourself)
• Had to Create/Follow a Budget

In fact, it seems your primary activity for the past few years has been to do research and write papers about other teachers! All of which has been paid for by either land-grant univerisities or our horribly stingy government.

The contention that saving the Hubble is "Basic Science" is ludicrous: it is an incredibly expensive project that is nearing the end of its expected duration anyway. I'm certain there is more we can learn from Hubble, but we are talking about billions of dollars to save it for a few years!

"Billion? With a B?"
"...Yes, with a B."

By the way, Professor, just why are you so bitter about this particular item? Have you ever actually used Hubble data during your search for better School Systems? Or are you just like the rest of us: mesmerized and inspired by the amazing and beautiful pictures.

Professor, the case for saving the Hubble may be strong. I'm not qualified to make that call. However, our elected officials have decided that the massive cost involved in saving it is not something that our tax dollars will be used for. A part of me is delighted! It's the first time in months I've seen them say no to anything! If you have evidence that they're wrong: let's see it.

Personally, I hope that the approach suggested in the article (you did read it, right?) is followed: let those who find this project crucial and needed say so with their pocketbooks. If they do, I (like most /.'ers) will delight in the images and wish them the best.

However, I hope that you remember that there are those of us in the audience (even here at /.) whose blood boils when they read a comment such as yours! We aren't protected in our ivory towers: our jobs will go overseas if we don't bust our asses. We aren't rich, but those tax cuts saved many of us our jobs! They let others save more and helped to put their kids through your classes.

So before you slam the government and therefore your fellow tax-payers, please remember that without them, your resume (oops, I mean Vitae would look pretty bare.

--Bill

M & M

[jefu]

This article is really just a piece of propaganda aimed at supporting the Moon/Mars (M&M) drive put forward by the current administration. It dismisses the notion of supporting the Hubble because of the risk involved and only really suggests a private foundation as a straw man.

I think the important part of the thing is in the next to last paragraph where he says "a permanent presence on the moon will provide a far better platform for a space telescope, and it is likely a telescope will be put there." And he implies it is only ten years off - though putting a permanent presence on the moon is probably 10 years off at best and expanding that to a good astronomical telescope would probably stretch another 10 or 20 years. If it even goes through and is not abandoned after the election. (Any bets on Republican support for such an endeavor if a Democratic president is supporting it?)

Oddly enough, I can't recall having seen anything in the M&M proposals saying anything about putting a telescope on the moon (though it is an option that I've heard astronomers favor).

There are alternatives

[Pi_0's don't shower]

We'd all like the government to provide for science. As an astrophysics student at a government-funded university, I certainly think it should be the government's job.

But our society doesn't always do that. Back in the 1960's, it wasn't the government that ran the show for science, though. Who discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background? Penzias and Wilson, two Bell-Labs scientists.

My point is that, if some time ago private industry felt an obligation to science to "give back" to the scientific world that they got rich off of, maybe they ought to be encouraged to do it again...

on the moon? think again --

[sdedeo]

The first warning sign was that we were being told to listen to someone who uses the word "technopolitical" in his job description. The second was that he was writing for the National Review Online, a magazine that has decided to throw it's lot in with "lie through the teeth" conservatism.

In the article, the author writes, with all the assurance that this is not just his belief, but rather a fact to be "remembered":

But it is worth remembering that a permanent presence on the moon will provide a far better platform for a space telescope, and it is likely a telescope will be put there.

As the slashdot saying goes, "BZZZZZT!" In fact, astronomers and instrumentation people have considered "moon bases," and concluded that there is absolutely no good reason to go all the way up to the moon (a very expensive trip between gravity wells) instead of putting your telescopes in low Earth orbit. The most enthusiastic moon astronomers want to do radio stuff -- not replicate Hubble's optical work.

Does the Lunar Surface Still Offer Value As a Site for Astronomical Observatories?, by three members of JPL, Goddard and UT, and published in Space Policy (I guess NRO wasn't taking articles then) provides the full story.

Re:on the moon? think again --

[sdedeo]

However, oddly enough, the moon - being basically made out of the same stuff Earth is - has all the raw materials to make mirrors. So the idea isn't to send a telescope from the Earth to the Moon. The idea is to build it on the Moon in the first place.

The idea of using in situ resources is great. But I wonder if it will really be a short term or medium term solution (on the scale of twenty years, say.) We have certainly been talking about asteroid mining &c, but I wonder if the costs for sending up infrastructure are feasable?

Think about it this way: the mass of the systems used to construct, test and characterise the PSF of a mirror are huge compared to the mass of the mirror itself. You would need (I think) technology on a near magical scale to get that down.

The authors also then go to say "why would we want to keep a state of the art instrument around for a long time?" implying, of course, that state of the art changes so rapidly that keeping something around for a long time is meaningless. They somewhat fail to see one thing: a gigantic mirror will always be state of the art.

Yes, and no. A gigantic mirror with a particular radius, smoothness and PSF will go out of date. The technology you have will improve continuously so that the best giant mirror you can make now will suck compared to the one you can make later. That will hold down to the level of smoothness given by the wavelength in question (I worked at Arecebo for a bit, and I believe for the radio wavelengths they were using, their mirror was pretty much "as good as it gets." I don't believe we're anywhere even close for optical telescopes.)

I am a fan of all the cool science you are assuming. But let's see NASA get together a working probe that can build a stop sign out of in situ materials so that we can characterize exactly how cost effective your suggestion is. My intuition is: not very, at least in the next fifty years.

just one small point

[kippy]

Rather than hope that some small or large corporation agrees that a profit can be made off of Hubble research, the government should take a stand and finance basic science for its own sake, instead of ruminating about a massive aerospace industry welfare program under the cover of an exciting bunch of missions to the Moon and Mars.

Aerospace welfare is keeping the shuttle and space station fantasy of space exploration alive. NASA employed a small army just to keep the shuttles in working order and ISS is just too pathetic to contemplate. Manned missions to planetary bodies is the correct direction for space exploration. That's where the science can be done. All the astronomy that Hubble did could be dwarfed by a lunar telescope array.

NASA is finaly breaking out of 30 years of aerospace welfare. The new space push is finaly something done right. Let's just hope they stick to it and do it correctly.

It's not about money...

[beeplet]

I doubt that raising money for Nasa will be enough to change their minds on the Hubble issue. (Though if I thought it could, I'd be the first to donate!)

Nasa is basing its refusal of the Hubble mission on safety issues. And since it has already made this clear, it would be a huge PR error to change their minds now... I think cancelling the Hubble mission is Nasa's way of telling the public "yes, we care about safety". Whether or not the Hubble mission is significantly more dangerous than the ISS missions is debatable in my view, but to Nasa it's a moot point anyway. As long as they are seen to be doing something to improve safety, then they can get on with the rest of their agenda...

Comander Data doesn't exist yet

[kippy]

I disagree. Sure it costs more to send a human cause of all the food and air and all that but robots are left in the dust when it comes to doing the science. Take the Mars probes. They're great and all and their teams should be commended but a human could have done in 10 minutes what they've done in the past month or so. And it's not like there's a shortage of work to be done up there too. Dollar for dollar, pound for pound and minute for minute, humans are better able to do science in volume, speed and creativity than robots. If it costs 100 times the amount to send a human than a robot, I put to you that the science return will be 1,000 times that of a robot.

This may change in the future but we're not exactly able to send C3P0 out there just yet.

You're less likely to see this these days

[rk]

because of the principle of unintended consequences. Now, there are laws that state that a publicly-traded company's board and executives must to their best to maximize shareholder revenue, which on the surface sounds like a nice anti-fraud idea.

The practice of it is corporations do relatively little basic scientific R&D anymore, and lay off masses of people at the first sign of financial difficulty.

I even remember the TV ads Bell Labs ran when that discovery was made (I'm telling my age a bit, I'm sure). Nowadays, if they crowed about it, the board would probably be up on charges of securities fraud because they were working on "pie-in-the-sky" abstractions and not figuring out how to integrate yet another toy function into a cell phone.