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Astronauts, Robots to Save Hubble
BungoMan85 writes "Astronauts who serviced the Hubble Space Telescope, among others, feel that NASA's administrator Sean O'Keefe shouldn't be too quick to abandon the now 14 year old space telescope because of safety concerns arising from the Columbia disaster." And an anonymous reader writes "At the insistance of congress, NASA is looking for a way to save the Hubble. "It's the most unpopular decision I could have made," Sean O'Keefe said of his decision to cancel the shuttle mission planned to fix Hubble. He has authorized his engineers to pursue the possiblity of a robotic rescue mission. This could be a great opportunity for private industry contractors."
I know the Hubble telescope has done some great science, but shouldn't we just let it go so we have more money to put up the next generation telescope?
Or is this really about hating Bush's attempt to bring a man to Mars, and undermining it anyway possible just because he's Bush? I can't see why people are suddenly spendthrift when a Republican president wants to do something, but we can spend billions on welfare and hike taxes up to strangulating levels without anyone complaining under a Democrat.
with the above post. 14 years is an eternity in the world of technology. For (probably) 3 times the cost of the repair mission, a telescope of (probably) 100 times the quality of hubble could be deployed. I can see why hubble has sentimental value, but really, it's time to move on.
bash: rtfm: command not found
i for one, think that nasa is scared more than anything. I mean, the space shuttle blew up this past year, and it would be bad PR if another one did as well...
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people have been saying that tehse shuttles are unsafe for years http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystor
How about we hire the Russians either to do the work themselves or to transport our guys up to do it?
They seem to have manned launch technology available with a decent reliability and safety record.
It may well be cheaper that it would cost to do it ourselves, as well. Outsourcing, right?
Hrm, if I was cynical I would say that this was the plan all along.
1) Scrap really popular program.
2) Get everyone yelling to bring it back
3) Say you can't unless because you lack the budget
4) Profit!!
According to current plans, there will be several years between the Hubble being decommissioned and a new space telescope taking its place, and that's assuming everything goes according to Bush's plan. There's no alternate instrument that can do what the Hubble does during that time, so a large subsection of astronomy as a whole would be crippled.
I find this comment in the article interesting..
.. deeming it too risky to astronauts in the wake of Columbia...
The risk factors haven't changed, those running the space program have always known the risks. It's not like Columbia's terrible accident made those in charge suddenly go "oh, maybe this space stuff is dangerous after all..."
It's not the risk factors that have changed, it's the public's view of the risks that have changed.
Live in your skin. Keep changing the scenery.
And then there's the fact that it's just insane to throw away something that is doing a fantastic job and can continue to do so if a small investment is made to keep it running. It's like throwing away an old Civic just because you might buy a BMW -- no reason you can't keep both cars in your garage, and there are just some things that a Civic makes sense for. Plus, with two cars you have more resources available.
And, the additional Hubble instruments have already been built and are just waiting to be launched!
i am a soviet space shuttle
I don't want to sound rude, but why must we take this to politics... this is a civilian space agency, and we should treat it as such (and not some government pet project as most administrations have used it: Kennedy for the space race, Bush for gaining a stab of popularity and spicing up discussions everywhere).
Politics aside, we've made an investment. 15 years of a working Hubble telescope. That time runs out next year and we're still a solid 6 years behind on a solid replacement (which, is still questionable, since everything I read tells me it is planned to be like the Spitzer telescope and take pictures in Infrared). We also made the investment on 200 Million USD on upgrades to Hubble. 200 Million dollars is a lot of money to put towards something that can probably never be used with any other piece of equipment except Hubble, and not put it to use.
And I don't buy this Bullshit O'Queef is selling us about the worries of the shuttles. They're operable as is already, and what happened on Columbia was a freak accident that nobody thought to try to explain until it was too late. Maybe the money that could be going to building these "robots" could instead be used to build a wing crawler, to crawl out and service the underbelly of the Shuttle in case of such a disaster.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Impressive rant! Simple and to the point. Being in the community and being a bit more circumspect, I would say that O'Keefe has not shown any of the vision that marked Goldin. I wasn't always happy with Goldin, but the man was visionary in the best sense of the word.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
The Hubble telescope continues to make headlines after more than a dozen years. Only last week on the news I saw photos of the deepest (and consequently earliest) space pictures ever taken, and they came from Hubble. Dropping this incredible resource into the ocean because of a relatively small budgetary shortfall is a horrendous waste of taxpayer money.
Chances are, if we crash it, we'll never get another. I'm getting old, I want to see some of those ancient mysteries of space solved in my lifetime.
As time passes, especially after a SNAFU or a poorly executed Let's Go To Mars! speech, the public's perceived value of NASA falls. Everyone's talkin' trash, saying "Why do we need to spend billions to develop a pen that can write upside down when people are starving?" and the like.
However, if the government, unprovoked, says "Hey everybody, we're going to disintigrate the Hubble and how do you like that" then the people apparently have the opposite reaction. Most people do not know anything about the Hubble other than it's a Good Thing. What a shame it would be to destroy it! So, by announcing plans to toss the Hubble in the garbage, NASA effectively primed the public to be willing to spend more dollars on space-related stuff.
I honestly don't understand this American concern for human life in such insular situations. Instead of asking for volunteers to rescue the Hubble, NASA has to spend some inordinate amount of money to reduce the risk factor by an impressive tally of 0.01%. There is no shortage of people who would be willing to risk their lives for the advancement of scientific discovery and human knowledge as a whole, yet apparently their passion to actually do something is nothing but vestigial barbaric brovado. Deaths that transpire under mundane circumstances (car accidents, drug-addiction deaths, gang shootings) are shrugged off as just a "fact of life," whereas sacrifices made for the selfless pursuit of nobility are deemed unnecessary and wasteful. Its absurd. There are people in the world who would end their lives forty years before their time in return for the chance to look out into the inky void and see a lone blue-green planet from a vantage point that few others have even dreamed of scaling, yet they are held back because of the terrible national tragedy that might occur if a nameless, faceless human were to die contently in one location rather than despairingly in another.
I dunno. I suppose I'm still bitter about the whole Columbia thing. Millions of people who a week ago didn't know of either the mission or the astronouts on the flight suddenly took it upon themselves to be morally outraged. The astronouts became greater heroes in death rather than life, and even then only to the masses who two months down the line wouldn't be able to remember a single, solitary name.
~Tirinal
The fact that you connect these two unrelated issues together shows your bias. How could the desire to keep a source of unprecidented scientific discovery operational be related to an opinion of a politician?
Even knowing the risks, I'd gladly go myself on a mission to service Hubble. And even if I were told up front that it was a one-way mission, I'd still go. I can think of many worse ways to give up one's life.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
The "Bush Plan" is yet another purely political move, from an administration that insults the intelligence of its citizens.
They allocated only a small token amount, enough to get the press for supporting this "bold initiative", but nowhere near enough to really accomplish such a mission (or enough to materially effect the budget).
This was the same thing as the Anti-Gay Marriage Constitutional amendment.. They know it has no chance of actually getting passed, but they throw it around to gain support from the fuckwits on election day.
Sort of like the crusade against steroids kicked off in the state of the union address. Yeah, we're in an unpopular war with more soldiers being killed, and we have the threat of terrorism... but what we really need is the fucking president to take a stand against steroids! Bringing down a wealthy black man like Barry Bonds should really secure Bush's power base.
"Mission Accomplished"?
"Bring 'em On"?
STFU!
Sure there are astronauts that would do this, and test pilots and jet jocks galore. Fortunately it's not their decision to make. An older and wiser head has looked at the risk (much larger then previously thought) consider the consequences if it went to hell (loss of yet another shuttle, loss of five to seven MORE astronauts, NASA being gutted after Congress and the public scream in outrage about "Why did you ever do such a thing after the Columbia boards recommendations???") and all the various other fall out, and decided the game ain't worth the candle. Look nobody wants to see Hubble fail, and NASA isn't talking about splashing it down tomorrow. It's got a few good years left. The problem is that the upgrades would only keep it going for five to seven years longer then otherwise and it simply isn't worth risking the human lives and cost to the program. The stars and galaxies and all will be there in a dozen years, why not use this sudden outpouring of concern for this myopic bird, to build a better scope and launch it? Why so much sudden attachment to a scope that everybody and I mean EVERYBODY jumped all over as a bat-blind hair-brained piece of junk when it was launched? I mean it's nice to be loved and all, but let's get some perspective. The truth is that it would be much more fun to design and build a better scope and do even better research. I'm not talking James T. Webb here, I mean a new visible light to UV scope, with better resolution and more thought into the science we would like to do, now that we know what kind of science we can do. And build one that doesn't require the Shuttle, because Shuttle is gone once ISS is finished.
We have three shuttles left out of five (which means that we can only do 3/5 of the mission flights we had planned to do every year), we have much more hardware for ISS, which is even more expensive then the repair and replacement parts for Hubble, sitting around in Florida. We have numerous international treaty commitments to our partners, many of whom are supposed to be paid with flight time on ISS for their contributions, which have to be honored. And after the Columbia boards recommendations any NASA administrator that decided to still go ahead with shuttle mission, at those orbital parameters, would be putting himself out on a very long limb, far, far above the ground, and inviting old man Murphy to come along with a saw. Commonsense says "Sorry, but this is a bridge to far." Understand that the game is changed. We got burned once, thought we had learned our mistakes, fixed the obvious problems we saw and went back to flying it. Now we've been burned again, and a LOT of the reasons sound hauntingly familiar. Well fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. NASA manned flight has suddenly gotten VERY, VERY RISK ADVERSE. The idea that "Oh well we fixed these problems, now it's all better" suddenly sounds like a lot of Pollyannaish nonsense. NASA will do what it must with the shuttles, but it will hold its collective breath every time it launches one from now on. Safety is no longer our watchword; it's the ONLY damn thing I hear about nowadays. Congress might vote to override O'Keefe, if they do then on their heads be it. If they do then they better get ready to collectively resign if anything goes wrong, and they better have the letters to the families written in advance, just in case, cause that's what Shawn O'Keefe would have to do if he had made the decision and it went pants, as the Brits say. Those who are so quick to judge aren't the people that will have to explain it to the president, congress, the families, and the general public, until they are, they can darn well be a lot less dogmatic about this. And that's my view for whatever it's worth.
but shouldn't we just let it go ?
If you are asking that question honestly, then its obvious to the scientists among us that you have little or no appreciation for the information that this great instrument has brought us, and will continue to bring us for quite some time if its maintained. That instrument has single-handedly multiplied our knowledge of the universe we live in by a factor of at least 100, and refined some of our +- 50% guesses down to +- 5%, simply by being beyond the reach of the limitations in optical bandwidth that our planets atmosphere places on all the ground based scopes. Its done things that all the active optical stuff we've put on mountains so high that they are run by remote control still couldn't do.
The "next generation" telescope everyone is drooling over is designed to do an entirely different job, and is in no way capable of overlapping what the Hubble can do in the visible and near infrared spectrum. And it will be like the Hubble in terms of delays, so I don't see it going up in my remaining lifetime since I'm 69 now. Yes, it will also do good science when it goes up, but it cannot do what the Hubble is doing in the wavelength range between visible light and near infrared, say an octave either way from yellow/green as our eyes see color. IIRC its designed to work in the far infrared and into the microwave, where its resolution at best will be 1/10th that of the Hubble. But it will see thru dust clouds the Hubble can't too. We won't know what the region around Sag A really looks like until it does go up, Sag A IIRC, is supposedly very near if not the black hole this galaxy spins around.
As far as a manned mission to mars is concerned, thats where I feel that the remoteness and generally inhospitable conditions which combine to make it a one way trip preclude using anything but prisoners already sentenced to death for such a mission.
Considering the intelligence level of someone dumb enough to have gotten themselves in such a predicament in the first place, I'm not too sure that we would gain much in the way of scientific knowledge by following that distastefull to many path.
I look at it as political posturing, an attempt at giving NASA a "reason de terre", as opposed to fireing that whole bunch and starting all over again. Thats something we should have done when the first one blew up. This new shuttle loss just confirms that the old boy network that covers their ass MOST of the time by sheer luck alone, is still in place.
Human nature being what it is, I'm not even 75% sure that a total housecleaning would even fix it now. But I think a wholesale fireing, and maybe even a highly public manslaughter prosecution of the decision maker who passed on the loose foam problem might have a sobering effect on all the pie in the sky folks NASA seems to have collected down thru the decades. Nobody learned anything about common sense safety after the fire in Houston (and the test admin who ordered that test should have been prosecuted for murder) nor from Apollo 13 when there was a clear indication of a problem with the tank heaters thermostat before they launched, the only thing actually fixed was the booster seals after the late 80's blowup, and this time the loose foam was known, and had been known for at least the last 20 launches, possibly for much more time than that. But nobody has stepped forward to actually admit that doing the launch was a bad idea, "after all, it hasn't been a problem before now, why should this time be any different?"
IMO that attitude will not change until someone actually does some hard time. The agency needs the same accountability as you and I would get in a prosecution for no less than manslaughter in 3 of these 4 "accidents".
Cheers, Gene
the excuse is that if the shuttle is damaged, it wouldnt
be able to get to the ISS which is in an entirely different orbit?
presumably a fuel issue?
so they want to waste money researching and perhaps building
an untested robotic system, and then *launch that*.
couldn't they devise a method for using a soyuz to propel
a shuttle to the ISS. then launch at same time (or have ready
to launch) a soyuz? (or if the soyuz has the room, simply
take the shuttle astronuats home directly.)
surely paying the russians for a soyuz launch is cheaper
than a robotic development program that probably wont
do as well as human repairmen? and infusing money into
the russian space program may not be such a bad idea anyway.
oh wait, cant have other countries helping, that would be
just plain un-american. much less embarassing to abandon
useful technology.
oh well.
How long did we wait after Skylab for the ISS?
How many times was it delayed and scaled back?
Do you honestly think that this new telescope will actually launch in 2012? It won't even be fully designed by then. The Hubble is not some old, obsolete piece of equipment. It's the best we've ever had, and will still be the best at what it does, even if the Webb telescope goes as planned.
The Webb telescope only sees infrared. It can't see what the Hubble can and never will. There will be no pictures from the Webb that can show what the human eye can see. The Webb telescope is intended to augment Hubble, not replace it.
Maybe the EU could chip in the money and resources instead of launching a redundant GPS system of satellites?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
This is why your analogy is bad. The point is that it is not a small investment. NASA would have to violate the recommendations of the CAIB report for safety, actually create known unsafe conditions, and risk the entire shuttle (and ISS) program just to keep the Hubble alive. This is most definitely not a small investment.
But is it worth the substantial risk? I'm not sure. I'd need to know more about what progress can be achieved in the few years between Hubble's planned shutdown and James Webb coming online. Would this loss put science decades behind in progress, or just a few years? It's something the whole community (NASA, astronomers, Congress, public) would have to decide, with promises not to shut down NASA programs if things go awry.
Actually, while you're logic's correct, it's not quite the same situation.
It's more like you have that $4000 bill to fix the truck, and while you can buy a new truck for $4000, you can't take delivery for a few years.
So, either you're without a truck, or you suck it up and spend the money to fix it in the mean time, while ordering that other truck.
I think your analogy is bad. It's as if you had already purchased some new part for your old truck for $4000, and had hired someone to install it. You are already planning to buy the new truck in 4 years. So, you can either pay the guy $50 to install the part and drive your awesome tricked-out truck for 4 years, or you can refuse, and walk for 4 years. Oh, and you'll have that fancy $4000 part lying around your living room, doing squat. Maybe you can make it into some kind of ashtray!
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.