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NASA Urged to Reconsider Shuttle Mission to HST
LMCBoy writes "Space.com reports today that the National Academies of Science has released its recommendation to NASA on the future of the Hubble Space Telescope. They conclude that 'NASA should take no actions that would preclude a space shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.' They also say that none of the safety requirements of the CAIB report preclude a manned servicing mission to HST." Read on for more.
"The NAS recommendation would reverse NASA's previous position that a shuttle repair mission is ruled out for safety reasons. In the wake of strong criticisms of this decision, NASA has also been considering a robotic repair mission. The robotic mission would not risk human lives, but it relies on a number of bleeding-edge technologies that would have to be deployed on a very short timescale. HST's remaining gyroscopes are not expected to last beyond 2007."
What a shame it would be to spend all that money putting Hubble up there and then not servicing it because of budget cuts. That would be like spending $20,000 on a new car and then deciding a few years later that you can't afford to take it in for an oil change. It's already up there, they might as well service it.
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Would be a shame to lose Hubble. Hasn't it discovered hundreds of new plants? That's too invaluable to just let die out in space. I'm all for a robotic mission :)
Safety concerns was the offical reason why they didn't want to service the Hubble, but this report most clearly is saying that's bunk.
But what about the finacial concerns? I don't think NASA has the funding to allocate to a Hubble Repair mission... could the safety claims just have been a smokescreen to cover when the real reason was because they can't get the funding to do this?
I think the problem is that they threw all their budget away on that damnable ISS (which if it were unmanned, would cost waaaay less), leaving no funding for real projects.
I mean, what's the point of throwing people up in space station compared to what you can get with an orbital telescope? The price of reparing this has got to be a tiny slice of what the ISS gets every year.
And now what- we don't have the guts to fix Hubble? I think what this is really about is that we don't want to spend the money, that the head of NASA (O'Keefe is not even a scientist) is willing to bank on ground based telescopes under construction being able to fill in for what Hubble currently does (such as the almost burned observatory in Arizona). That is a dangerous, if not stupid, bet to be undertaking. Instead, we are going to throw our dollars at an improperly positioned space station that is doing trivial, not very important science and the search for life elsewhere in the solar system at a time when we are not technologically well equipped for such missions. We need to focus on near-Earth applications, going no further than the moon until we can bring down the costs and time needed to explore planets like Mars, Jupiter and Saturn for signs of life. I would rather obtain good astrophysics data than bad, inconclusive data about whether water existed in a crater on Mars many unspecified millions of years ago.
I could see them objecting to maintaining Hubble in favor of a better space telescope, or even "we haven't got enough money", but because there's a risk?
Is the idea at NASA that we should just not try something because there's a risk? I mean, is this the same agency that put men on the moon eleven years after being formed? Should I just not go to work tomorrow because I could get run down crossing the street?
What the hell happened to this country's can-do spirit?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Looks like the robots are replacing humans more and more.
More people will loose thair job, if this development continues on earth.
Whatever you say. Gimp RulZ anyway
If its on, give it the time and funding it deserves. If its off, don't waste resources on it. This to and fro nonsense just wastes money that could be used elsewhere and increases the risks if a mission does eventually go ahead.
No one's willing to take risks or make a decision anymore. All we need is another damn shuttle disaster to slow everything down and have people screaming "its too dangerous to explore space - spend all your money down here".
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
What the hell happened to this country's can-do spirit?
Can-do is great. Disregarding safety because a job seems like it's important is not.
"The pick should never have been made. But peer pressure was used and I succumbed. That skid was heavy right off the truck with that 35 ton crane and I still had to boom down with it. Well, I got that skid about 3' away from where it had to go and stopped. My rear pads were about a foot off the ground and I had had enough. My foreman is screaming at me to boom down. I'm waving him off and starting to boom up and lower the load. He went ballistic. I stopped bringing the load to me when my pads were back on the ground. I should have put the skid back on the low boy but didn't. The foreman told me to wait one minute and pretty soon I saw an excavator and a D6 come rumbling up the haul road only to take position behind me and pin each outrigger beam down with the blade on oneside and the bucket on the other. Now it was showtime. The skid was placed where it had to go, the machine remained intact, and no one got hurt. People were clapping me on the back and telling me how "American" I was. Other people were shaking their heads. I could've puked."
from craneaccidents.com
I do not think that this would be a good idea. While it would be impressive if they could pull it off, the risk of failure outweighs the benefits even more greatly than that of a manned mission. Attempting to deploy "several bleeding edge technologies" on a "very short time scale" for a project like repairing the hubble space telescope is simply not a good idea. In all likelihood the technology used will not be adequately developed and it will be a unnecessary failure.
With the recent success of the Mars missions, NASA is starting to get its good name back, they need to see this continue and properly manage their risk, not spend money on projects they know will in all likelihood fail.
Aaron Bryden
abrydenREMOVETHIS@gmail.com
The problem with NASA is that it wants to be sexy rather than actually try and discover stuff. Looking for life on Mars is sexy. Looking into some obscure spectrum of something or other with a huge array of sensors located in Antarctica is not.
Despite the fact that every time we try and use a new way to look at stuff (some obscure spectrum of something or other, for example) we find a lot out there, NASA stopped building an array of sensors in Antarctica (which son of George H Bush that put the pressure on them to do this is left as an exercise to the reader). The reason is that the populace seems to like sending stuff somewhere. Seeing more just isn't cool anymore. The Hubble telescope will fall into disrepair because people don't like looking at stuff. They insist on touching it. Even if that means the stuff is more than a few orders of magnitude closer.
I guess I'll sum it up.
Going to Mars with a robat that touches stuff and messes around: SEXY
Looking at shit with a few big mirrors: NOT sexy
Help I'm a rock.
And Hubble's second servicing mission cost $347 million plus another $448 million for the Shuttle flight - I believe that is in 1996 dollars.
So as a taxpayer, for all that dough, how 'bout some new satellite pictures of my house! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
How long was Hubble supposted to be up and running in the first place and don't we now have ground-based telescopes that can perform as well if not better than Hubble? Ditch the nostalgia and let Hubble go. We'll get along fine without it.
Hubble is a great telescope, no doubt about it. Unfortunately, ground based telescopes now are able to get around the distortion of the atmosphere to obtain even better images of the stars than Hubble ever could. I'd hate to see Hubble go, but as long as NASA keeps supporting doomed projects such as the ISS, I think we are going to be saying goodbye soon.
n/t
Hubble space craft is needed... Why? It is a known fact among the star gazer's that there are hundreds of blackholes just in our galazy. It could provide us with ample warning if one of them comes to close to us. The distruction would be on a scale humans have yet to see.
NASA did nearly the same thing towards the end of the Apollo program...They scrapped the last two lunar landings, even though ALL of the hardware was already built and ready to go, because they didn't want to staff the control room and fuel the rockets. It has been said that this was equivalent to crushing a brand new Rolls Royce which has never been driven simply because one does not want to pay for a tank of gas.
The astronauts have already said that they are willing to accept the very reasonable level of risk to fly the mission and repair the Hubble. It is terribly ironic that one of the few worthwhile shuttle missions of the last decade is scrapped because something MIGHT go wrong. They seemed perfectly willing to risk human lives to fly loads of fairly useless experiments just a couple of years ago. Nobody would argue that the shuttle has lived up to the lofty promises that NASA administrators made to Congress in order to get the funding for all of this in the first place. The shuttle, despite that fact the shuttle itself is reusable, has cost billions more dollars than equivalent rocket missions would have. In fact, one of the main selling points of the shuttle, that it could carry 20 tons into low earth orbit, is moot because the shuttle almost never flies with the maximum payload for safety reasons. The decision not to save one of the best scientific investments ever made is a slap in the face after all of the money which NASA has sunk into the shuttle program. The Hubble Space telescope has added tremendously to our knowledge of the universe and inspired a generation of young scientists and engineers. If any further proof was needed of the impotence and wrong headed thinking at NASA then this is surely among the most damning pieces of evidence. Let us hope that they make the right decision before it is too late.
Hubble is a great telescope, no doubt about it. Unfortunately, ground based telescopes now are able to get around the distortion of the atmosphere to obtain even better images of the stars than Hubble ever could. I'd hate to see Hubble go, but as long as NASA keeps supporting doomed projects such as the ISS, I think we are going to be saying goodbye soon.
Within five minutes after I posted that, it was given a -1, despite the fact there was a spam two posts below it that was completely off-topic. Isn't the mod system great?
Hubble is really super, and don't go spouting off on how it sucks, or is impaired, or how it should be replaced...It is the best thing going for now, and the last 14 years, and it won't be replaced for several more years. I've still got a few Hubble projects I still want to do, and preamture failure might mean I won't get to do them, and I *can't* do them from the ground. It was never clear that a Hubble servicing mission was all that dangerous in the first place, probably not as dangerous as two ISS missions, for instance. I hate to see a new administrator come in and make the sort of unilateral decison(at least he didn't solicit astronomers!) especially someone who isn't a real scientist.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Space is an unknown, it is one of the harshest environments to be explored by humans. You'd think we could do a little better... Nock Nock... Better, Faster, Cheaper doesn't work. We make stupid mistakes which cost a lot of money. As far as I am concerned, everything that NASA does is new, it has never been tested before, so what should NASA do? Test it! Improve it! Sending a probe to mars without sufficient memory is entirely avoidable, as are mistakes in conversion, metric systems, and a myriad of problems with hubble, from Nicos (100m down the drain because some ice expanded) to the Gyroscopes, to the Mirror has been a failure. NASA has had many successes but its last two directors have had their flaws (including our current directors blinding obsession with finding life on mars). Bottom line... NASA needs new management and a new Mission Statement.
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
During the proceedings (thanks C-SPAN!), it was quite evident that NASA was not giving a coherent reason for abandoning Hubble. NASA claimed that a mission to Hubble was unacceptably risky, while missions to ISS were not. The board pressed them on just how and why, and the increased risk seemed negligible for such a servicing mission.
However NASA was excited about sending an unmanned robotic mission to service Hubble, and they claimed that there were companies working on proposals to provide that robot.
My take was that this is the result of putting a non-scientist bean-counter (O'Keefe) in charge of NASA, coupled with an administration keen on cutting social funding while simultaneously funding private contractors as though there was no tomorrow.
The HST's data archive is currently about 12TB. That data lone is going to provide grounds for scientific papers well into the future. This data archive grows by about 2TB every year. That is a lot of data out of one instrument. There's a lot of good science left in that data. Letting that tremendous data source fall prematurly into the ocean because the HST was abandoned would be monumentally stupid.
There's also quite a bit of money and resources already devoted to the HST. Instruments and components have been built and paid for and the work is already done. Letting it sit on a shelf indefinitely would be a magnificent waste. Besides the money already spent a mission will have to be sent up, automated or not, to de-orbit the HST.
NASA ought to bite the bullet and push the envelope a little bit. It doesn't matter that they would be using untested technologies. Fixing the HST would be the test. I have little doubt that it would be feasible to robotically service the HST. A small cadre of tool laden AIBOs with rocket packs should be able to do the trick. If NASA is too scared to send people into space they could at least send a few cute robot dogs.
The technology and techniques learned with the HST could be applied later with the ISS' construction or even an in-orbit repair of a Shuttle or other craft. Maybe we could even start designing satellites that are meant to be services by robots to extend their useful lifetimes. Companies would be much more likely to invest in satellites if its potential operational life of 20+ years instead of 12 if everything goes alright.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I made the mistake of opening up one of Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels as a soaking-in-tub read the other week, and I've gotten re-hooked on the series. While the books don't play this up (excepting a few of the later ones), the fact is that these books actually, to me at least, provide a surprising amount of insight into why NASA is falling apart and no longer inspiring like it once did.
The books are about a lost Terran colony (that's us) that has been out of touch with the rest of the universe by accident (a series of natural disasters shortly after the colony was formed destroyed much of the colony infrastructure) and design (frustration with wars, politics, etc. elsewhere meant the colonists were isolationists in search of a simpler life).
In the Pern series, all of the colonists were volunteers. So too are all astronauts (and, presumably, all cosmonauts and taikonauts; so far, the sole civilian astronaut was also a volunteer). They know the risks they take, and it's within their rights, I think, to want to take them. Right now we have the bureaucrats running scared, and they're losing sight of that fact. Too bad, too, because Senator Jake Garn flew on the shuttle once and knows the risks involved. (Is he still a senator?)
So that's strike one against NASA -- they've gotten scared.
What's important to think about here is this: anyone who's read the series knows that there's absolutely no sign of any Terran involvement anywhere. Why might that be?
While the initial planetary exploration efforts were government-funded (see Dragonsdawn for more about the intial survey, and some of the associated short stories like Rescue Run), the actual settling of the planet was carried out by private interests. And that's because the government doesn't really have an interest in supporting long, involved work like that (because of the costs, relatively low return, and so on) beyond adding to its territory ("we have a colony there; we'll defend it; we can say we have a bigger empire now, and the people can pay taxes"). But if it eventually becomes generally accepted that the surrounding area is part of a nation's territory and no trouble ever is stirred up there, it'll just sort of quietly be forgotten except for boundaries on some maps gathering dust in some library somewhere, which (while never explained in the books) is quite a likely scenario.
Why should the government continue to care, when private interests in the form of corporations or non-profit organizations will arise spontaneously to do the job once it's been proven possible by all that government research collectively supported by our tax dollars (remember, NASA gets 1-2% of the federal budget, if even that)? The focus shifts from government sponsorship to private over time. (This transition is in progress now for spaceflight in the form of the X-Prize.) Once private industry figures out how to make a profit out of it the way it did with the "empty" Americas, I'm betting that all kinds of private-industry spacecraft will be built (hotels, asteroid mining are just two of the most common conjectures) and will eventually vastly outnumber government craft, as is already the case with communications satellites. The government doesn't have to deal with managing and funding all that -- it just issues regulations and collects taxes and fees. Just like it issues Charters to proposed colonies, licenses spacecraft, and collects application fees as well as (presumably) taxes from the colony itself once it's formed. Politicians are, after all, inherently lazy.
So that's strike two -- the loss of government incentive to become involved, because there's nothing in it for them anymore and because private interests have arisen that can do the job for less and with greater efficiency (Arianespace, Energia RSC).
There's a real-life parallel here: the exploration of the Americas, what we now call the New World. The original 1492 Columbus expedition was government-funded and was originally intended to open up trade routes (back to
i am a soviet space shuttle
3.1415926535897932384629
In case you're not aware: s/9$/6/
And don't ask why I know that off the top of my head . . .
Maybe they could raise money for a shuttle repair mission by renting a timeshare of the telescope out to japan so they can monitor schoolchildren.
If NASA is not sure that shuttle can fly safely,
they should by one Soyuz from us, Russians.
Of course, Soyuz is technology of early 70'th,
but it would be newly manufactured, when shuttles are PRODUCTION of eithties. It is also order of magnitude cheaper. We fly space tourishs to ISS for $20millions or so.
Fear and Loathing: in Space.
The HST provides the best telescope data, period.
The bean counter idiots in charge of NASA intend
to replace HST with an inferior IR space-based
telescope. The same contractors that have been
working on HST are working on the "replacement".
There is far more money to be made developing a
new telescope than there is for "maintenence" on
the HST. The development of a bleeding edge
robotic servicing mission also is more profitable
for the contractors than a manned mission.
It all boils down to money, and where that money
would be spent. Space robotics have a huge
potential in military applications, so the R&D
money spent by NASA can be parlayed into bigger
profits for these same contractors. The best
hope for the continued survival of HST would be
to farm out the repairs to China or India, but
the political costs would be too great.
The money misspent on the ISS has drained the
NASA budget at a time when pure science is
being sacrificed for dual-use applied science
and political expediency. The ISS has become
a fiscal "black hole", with budget overruns
that make the original projected costs of the
shuttle program look like kindergarten.
When real scientists running NASA were replaced
with politically "inspired" professional bean
counters is when NASA started going downhill.
And the Bush "back to the moon" initiative is
pure BS, as there is no valid scientific value,
nor the money to waste, for such a mission
directive.
Now I'm going to rain on half of everybodies parade and get modded strait to hell for doing so, but why should they put hubble back in orbit? No offense- and I like interstellar polaroids as much as you do -but hubble cost an ass-ton of money to maintain while showing next to no tangible returns other than said polaroids. Seeing fuzzy blobs that may be planets gets us... Nothing. "Seeing" further into space gets us exactly nowhere. I'm not talking within the solar system here, I'm talking about the crap we'll never be able to confirm in our lifetimes. And as harsh as it sounds, given the choice- hubble or the moon or mars -I'd pull the plug on hubble in a heartbeat too for as much of a bite as it takes out of my current budget.
Practically put, Hubble is a black hole for money with little tangible return on investement. In a budget where every dollar counts, Hubble is the obvious loser, and perhapse rightfully so. This is also an object lesson for all of those crying about how NASA and the current administration can spend their money better. Well here it is. Kinda leaves a sour taste in your mouth, don't it?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Do you think maybe that O'Keefe is protecting NASA against future poly-critter attacks. As you point out "he is not a scientist", probably because he has the title Administrator! The Colombia inqiry put ALL the blame on NASA and the poly-critters said to NASA "make it safer". So in response O'Keefe picks a mission with no prospect of rescue and says it's "too risky" according to the inqirys recommendations. He deliberately picks Hubble so as to maximize the noise in the media. Then (after suitable howls from the public) he magnamously suggests that a second opinion should be sought for such an importatnt decision. When he is inevitably "forced to change his mind" by the second & very public opinion then NASA will be able to share the blame around when (not if) one day, another ACCIDENT occurs. Wisdom, politics and Sun Tzu are not taught alongside science, pity really.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Even if it could be shown that a shuttle mission (with a crew who are willing to accept all the risks) was cheaper and easier than a robotic mission, NASA would still push for the robotic mission.
Because if something goes wrong, NASA are out one expensive irreplacable shuttle and only have 2 left.
Which isnt that much of a margin for error when it comes to sending shuttles up to finish the ISS.
Not taking sides in the discussion whether we have good enough ground-based telescopes or not, an interesting telescope exists, having adaptive optics to compensate for air tremor. More in this article from IEEE spectrum.
Z
The "interstellar polaroids" and "fuzzy blobs" that you speak of form an enormous data set that is "the tangible return on investment" for science, I am assuming taxpayer funded science is the investor right? You see in science theories are free but raw emprical data on this scale is what is needed to test said theories. Collecting that data costs megabucks for any serious science to be performed. By your standards the mapping of the human genome was a waste of money because it tells us "nothing" and I'm pretty sure it also has some "crap we'll never be able to confirm in our lifetimes" hidden in it. How would you measure the return on the investment in weather recording over the last 100 years?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Maybe they can pay someone like Burt Rutan...hushed silence...ten....million...dollars! to send a space ship up there to fix it.
Oh wait...
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Instead we have some egotistical jerks who want NASA to go save their precious Hubble when they know damn well that the Shuttle isn't safe, its just lucky.
The best bet for NASA is to either shut down the shuttle fleet or use it only for shuttling people to the station. Another disaster, especially linked to something high profile, will kill NASA.
I would rather the Hubble burn up before risking anyone on the shuttle.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I think the Hubble should be saved, too. It is by far the optical device with the best 'seeing'. NASA and the scientific community have already labored long, and spent a fortune running the program. It has produced wonderful results. This is in spite of its checkered history: what kind of dolt would send this priceless piece of hardware into space untested?
However, I suspect that the Hubble people are not acting altruistically. They are not thinking 'what can WE do to improve space-based astronomy.' It is more like: 'I want more funding. Screw the rest of you guys.'
They could sell ads in Hubble's images.
Maybe some scientist will buy generic generic viagra...
Moon Missions = Kennedy = Democrats. Therefore, Nixon cancelled as much of that as he could, once he got into power in 68 - most missions were too far along to cancel, but the later ones were ok to stop. "Scrap it all, build me a shuttle!"
Carter was on the brink of cancelling the shuttle (build some nice Democrat program instead when the dust settled) but the program was too far along, to much money wasted to throw away.
And then came Reagan and Bush ! with a vengeance...Although Reagan preferred the space plan, which by the time Clinton got ahold of it was put quietly to rest... I think it had a lot to do with which contractors were where.
Why does a mission to repair the HST cost so much ? - I mean if companies like Scaled Composites can fly a mission into near space for around $20,000,000 why does a mission to HST have to cost almost 20 times that ?
Well you know
56,000 miles is pretty impressive, but 160k miles it is not. So the Shuttle still has a couple of magnitudes advantage over our x-prize favorites.
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
Nasa has to know full well how valuable HST is. From the very beginning, the little voice in my head has been telling me that NASA announced the abandonment of HST in order to leverage more funding.
The little voice has been wrong once or twice.
The entire Pern series is garbage; well, the first is just mediocre.
McCaffery is almost unreadable. I always picture her readers as girls who would otherwise be playing "Barbie" or guys who think football is too violent.
So, the point is that a man should never admit to reading those books. Might as well put on a pink shirt and lisp.
O'Keefe is facing a grim reality - he can't fund all the projects he's got running. I'm not voting for Bush this year because he's run up a huge budget deficit - a deficit so large that us boomers won't live long enough to see retired. You younger ones will be paying for it long after we're gone. Since I'm pissed about the budget deficit, I can't very well say Nasa should get more money or fault O'Keefe for saying "you gotta choose and this is what my choices are..."
I don't think the Soyuz can make Hubble's orbit even if it's launched from the Equator. The Hubble is somewhere around 600 km above Earth while the International Space Station is at 300 km which is barely accessible from the usual mid-Asian launching point for Soyuz.
My step mom works on HST (she's some sort of liason between contractors and NASA) and what my dad told me is that it's a pretty sure thing that there will be a servicing mission! Unfortunately, I haven't been able to verify this with my step mom but I can believe my dad :-)
If we're too afraid to send a mission to fix Hubble because suddenly the SST is "unsafe", how will we ever make it to the Moon or Mars?
The seven Columbia astronauts understood the risks of spaceflight and took those risks willingly. If you asked for volunteers for another shuttle mission there is no doubt that you would find a sea of hands. I am sure that everyone from the designers and builders of the shuttle down to the flight engineers would like to see additional shuttle missions. I think the paralysis starts at the very top, for political reasons yet again.
Not the first time that politics has interfered with science from the Bush administration.
I know most of the news outlets have been reporting vague safety concerns - I was rather skeptical that anything other than political and budgetary reasons were behind the decision to scrap the Hubble servicing mission.
Last Friday, John Blaha addressed the San Antonio Astromical Association regarding the Hubble Space telescope decision. John's a fourteen-year veteran astronaut, and although he's been retired from NASA for the past few years, he still maintains his contacts within the NASA bureaucracy and is very much in the loop on their reasoning.
Basically, the same thing happened after Columbia as with Challenger before it and Apollo One before that - the level of risk which Washington deems acceptable for the space program cranked down another order of magnitude, and NASA has to go to tangible lengths to satisfy that requirement.
In this case, all future shuttle flights require a redundant safe haven should something go wrong in orbit, precluding reentry. Basically, that restricts all future Space Shuttle missions to the ISS's oribital plane, which is entirely orthogonal to the Hubble Space Telescope. While the Space Shuttle is capable of significant orbital maneuvering, it doesn't have the fuel capacity to change from an HST servicing orbit to an ISS docking orbit within the same flight.
It's really just that simple. Any flights incapable of making orbital safe harbor at the ISS have been deemed an unacceptable risk, and the HST's orbit is too far off-axis from the ISS's orbit for the shuttle's orbital range.
It's simple enough. Have two shuttle flights go to the higher HST orbit, with them timewise overlapping (the second goes up while the first is still in orbit). This way, if either has a "problem" that keeps it from re-entry, they can dock and all crowd into the other to return to Earth.
And of course the second Shuttle wouldn't be on a thumb-twiddling mission. While one Shuttle services Hubble, the other could laumch sattelites, do science experiments, or whatever else a shuttle could do in the HST orbit.
If they're really that afraid of unfixable Shuttle tile/re-entry problems, they could/should do all future Shuttle missions as overlapping two-at-a-time in dockable orbits. I don't know if NASA has the resources to do two missions at once, but if they're ever going to do a "rescue mission" (as was specuated might have been done had the Columbia been found unsafe for re-entry while still in orbit), they better get the resources and get some practice doing it.
Tag lost or not installed.
NASA is trying to fund lots of things and its priorities have shifted in accordance with its history and funding.
Back in the 1960s Congress funded NASA programs because it was "necessary" to beat the Soviets in technology. And the Space Race was the technology showcase that the Soviets chose for us (they were the first in Space with both unmanned and manned vehicles). Congressional candidates translated that into politics: If you did not vote for NASA funding, you were "soft on Communism."
By the time of the moon landings, the rhetoric had changed from "red scare" and "red baiting" to The Great Society, basic human rights and whether or not one was for or against the war in Vietnam. Detante was in vogue because Nixon was winning the "unfought wars" against China and Russia with his trips there.
NASA's attitudes changed from an assumption that funding would always be there, which encouraged a "can do" attitude, to wondering how to save programs and which programs to save. NASA negotiated with people who wanted launch vehicles and found it had competition -- not from the Soviets, who were still unacceptable to the West but from the newly-minted European corporation, largely funded by those governments in Western Europe who needed access to Clarke orbit for geostationary communication satellites.
NASA's first proposal, which I remember from my World Book Encyclopedia, was to build a reusable manned vehicle that it could fit atop a Saturn rocket engine. NASA would use the Saturn V (which was used to launch the moon missions as well as Skylab) to construct an outpost in low Earth orbit and use these reusable vehicles to transfer men and cargo to a space station. The space station would, in turn, be a waypoint for launches to the moon and beyond.
But NASA had problems getting customers to buy into its new concept, because its reusable launch vehicle, or "shuttle" was too small. The military insisted that its cargo bay be of a certain size, so that they could launch large spy satellites. NASA, fearing that all satellite launches would go to Arianespace, kowtowed to the US military and built our present shuttle system. The delay in changing the program cost them ten years and billions of dollars. It cost them most of their "can do" managers. It also cost them support in Congress and among the American people. With no regular launches, media started asking NASA the questions previously reserved for congressmen and the President: "Is this a good use of taxpayer money?"
NASA administrators and PR people started talking about spinoffs from their scientific endeavors to answer many of these questions and even initiated the publication of a magazine in 1996 to help convince the public and corporations that NASA programs are relevant.
Then came the shuttle program. It was over budget, very, very late and hugely popular, until the launches became routine. And what made them routine was a consistent refusal, within top level managers to see that space flight is more dangerous than flying in a private plane. Also, there was no funding for a place for the shuttle to get to as before the first shuttle launched, Skylab fell from the sky. By the time of the Challenger accident in 1986, upper level managers were no longer listening to the scientists assembling and handling the equipment And I would argue that the recommendations in management behavior didn't change.
Nowadays, NASA is infected with a "can't do" attitude as the Columbia tragedy grounds NASA and the facts are reported that managers felt it was best to risk the lives of the astronauts and the shuttle because they
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.