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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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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.
Yes, but the authors of this report have got fuck all to do with the way that NASA evaluates safety.
If one or more of NASA's safety panels decides a mission should not take place for safety reasons, then that should be taken seriously. Not overruled by a bunch of scientists.
Of course they are well-meaning, but they are not engineers, they are not safety experts, and, frankly, those scientists who have a vested interest in this mission (i.e., some of the astronomers) should remove themselves from this kind of panel.
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
In converse, it's the elected representatives who control NASA's funding to begin with... NASA can't fund a mission if they don't include enough money to do it in the budget.
The current political pressure on NASA is to go to the moon and Mars. If NASA has to spend all of its money on that, there's nothing left for Hubble.
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
But what about the finacial concerns? I don't think NASA has the funding to allocate to a Hubble Repair mission...
First of all, the instruments which were slated to go up have already been built, so you're looking at a substantial loss of investment if a servicing mission doesn't go.
I heard an estimate of 1 billion USD today for the robotic mission. A manned shuttle mission would likely be comparable in price. However, even if they don't send a repair mission, a robotic mission to HST will still need to be sent, in order to attach rockets which can safely splash it down into the ocean. Otherwise, there's no way to control where it will come down. The cost of this robotic-splashdown mission is half the cost of the full robotic-servicing mission (500 million USD).
It would be a shame to scrap HST because we didn't want to spend an extra $500 million to save it. That's almost exactly the average price of a single space shuttle mission. NASA's annual budget is $15 billion. It's not a lot of money, considering what we're getting for it.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
I mean, what's the point of throwing people up in space station compared to what you can get with an orbital telescope?
Apples and oranges, I'm afraid. It is true that people on the ISS cannot reproduce the valuable data that Hubble provides about distant stars and planets. However, the people on the ISS are capable of carrying out other forms of research that may be just as valuable. For instance, placing people on the ISS allows us to learn about the effects of living in space. This kind of experiment is essential when it comes to thinking about very long missions to Mars and other planets. Not to mention all sorts of other space-based experiments that may not be feasible without a human to monitor them.
NASA's means of funding is to blame in this situation. Big science telescopes like Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer are one-off affairs. They get built and that is that. Hubble is an odd case because it has been serviced by the STS. The ISS on the other hand has to be constructed and launched, slowly. The contractors putting together ISS components make a lot of money billing the government.
The Shuttle's design didn't originally include solid fuel rockets. This was later made a requirement as part of a compromise aimed at lowering the Shuttle's design and flight costs. The company that designed and built the SFRs was called Morton Thiokol, now called Cordant Technologies, which was based in Utah. Coincidentally this company had strong ties to the NASA's adminsitrator James Fletcher.
Fletcher built up political support for the Shuttle by throwing some aerospace jobs to Utah. The first US politician to fly aboard the Shuttle was none other than Senator Jake Garn of Utah in April of 1985.
This is the same reasoning behind many of the ISS decisions. NASA can't build something like the ISS without pretty hefty funding from Congress. In order to get funding they have to promise jobs and/or money to the constituencies of the legislators they're asking for money. NASA's administration also knows that if they promise individual companies contracts they can get them to make said legislators happy by writing them nice big campaign checks. Almost all government projects are based around this favor bartering system.
Space telescopes aren't very lucrative contracts so it is hard to sell them to aerospace companies and Congress. The umpteen billion dollar ISS on the other hand is an easy sell as long as the construction can go as slowly as possible.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.
Sure, and no one would expect them to try this is the astronauts were likely to become injured. But just because there is _any_ significant risk isn't a good reason to cancel.
To use your story... every crane lift is dangerous, and a certain (small) percentage fail. Still, we are careful and take out timee. Had we not, the species would just be sitting around like Moongazer, afraid to leave the cave.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
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 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)
I'd be excited about a robotic mission too ... if I believed it would work.
The NASA guy (high up in the org) was really keen on the robot. He claimed to have seen "video" that was not (his words) "Power Point engineering".
I'm highly skeptical of the robot idea, and here's why:
NASA can afford to, and is capable of, repairing Hubble with a manned mission right now. The risk to the crew is negligibly greater than a mission to ISS, and NASA plans to send crews to ISS a-plenty.
The risk to Hubble on a manned mission is fairly low. The risk to Hubble by entrusting it to an untested and today uninvented and yet-to-be-engineered robot is very high.
I am *far* from convinced that cost and safety are rational reasons for the attitudes of being extremely against a manned mission to Hubble and being so emphatically enthusiastic on a robotic mission to Hubble. It doesn't add up. There are reasons I'm sure, but they *aren't* the officially stated reasons.
The megapixel rating on a digicam is a meaningless number to trick stupid consumers like you. My 3 year old very expensive 2 MP camera takes pictures that are much crisper, brighter and with better color fidelity than a new 6 MP POS that costs 1/3rd the price it was. 6 MP is useless when the 50 cent optics blurs and distorts the picture the cheap CCD can't distinguish colours properly.
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.
You know nothing about astronomy, cosmology, or even first grade science if you can make such a statement. Hubble has provided more return for the money than any other government funded science effort. Hubble's return has been in the form of pure knowledge however, not in the form of anything practible on earth. Someone who hasn't ever opened an encyclopedia wouldn't care about the kind of research conducted by the scientists using Hubble.
Crawl back under your rock.
Depends on exactly what you are buying. If it's gasoline, it'll cost more today. If it's a computer hard disk, it'll cost approximately the same. If it's a gigabyte of storage in a large system, it'll cost significantly less. The problem with inflation calculations is that "cost of living" isn't a very good reference index for things like space telescopes.
This is a problem that everyone has to cope with when one considers upgrading a home computer. The machine you have right now may be almost worhtless, considering its capabilities and what the same capabilities would cost today. But you spent a lot for it a few years back. So we are always reluctant to trash or donate an old computer, but from the viewpoint of a cost/benefit analysis it might be the most rational thing to do.
Of course, the cost of space missions hasn't gone down like computer hardware did, but still one wonders if a better and more advanced space telescope couldn't be built at the same price a maintenance mission to Hubble would cost.
If you're so certain sending humans into a spacewalk would be a waste, than enlighten me: What happens when a bolt is 1/16" out of alignment, and the robot locks up? After a reboot, it STILL won't be able to COPE with the UNEXPECTED.
THAT'S why sending people into space to actually DO things is SO DAMN IMPORTANT. Now, the question is: "Why do we keep sending 40 year old PHD's and NOT 20 year old Construction Workers?"
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
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 ?
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..."