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NASA Gives OK to Fix Hubble Telescope
Erick writes "NASA has decided to rescue the Hubble. This will come as great news to all of those who have advocated for fixing the ailing 'scopes sensors, gyros, etc. The article states that nine to 12 months of planning will precede a mission to the Hubble Telescope."
Don't beleive that stuff, Be more cynical. Bush is allocating 1 billion a year for the moon and Mars. Impossible. In return, NASA is being asked to give up the Hubble, the Shuttle, the Space Station (eventually). And funding for all other programs will be cut or eliminated as well, "for the Mars mission". The "Mars Mission" is twenty years in the future. It will have to survive five administrations, ten Congresses, and the eventually bankrupting of the Federal kitty by the tax cuts and increased non-discretionary spending. Point is, the "Mars mission" won't survive. I've watched the space program for thirty-five years, and things like this don't maintain momentum, especially in hard financial times. NASA, I hear, initially was jubilant; now they realize what they are being asked to give up: everything. For a pig in a poke. You are being just cynical enough. This is a way of disbanding the manned program while looking like heros, or "spatial pioneers", as Bush called them (I am not making that up). Five years from now, NASA will be all but gone, with a few contractors making a bit of money researching new systems that never make it to reality. I didn't believe it would happen so fast! Hubble already given up? I only wonder if Bush is smart enough to have thought this up himself, or if his Grand Viziers came up with the scheme while telling George about Mars and "Spatial Pioneers"? Does the King actually believe what he is saying? Is he that dumb, or that smart? And these comments are "flamebait" if you are a far-right whacko, kids. I'm not laughing.
'm sure that at $1-$1.6 billion to repair the Hubble, many who are not directly affected by the Hubble's latest problems will wonder why we're throwing so much money into something that, to them, is just a big, expensive camera.
I would remind these people that $1 billion souunds like a lot, but it's equal to the cost for 2-3 shuttle launches, and probably not much more than we've spent on previous HST servicing missions. It's certainly far less than has been wasted^W spent on the ISS.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
...as long as they're ready to fly again, the administration would be eager to get them back in space
Well, it's not as though we've got a huge stable of shuttles ready to be deployed. We've only got two left Discovery and Atlantis, and there's no way we'll build any more like them, I'd wager. And, I'd also wager that NASA has essentially lost the ability to build any new launch vehicles because of the attrition of layoffs and retirements of skilled people to pull it off. (There haven't been any new designs seen to completion since the shuttles. I'm purposely excluding the ISS because it's not a launch vehicle.)
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Seems to me they issue this sort of announcement every other Tuesday. How many times now has NASA gone through this "we're gonna get rid of Hubble... we're gonna do it... PSYCH!" dance?
The cynical side of me says that they're holding it hostage for better funding and popular support, because it's such an icon. The last time they announced that they were junking it I didn't believe them for a second... and now, surprise, looks like it has a new lease on life.
Because the $1B you use to keep the Hubble up is the $1B that you now don't get to spend on the replacement.
I expect to hear that in the next few days, since the new fiscal year is coming up, that both of the future space science projects that I work on will have budget cuts, if not be mothballed entirely. This will be directly as a result of this Hubble decision.
They need more Astronauts like Story to gain interest. Am I the only one who remembers their kickass EVA on STS-61 ? Of course, adding in a Zero-G sex act would probably increase viewership way more than the intellectual challenge.
Yeah, just like Microsoft saves a buck while producing the best software, or Ford saves a buck by producing the best car...
Private industry is no panacea. Particularly since the main client will continue to be the US Government and nobody has ever accused government contractors of producing the best product. As one astronaut once said "I try not to think about the fact that every part of the rocket underneath me was built by the lowest bidder."
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-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
US has 5% of the world's population and 50% of the world's spending on military and it's not enough ?
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This sounds to me like a stalling tactic, not like NASA is actually going to fix the Hubble. Think about it:
They have 9-12 months to design a robotic space mission. Then how many years will it take to build it and implement it? By the time this "mission" is underway, Hubble will have been floating dead in space for years and will probably have tons of other problems that will make this mission obselete.
This sounds more like a way to funnel money to people studying robotics than a way to save the Hubble. An interesting thing to do would be to see which companies are supposed to develop these robotics and what connections they have to the administration.