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Robot Helps NASA Refocus On Hubble
The ailing Hubble telescope keeps refusing to die; jdoire points out this story at the Washington Post which reads in part "Largely because of the Canadian robot named 'Dextre,' NASA has gone in less than a year from virtually writing off the Hubble to embracing a mission that will cost between $1 billion and $1.6 billion and approach in complexity the hardest jobs the agency has ever undertaken." (We last mentioned Dextre back in August.)
Quite honestly, other than balancing the budget, I see this as some of our better spent money. Not so much on the Hubble (even though I do think that we should keep it going), but on being able to handle a mission robotically. This money will not be used just to launch the mission, but also to prepare for it. It will require a fair amount of work on robotics. This will help show us if we have it or not. If not, then we lose the mission and possibly the telescope. But if so, then we are in a better position to build on Mars (or on the moon).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Who cares if its expense, while I say let's the thing deorbit and move on, it does present an interesting engineering challenge. If they do manage to repair the thing with robots, the accomplishment is not that the Hubble is working again, but the fact that they did it with robots. That fact will give them more options and a big boost to the more ambitious missions that are on the boards as well as increase the capabilities for smaller onse since we can fire off robots into orbit without worrying about having to ground the fleet everytime one crashes.
Well, I've never heard that any extra-terrestrial corporations participated on the project. So, ultimately, those $1.6e9 were all paid either to workers as wages or to investors as profits. Then it's up to those people to decide whether to spend it on improving or on worsening things. But all the money, down to the last cent, was spent right here on the ground.
So it should be possible to launch two or three new Hubbles at a cost of $600 million apiece. Instead of one repaired Hubble, why not three new ones?
A lot of the 1.6 billion is going to R&D, because this mission would do things that have never been done before.
Building and launching 2 disposable Hubbles would get you 2 nice telescopes for a while (but not as long as the current one has lasted, since the Hubble design requires periodic servicing); designing a robotic service mission will get you a lot of knowledge about how to do robotics in space, as well as a nice telescope for a few more years (and maybe future robotic service missions can extend its life even further, but those ones won't need all the R&D, so they'll be much cheaper.)