No Money For Hubble Service Mission

starexplorer writes "SPACE.com is reporting that the White House has eliminated funding for servicing the Hubble Space Telescope from its 2006 budget request. After many options 1, 2 were explored, is this the death knell for Hubble?"

Comments

Re:Death for Hubble?

[shanen]

Private funding? This is the same level of thinking that caused the problem that killed Hubble, and one of the main reasons America is so quickly falling behind in so many fields of scientific research. There are some things that private enterprise and free markets are very good at, but long-term scientific research is NOT one of them. (The other reason is religious fanaticism directed against science because of the unpleasant truths it persists in revealing.)

Significant research is very risky and rarely profitable--and never reliably profitable in the way that normal business investments are. Yes, there are enormous long-term benefits, but the current CEO will have cashed out all of his stock dividends a long time before major research produces any results. There is a fundamental mismatch between the long-term perspective of pure research and the short-term perspective of a business that will have to show its profit numbers to the SEC at the next quarter--at which time the investors will sell their shares if that company is "wasting too much money" on research.

America is becoming the land of the ignorant. Proud, boastful, even aggressive ignorance.