Slashdot Mirror
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?"
So if there isn't money for Hubble than auction it off as surplus - let free market pick it up if they want to.
"directed NASA to focus solely on de-orbiting the popular spacecraft "
Well, if we count on the government to fund Hubble, yes.
Perhaps a private party will either donate, or advertise.
This cosmic picture was brought to you by Budwiser.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
pitched it to Bush as a way to finally find those missing WMDs, the administration would have spent billions on it....
All this discussion of saving the Hubble seems to ignore an obvious solution. Just launch a completely new, improved orbiting observatory. Hubble is nearing the end of its lifespan even if it is serviced. A replacement might not cost a lot more than a servicing mission and would involve zero risk.
Can't they just stop off on the way to mars?
Photos.
Bush: "We must further our ambitions in space"...or something like that anyways
Now I see this posted... Now admittedly 1 billion is a pretty big price to save Hubble (would probably be more practical just to send up a new one) but is there a newer one in the near Horizon even?
Politics and space mix badly...but then again what else is new...
...in bed
Crash it like they did the Mir...then I can put my blender up on EBay as set it for hundreds as "Hubble Debris".
Things like this will continue to happen so long as space use and exploration in general does not capture the public's fascination.
I'm an avid supporter of all things space-related (paying member of Planetary Society, etc) but I find most articles written about the Hubble telescope and space in general pretty boring. Until someone inspires the world with a lofty goal that will push technology or knowledge forward significantly, I think you can expect this type of stagnation or actual devolution.
I'm a big tall mofo.
*ring* *ring* "Hello, Energiya?" "It's the wealthy ingrates." "Huh? No, America not France." "We've got the 100 million, you want it in dollars or *heheh* euros?" "What!?! France bought all Soyuz missions for the next ten years?" "Go ask Chirac? Yeah, very funny."
Maybe it'll crash on me so I won't have to worry about Social Security.
Last time Taco Bell promised a free vouchers for everyone if MIR hits a floating target.
NASA, PLEASE, don't miss the bulls eye now! I want my free burrito!
It's too good a technology to waste.
And, no doubt, if we just leave it up there the Chinese and/or the EU will most certainly claim salvage rights and send up a repair crew.
The Chinese would claim it, if for no other reason than to make clear to the world what is becoming increasingly obvious: the USA lacks the desire (funds?) to maintain its status as a space faring nation and is being replaced by China as the space faring super power.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Of course there isn't any money. How else is NASA going to develop the James Webb Telescope? The Hubble's expected to last until 2009 and there would only be a two year gap between its failure, de-orbiting or return to earth on a shuttle. I'm sure Astronomy Picture of the Day will do fine in those intervening years.
The ESA would certainly be interested. The Chinese and Japanese might take an interest as well.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Turn it around and say that the President decided to spend one billion on some program that you don't personally have any interest in, and all of a sudden it would be "Why spend a billion on that when there is a war going on in Iraq?"
Stop using both sides of the same arguement to bitch about the war. You don't support the war -- We get it. This is about the Hubble, not foriegn policy.
Do you really think that the saved money is going to go to tsunami relief or ending world hunger? If it goes anywhere, odds are it will go into the Iraq war. Or maybe the upcoming Iranian war, even.
It's not a zero-sum game between humanitarian aid and science. Any language that supposes that it is leads you into trouble.
After the Challenger disaster, plans to bring the Hubble back were dropped. Landing the shuttle with that much weight was found to be too risky.
After the Columbia accident, going to Hubble to repair it or deorbit it with a space shuttle was found to be too risky.
The Hubble was designed back when the shuttles were believed to be far more robust and expected to have a bit more carrying capacity. Going from the drawing board to a flight-worthy vehicle with a design that managed to be both revolutionary and out-of-date resulted in some difficult problems.
Eventually (as the Estes catalogs taught us in the late '60s) reusable is the way to go. But with the current state of engineering and finances, the Russians are doing a lot better with big, dumb, reliable, mass-produced single-use vehicles.
We desperately need a new space vehicle system that's safe, versitile, and cheap in terms of the cost of kg. to orbit. The new system is doable engineering wise, but probably dead politically.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
University of Arizona is building the Large Binocular Telescope [http://medusa.as.arizona.edu/lbtwww/], with with a pair of mirrors each 8.4 meters (25 feet) in diameter. The light gathering power and sharpness are both supposed to put Hubble to shame [ see http://www.nd.edu/~science/core/binocular/lbt_othe rtelescopes.shtml]
using adaptive optics to remove the atmospheric blurring. It's a lot cheaper than Hubble, and while being ground-based has limitations, having it on the ground will make it much easier to repair and upgrade.
Cost of maintenance: $600M-$800M
Cost of Hubble in 1990 dollars: $1.5B
Cost of Hubble in 2004 dollars: $2.2B
That doesn't include launch costs. It would also probably take ~10 years to plan and build.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
You, idiot. Iraq was one of the few arabic countries where woman had equal rights and you would go to jail for *not* sending your daughter to school. It was a fascist dictatorship, but it was *not* a fundamentalist one. Tarek Aziz was a christian. Of course women rights will go down the drain, now that the US is about to lose the war. well done, morons.
Maybe when they find out that no one is doing anything useful on the space station and that you don't need a base on the moon to go to mars, then they will repair Hubble out of the billions saved. Then, they might also decide that invading another country is a better idea. Hey, I know! Why not present Hubble as "a tool to invade the privacy of terrorists who might hide in other solar systems". That might just work!!
No.
In the end, the bugetary decisions are up to Congress. They have the power to restore the Hubble funding to the budget.
Hubble has been crucial in imaging Supernova 1987A. We have an astonishing volume of data from the Hubble as we follow the sequence as this progresses in the Greater Magellenic Cloud. If Hubble is lost without any replacement, we will lose a rare opportunity to image a supernova this close.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
Cut the funding to the orbiting pile of crap the ISS and put it into Hubble, an orbital piece of technology that does something useful. If Hubble isn't repaired then we are going to lose one of the most useful cosmological tools available for many years to come.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
We can't hack Hubble now and yet it was one year ago last week that his plan to go to Mars was in the news? talk about flip-flopping... geez.
. stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3381531
The Bush administration is trying to kill science and turn the US into a theocracy. Religion keeps people opiated; science teaches them to ask questions, and is therefore incompatible with their autocratic goals.
Bush wants the US to push towards mars (or at least that's what he claims to want).
But in the process, lets scrap perhaps the most successful space venture in human history.
Hubble has been the greatest achievement in NASA's history. Far from the high profile Moon Landing. but it's the better achievement:
1. Has made millions interested in space, and sciences through it's absolutely breathtaking images.
2. One of the greatest feats of engineering servicing that thing.
3. It's been reliable and usable for YEARS
IMHO it more than earned a repair, and an upgrade.
It's been NASA's true achievement. The mars rovers have been great, they did a lot. But nothing has outperformed like Hubble.
How about putting a PayPal donation button on their homepage?
(just kidding)
Your password has expired, please login to change it.
Who mods this crap "interesting"??? How about "Off topic"?
I guess this lesson here is that it is better to have security under a tyrant that the opportunity to live free. Why are 80% of Iraqis planning to vote? If the situation were truly so terrible, how could that be true?
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
In case you hadn't hear, we already won that war, and currently we're having a great deal of success with our peacekeeping efforts. In fact, there's going to be free elections in Iraq in less than two weeks.
Maybe you were thinking of the cost of the upcoming war with Iran, but I have it on good authority that it's going to be a cake walk, and our soldiers will be greeted as liberators.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The other reason is religious fanaticism directed against science because of the unpleasant truths it persists in revealing.
I think it's worse than that. From my perspective (I'm in catholic Italy) there was really no need for the church to go back to challenge scientific discoveries. In fact the Pope is fighting for what is seen as unethical research on human cloning and so on, but doesn't challenge Darwinism, for example. On the other hand, IIRC, one minister tried to remove Darwin from teaching programs, but the model for this behaviour stays in US, not in the Vatican (I don't want to try and excuse the Roman Catholics, which should speak out louder against this, as I do)
So, why politicians of us and italian right fight science more than the official Church? I have one dystopic explanation. Science as it existed before big money came in (that is: peer review, published results, quest for personal glory of the scientist...) is no longer desirable for the society we are transforming into. Scientific discovery must be directed by the market, in controlled environments and regulated by patents so that the big players exert their superiority.
Among other strategies, the enemies of science are using religion as a mere weapon of disinformation. They want people to blindly obey faith and negate scientific evidence and couldn't care less for the message itself. Else they would be evangelizing in a totally different way...
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
A few people have suggested launching something very similar to HST, with the new instrumentation that was supposed to go up in servicing mission 4. One such proposal is the "Hubble Origins Probe"; they had a poster at the last American Astronomical Society meeting, the abstract of which you can read here.
..." (COS and WF3 are the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and new Wide-Field Camera, respectively.)
That abstract begins, "A no-new-technology HST-class observatory with COS and WFC3 as its core instruments
There's also a brief article about this at New Scientist.
I'm not crazy about this idea, for a bunch of reasons, but it is under active investigation.
Maybe letting the Hubble burn up in a fiery inferno is Bush's way of bringing democracy to it.
If you ask why a space telescope would need democracy, you are acting very un-american.
Who mods this crap "Insightful"??? How about "Outright Lie" or "Woefully Misinformed"?
6 5-2005Jan12.html
where did you get 80%?
Even the Bush whitehouse is downplaying the importance of the elections these days. Things really are "That Horrible", as you say:
The administration continues to say publicly that it expects a significant Sunni turnout, citing an International Republican Institute poll in early December showing 20 percent of Sunnis intend to vote and 35 percent intend "somewhat" to vote. But in light of the insurgents' growing attacks on election and government officials since that survey, U.S. officials fear last-minute attacks on polling stations, candidates and voters will produce a much smaller turnout among the minority group that once dominated Iraq. One unofficial estimate already predicts a vote as low as 10 percent in some areas.
Sunnis represent about 30% of the total population of Iraq, BTW.
source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50
Here's to finally giving Bush his exit strategy in November
just because you want to or how it makes you feel is not just dandy.
believe should follow evidence, period.
I'm tired of pretending it's OK to believe everything.
O'Reilly was going on about Intelligent Design yesterday... it's a theory, just like evolution. Right, and just like the theory that the moon is made of cheese... to bad the facts are not on it's side.
we should not coddle the believe-whatever-we-like crowd. Reality is relative, that doesn't mean you can't compare things, it means you HAVE TO.
-pyrrho
One of the reasons there's not much interest on maintaining Hubble operational is because of the availability of land telescopes with similar precision nowadays.
The reason Hubble is in Space is because of lack of atmosphere distortion, so we have much more precise pictures.
But now we do have land telescopes which computer-controlled visual compensation which gives similar resolution at a fraction of the cost.
With advances in adaptive optics and computing, ground-based telescopes are now BETTER than the Hubble in many ways.
h ybuild/grbsspc .html
This site on the Large Binocular Telescope (recently threatened by wildfire!) is very interesting.
http://medusa.as.arizona.edu/lbto/w
De-orbiting the Hubble is part of the religious right's attack on science. Learning where we came from is not in their interest. News about science and knowledge is not in the best interest of furthering their agenda.
Hubble Origins Probe, a rebuild of Hubble with modern technology on a expendible launch, will cost only $750M - $1000 according to the following report.
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/groups/ astro/Colin%20HOP_final_noBudget.pdf
"If memory serves, the previous administration spend more than that on their own"
Your memory does not serve. This was the most expensive inauguration ever.
"40 million bucks goes to things like limo drivers, cooks, clean up crew"
No. It buys access for the corporations who wish to bend the ear and favor of those who write the laws.