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Repair Costs for Hubble Are Vexing to Scientists
wallstreetprodigy23 writes "Some scientists questioned whether a repair mission for the aging Hubble Space Telescope was worth a projected cost of $1 billion to $2 billion at a hearing of the House Science Committee on Wednesday.
Both scientists and legislators praised the orbiting observatory for the many contributions it had made to science since it was launched in 1990. But the telescope needs servicing to continue working...
"
If this can be justified, I think a toy like Hubble should be affordable.
However, our parents always tell us they can't afford 10 cents for that yummy candy because they just bought a $40K car.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
How much would a new telescope cost? I mean, $1 billion is a lot for repair costs -- if a new one costs somewhere around there, why not just replace hubble altogether?
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
Another referral network scammer posing as a legitimate article, no matter what the subject matter. Entire article modded 'offtopic'.
Here
And don't even get me started on universal health care...
The CB App. What's your 20?
The John Hopkins folks proposed a 'Son of Hubble' for that same cost. It would give the same or better scientific data gathering and also be designed to be fixed in an easier fashion, made with more modern tech, etc.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
It always seems that whenever something needs to be maintained, suddenly, congress is all scared to give them money. Like they never expected a 15yr old telescope dealing with the harshness of space would need lots of money to keep it going. The problem is, they make the initial investment saying "Oh, this will be great", but as soon as it becomes less than popular, they drop support, and thus waste billions of dollars worth of equipment and achievements, just so in the public eye they aren't wasting money. The problem is, the public doesn't realize they are wasting money by NOT spending the money for it. All I can say is "people are dumb" (well, on average, at any rate)
I came, I saw, She conquered.
That 1-2 Billion buys you Human advancement, however large or small, that is permanent. Permanent so long as that 80 Billion we just spent on war doesn't wipe it out.
-Ryan C.
That $2 billion price tag they mentioned was the cost of a robotic repair crew. $2 billion is a lot of money... it's hard to imagine all the R&D and other work that must go into a project like this.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
Is this thing just an out-dated, broken down piece of crap that people just can't let go of because of sentimentality?
I have a 15 year old car that I'm rather fond of due to all the good times I've been through with it, but when the next major repair becomes necessary, it's going to the dump.
...of the ISS. Is that money pit doing anything for science but falling apart?
why the large increase in costs for this mission? the delay? they don't say at all. it doesn't even really sound like they're sure it will cost that much...
guess it's google time.
sum.zero
I'm assuming that a new telescope can be developed and deployed for the same cost as a repair mission, and that the issue is the 5-7 year delay time from concept to launch?
Maybe it's time to bite the bullet, be without data for a few years, and plan for something grander for the next decade.
Why not look at developing a fleet of Hubbles, each with perhaps a 2 year lifespan, and just keep launching them as the others break down? Or better yet, launch a number at the same time. Hubble often seems very busy, I'm sure people would crave the opportunity to collect even more data?
Of course, Hubble nostalgia is the one thing keeping funding going. Politically, you can continue to argue for Hubble repair, but not for the construction of new telescopes, even if they cost the same thing. The program would be never be approved or scrapped soon after the design phase.
Don't forget to check the oil and rotate the tires while you are up there
"Both scientists and legislators praised the orbiting observatory for the many contributions it had made to science since it was launched in 1990."
I prefer to praise the humans who built Hubble versus Hubble itself. That damn Hubble gets all the m4d pr0pz.
How to Download YouTube Videos
...are "Why are these costs so prohibitively high?" and "What can be done to correct this?"
The coolest voice ever.
now that the unsuspecting people think that hubble is just floating garbage, it's true purpose can be utilized; a High powered Super Laser.
Open it up to the rest of the world, have other countries, people, and institutions fund it and then split up their usage time depending on the amount they donate.
I suspect the Chinese could get it fixed for a lot less than $1 billion. It's called trickle down economics, I think.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
other nasa hardware seems to be doing quite well down there. maybe it's something in the air?
NASA should have read the contract, Hubble was a loss leader for the manufacturer. As we all know the profit is all in the servicing of it.
Hubble $$$
Replacement gyro - $5,000
Replacement screw - $0.05
Replacement nut - $0.05
House call - $1,000,000,000.00
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The mission was in the can, and it still is. The hardware is done and under nitrogen purge. Now NASA is scared shitless of sending actual people to do the job, so now that the community has spoken, they're like "Alrighty, we'll fix it. With a nice billion dollar payout to ye ole military-industrial complex. How you like them apples!?"
It's a crash program that doesn't have to be. But that's what NASA is about these days, crash programs that will in the end, go absolutely nowhere. But we'll enrich our large corporate pals while we do it, don't you worry!
Repairing the Hubble might be prohibitively expensive, but a simpler retrieval mission shouldn't cost much more than your average shuttle mission. That thing belongs in the Smithsonian once it's out of service, not vaporized in reentry.
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
Yeah, it did a great job for us. But now we have to feed the horse?! No, never! Let that horse die, it is full of space telescopes out there in space, just waiting for someone to pick them...
Do you know that it took a few years to produce the Hubble's main reflector with the sufficient quality?
*Cue Dr. Evil's voice* ONE beeeeeeeeeeeliyon dollars. muahahahahaha! muuuhahahahah!! muuuuuuuuuuuuhahahahahaha!!!
i'm just being silly. move on. i've got nothing else to contribute to this thread. don't get me started on universal health care (almost went bankrupt because of family medical debt).
I know this is going to start a huge flame war, but seriously - what good has the space program done for mankind? Anything other than cure our lust for knowledge of the unknown?
The Hubble is supposed to end service around 2010. The James Webb Space Telescope is slated for an August 2011 launch. We just need to ensure it launches both successfully and on time.
What complicates the question are the breathtaking advances in Earth-based astronomy since the Hubble was conceived. During the 1970s when Hubble was designed, the conventional wisdom was that ground based telescopes would never have the resolution of space telescopes because the atmosphere seeing limited the resolution of ground telescopes. In fact, microcomputer technology starting in the 1990s allowed for adaptive optics which adjusts the mirrors continuously to compensate for changes in the atmosphere.
This means that there is not any need replace the Hubble to obtain better astronomical imagery in the visible range. The new ground-based telescopes can do the job, and even the most ambitious of them, like the Keck in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, are much less expensive than the Hubble and much more sensitive to light. This naturally is much easier to service and update. For example, the VLT cost was roughly 1/7 of the HST cost, and gave the astronomic community four 8.2 meters telescopes, with a resolution almost as high as the Hubble.
Anyways...
The James Webb Space Telescope is a large, infrared-optimized space telescope scheduled for launch in August, 2011 . JWST is designed to study the earliest galaxies and some of the first stars formed after the Big Bang. These early objects have a high redshift from our vantage-point, meaning that the best observations for these objects are available in the infrared. JWST's instruments will be designed to work primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range.
JWST will have a large mirror, 6.5 meters (20 feet) in diameter and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. Both the mirror and sunshade won't fit onto the rocket fully open, so both will fold up and open only once JWST is in outer space.
JWST will reside in an L2 Lissajous orbit, about 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from the Earth.
with a b-i-n of around 500 million ought to do it.
I think that's a great idea! Hubble may not be useful as far as US needs are concerned, but our garbage might be someone else's goldmine. A lot could be learned by a nascent space program just from interacting with Hubble and attempting to maintain it IMignorantO
;-)
Besides, don't tell anyone, but we need the money
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
let me just state that it's hard to put a price tag on "functioning" status. what's working today and will continue to work longer with high probability given proper care is almost infinitely more valuable than something that's being planned and may (or may not) work in the future.
Let some private companies come up with the billions.
Ultimately the private companies are the ones who will profit off of the research anyway....
some quick results [not guaranteed to reflect the whole picture]:
0 5. stm
looks like the white house lowered the priority of and cut the funding for the fixing of hubble from the budget in january and are just now spinning it out to the pleebs.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6853009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/41975
sum.zero
"Representative Bart Gordon of Tennessee, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said the NASA estimate for a shuttle mission needed clarification. In answer to committee budget questions in 2002, Mr. O'Keefe wrote that the cost of the shuttle mission was included in the long-term budget of the space flight office, not the science budget.
Dr. Steven Beckwith, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said previous shuttle missions to the telescope were charged in the $300 million to $400 million range, which was acceptable to scientists. If the cost suddenly went above $1 billion, Dr. Beckwith said, he would have to reconsider his strong support for a service mission."
So the Hubbell costs $300 million to service when you don't add the cost of the shuttle flight? I can't believe that NASA ever tracked the cost of their programs this way. Does it make any sense not to include the cost of the shuttle flight in the Science budget if that is the only purpose for the shuttle flight?
msnbc bbc
why is a man wearing panty hose /.er = geek = good at math = male /.er = male
since
then
so again i say why is a man wearing pantyhose
Afterall, outsourcing is the lingua franca in Washington these days. Now, before I get modded, these are facts.
If we allow for a 0.5% probability of the loss of austronauts, the costs would drop dramatically. For example, they don't want to send the mission without another shuttle on "stand-by", because, if something is wrong, this mission will not be able to repair itself (unlike those, that are sent to ISS).
If lives can be and are lost for a good cause in Afghanistan, Iraq, in fighting domestic crime, and in firefighting, I say, we are overly protective of the space crews.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That $2 billion price tag they mentioned was the cost of a robotic repair crew.
The article mentions that they don't want to risk stranding astronauts at Hubble since there's no haven there to rescue them if something should go wrong. So they *have* to use robots.
I'd fly up there and do the repairs for $1M regardless of the risks. Ok, maybe I'd ask for $50M since there's so much money floating around... but really, I'm sure if NASA offered $1M and training, they'd have thousands of volunteers regardless of the risks.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
it also appears, as others have suggested, that the majority of the cost is shuttle flight-prep work, and not hubble itself. shouldn't that be part of the shuttle re-prep budget instead of hubble's?
sum.zero
duh, just outsource it to india.
Hell, we're now spending our tax dollars to buy Viagra for seniors.
link here
As a friend of mine put it. The seniors have been screwing over the young for years... now they've got Viagra to help.
Leave it to /. to turn everything into a political flame war.
Aren't they going into space next??
I have written an informative article about Hubble on my site.
- Shuttle Launch: $400-500 million
- Additional Hardware to meet CAIB requirements for non-ISS shuttle flights: $80-100 million
- Actual hardware and training to execute the mission: $300-400 million
- Potential Cost of Losing an Orbiter in an Accident: $2.2 billion
- Potential Cost of Losing Seven Lives in an Accident: Priceless (can you put a price on life?)
If this were a systems administration project like many of us geeks typically work on, we wouldn't be trying to sell the boss on a hugely expensive upgrade when we know damn well that we're going to be rolling out a completely new, cheaper, better system within the next couple of years. Sentiment aside, it just doesn't make sense to spend national resources and risk lives when we can devote our energies (and dollars) toward further improving ground-based telescopes and getting JWST aloft. Let Hubble give us the best it's got during its last few years, and then bury it in a blaze of literal glory as it burns up in the atmosphere.Hubble Are Vexing to Scientists
I'm not 100% sure, but I think Blue Star Ointment helps soothe Hubble vexation. And now it's peppermint flavored!
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
They should have listened to that kid at Best Buy! It's for your own protection, dammit!
Reason enough...
The solution is synthesis of a sky-time market from scientist demand. Scientist demand should derive money provided by their funding source to purchase required sky-time. If there is sufficient market demand for Hubble sky-time it will be profitable to repair. Otherwise it should be sold for scrap/ditched.
Seastead this.
I think the US needs a Constitutional Amendment that defines gravity as being exclusively for the purpose of making apples fall to the ground. Any other use of gravity, such as being an obstacle in the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, is against the intentions of the founders.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Any proposal to use the Space Shuttle should require answering the question: Which astronauts are you willing to kill for this mission?
Err, I think you mean it will be at the second Lagrange point (L2)..
Actually, it'll be in orbit round the L2 point, but now I'm just getting picky.
I think you'll find that the French physicist Lissajous had very little to do with orbital dynamics, and much more to do with fascinating sqiggly loop patterns that provide endless entertainment for thost supposed to be learning how to use an oscilloscope.
Wow. This guy is one sick fuck.
See you on CNN, in all likelihood....
If sending one shuttle into space is risky, wouldn't sending another shutle up to save the first be just as risky if not more so.
Space travel is inherently risky. People are going to die. Its just a fact of life.
Unfortunatly we have allowed NASA to become bloated by oversight that demands results, punishes failure, is unwilling to take risks, and when something does inevitably go wrong they are more intersted in assigning blame than solving thier problem.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
Yeah, but why miss an opportunity to bash the USA. After all, we only put the damn telescope up there in the first place. If we don't want to fix the sonofabitch, it's our business.
If the US refuses to repair the Hubble, the it should be considered abandoned and up for salvage. Then the EU, India or China could claim it and repair it.
Private health care costs more. For example:
Illness and medical bills now cause roughly half of all bankruptcies in the United States, more than a 23-fold increase since 1981, according to a new study. The study, which estimated that medical bankruptcies affect 2.2 million Americans annually, also found most of those bankrupted by illness had health insurance or lost it only because of the illness. (Emphasis mine)
STFU about slashdot bias.
At this point, we are supposed to mumble something about "out of context" and "Fox News made this up", and then we start a conversation about Halliburton.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
...then they should just outsource the repair of Hubble to Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites.
They've already proven they can do things better and cheaper than NASA.
With as firm a grasp as you have on the English language, I wonder how you can possibly feel qualified to address things as complex as Hubble and light spectra. Simpleton.
If it were true.
Canadian life expectancy: 79.4 years.
American life expectancy: 77.1 years.
Source.
STFU about slashdot bias.
It's not so much the lives, as the replacement costs for the lost shuttles. Even with the training and skill requirements for Astronauts, and despite the risks, they are eager and not hard to find. Spacecraft are less easy to replace.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Maybe the Canadian government could implement for us. Do you really want to trust the health of all of us to the organization which has brought us the thriftiness of the Pentagon, the respect-for-rights of the FBI, the public transparancy of the CIA, the timely delivery of the U.S. Postal Service, and the warm human compassion of HUD?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Reworded: "I'm Centauri, and back in the glory days of the Republic, the proclamations of our emperors would make the galaxy stand still and even the earless Narn would pay heed."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Some of this can be explained by the natural cryogenic properties of the Canadian environment.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
In all of the debates over repairing Hubble, I haven't seen any estimates on what it would take to replace it with a newer telescope.
Would it be worth scrapping if we can build something with more up to date technologies. Maybe go in with the Russians and use a Proton as the LV.
What about docking a new oneat the ISS to help ease maintenance?
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Apollo Guidance Computer.
The AGC at one point was consuming the vast majority of IC fabrication at the infancy of that industry, and proved that a "digital computer" was the way to go. The knowledge gained by creating the AGC, as well as what it could accomplish for the cost, showed where electronics in general was headed.
The computer that the grandparent post was written on owes much to MIT, NASA, and the AGC.
Linky
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"I'm Al Gore, and I took the initiative in creating this message and also in creating the medium."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
People will not die if the Hubble Space Telescope is abandonded. People WILL die if we leave Iraq immediately.
People will die if we stay in Iraq! We started the war! It's a big sandbox with all this running around and shooting at one another.
People won't die by fixing the Hubble.
Note that the thread ended with you as the clear victor. Thank you.
Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but most options I've seen ask to replace Hubble with something newly designed. Why this seems good, and if we had the money I could see it, I haven't heard the alternative:
Why not replace it with a brand new hubble, using the design of the original? I.e. reduce the costs of design, research and development by reusing what we already know works, of course use some obvious improvements (including avoiding the optics errors), but only replace something in the design if a better, proven, easy-to-upgrade or off-the-shelf alternative has been developed since Hubble was first designed/deployed.
Suppose you would ask which astronauts are not willing to take the risk of this mission?
My guess is, there won't be many who refuse. It's not that they don't care about safety.
Aside from life-extension repairs, the mission would also replace two instruments (one not really an instrument) with two brand new instruments providing greatly increased capability. Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) will replace Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), will replace the no longer needed corrective optics of COSTAR (the corrective optics are now incorporated into the individual instruments). To call this strictly a repair missing is a wild understatement.
--- What?
Which civilians are you willing to kill to NOT do the repair?
You already have to go up to put rockets on HST to be able to deorbit the satellite - otherwise we have to pray really hard it doesn't hit anything really important when it comes down. So, the astronauts are going up to HST, one way or another. The question is whether the added time of a repair and the money to fix HST is cheaper than other means of making space observations (ground telescopes, another Hubble, etc.).
The lives of the astronauts are always at stake unless they don't go anywhere (and even then, though outside of our responsibility). In this case, there isn't much difference in danger, either. Either they're going up or you're hoping that God really doesn't want to let the Hubble drop on anyone.
Only one billion, the mirror won't be messed up, will use the Repair Mission 4 instruments, and cost half the cost of the -repair mission- to put in orbit, and won't risk human lives on the worn-out shuttles.
Or, for the cost of the repair mission, you could launch two or three of these (economy of scale) and have more observation time available.
Just close Iraq for two days.
I for one would really like to see pics of that commet hitting earth in 2034.
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
The original cost to design, build, and launch the Hubble was 1.5 billion. I say we either take our chances on how long it lasts until the new telescope goes up in several years or rebuild it with (this time) better optics and digital sensors. Say we fix it for 2 billion. Who is to say that something other than the gyroscopes will go out soon thereafter? This is a complicated piece of equipment that is getting very old and is past its design life. And the engineers working on the repair project don't even think it has an especially high chance of success. Sure, I like the pictures as much as anyone else, but 2 billion dollars for a shot at a repair?
Maybe I missed seeing this in the other comments, but massive arrays here on earth are approaching and surpassing Hubble's abilities. So it is not true that we will be plunged into an eternal darkness until the new scope goes up.
Why don't we tether(move closer, physically attach who cares) hubble to the ISS? Future repair missions costs would be negligible as we have people close by at all times with frequent trips up that could carry replacement parts and holy cow it could perhaps even justify ISS which is largely just a excercise in keeping people alive in space. Not that this is without merit but for crying out loud give them something useful to do.
I'll fix it for $1 less than the Indians or Chinese.
It is significantly easier to get funding for a government project that already exists than to commission a new project. The scale or relative importance is immaterial. A simple example is occurring no less than 25 feet from my desk, at this very moment:
Two mid-20's support personnel are working on a 70's-era line printer and have been, all day, for the last eight days. They are working from original repair manuals, sitting amid piles of circuit board components and wiring harnesses, covered in toner to the elbows, and have recently dragged an oscilloscope over. Once in a while, I see a more senior individual giving them additional help. Assuming they are each paid $15/hr., the current bout of maintenance has already cost nearly $2000, ignoring parts or help from the higher-paid senior help.
Why is this especially horrible?
Because they aren't allowed to purchase a working, refurbished, identical printer on eBay for less than $50, let alone a couple hundred for a brand-new upgrade. That would require purchasing approval from several levels above and, until you work as a government employee or contractor, you can't understand how rarely that happens.
I do not think it is worth spending $2 billion on Hubble - its been brilliant, but at the end of the day its 70's tech which will get harder and harder to keep going. Also not in the ideal orbit - the earth is too close.
It hsa been suggested we could build another "cheapy" scope for this sort of money or less with about the same capability as Hubble - things like Mirrors, optics, CCDs, etc have come a long long way in the last few decades..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Iraq buried fighter jets. How hard would it be to bury a bomb? Or destroy labs? etc It's obvious to me that Saddam was willing to destroy his equipment rather than let it be found. It's lucky we've found things like jets that are fairly easy to track by satellite and determine last known locations, but its quite another thing to track a vehicle that may or may not be carrying a WMD, and then determine where that weapon went. I would venture that there is equipment buried in the sands that will NEVER be found.
Go ahead and mod me off topic if you like or a troll or inflammatory, but just think about it for a moment.I'm trying to make a serious point.
How about from the universal health care that the Bush administration wants to pay for in Iraq when there's no way they'd want a program like that for Americans? Or the additional $80 billion authorization for the next year in Iraq and Afganistan for military operations (you know, 1/80th of that)? Or defunding the religious groups getting government dollars? Or scaling back the tax break for the wealthiest 1% of Americans by, oh, say, $714 each (for the high end at $2 billion)?
Or maybe NOT cap penalties that the government take from business that do wrong like Tyco, Worldcom, Microsoft, etc. where the monetary punishment is less than the taxes they would have paid had they done things above board?
If only we could give back 1 of the B2 bombers that the Republican Congress pushed through when the DOD and Air Force wanted to kill it off, that would pay for somewhere between 2 and 4 repair missions. In roughly 1992 dollars.
Why is it that NASA is trying to go with the Emacs concept in space anyways? I thought the philosophy was shifting to smaller, one-function satellites that were way cheaper to build and deliver? One satellite for infrared, one for x-rays, one for visible, etc. There's no one point of failure - losing one function only disables one portion of the useability. (Not counting the US Gov't as the point of failure)
Commodus the Scientist...
Commodus: Why is Hubble still alive?Lucilla: I don't know.
Commodus: It shouldn't be alive. It vexes me. I am terribly vexed.
I know this is going to start a huge flame war, but seriously - what good has the space program done for mankind? Anything other than cure our lust for knowledge of the unknown?
It may colonize the solar system and increase our survival prospects.How about putting half the amount up as a new X prize for a commercial venture to get up there and service it?
A few million got Burt Rutan's ship into space, surely 500 million to a billion dollars would get a commercial, reusable system.
It seems that everyone just assumes that even though Nasa is way more expensive than it needs to be that they should still get the job.
Unix is User Friendly, it is just particular about who it's friends are!
Well what if we used the same design with the few upgrades they've come up with since the original concept?
Hubble helps us gather knowledge and advance the progress of mankind and send us into the future, Pretty Important.
Certain people want to send mankind back to the stoneage, loosing all advancements we have made since then. Killing them is even more important that fixing hubble.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Now that you've listed all these Democrats saying this, you can list some Republicans saying it, if you like. But as soon as you're done, why don't you answer the original question?
> Please tell me, how was invading Iraq "protecting
> ourselves
Pointing out that many Democrats considered Iraq a threat is nothing but a defense of Republicans' failed policies. "Well, some Democrats thought Iraq was a threat too...nah, nah, nah." How does this answer the original question of how invading Iraq really protected us?
I'm an independent, and disagreed with the invasion of Iraq as a way of protecting ourselves from WMD. When nearly every Republican AND Democrat voted for the resolution to go to war, I disagreed with both of them.
Demonstrating that Democrat politicians are just as stupid as Republican politicians doesn't help answer the original question. It does, however, show exactly how biased and politically-minded you are. Rather than trying to figure out whether a policy was wrong, or defend that policy, you immediately jump to defend what apparently is your political party of choice. In other words, honesty and objectivism are not important to you, only partisanship.
It is exactly this kind of thinking that allows politicians to make poor choices and not be held accountable for them. People like you resort to partisan hackery, rather than trying to fix the system or question the choices of the people they supported in the election.
Now, history will tell whether invading Iraq was worth the cost. I personally believe that WMD were not even the *primary* reason for invading, although they were the *primary* justification. That doesn't mean I don't see the invasion as having some merit. But it does mean I question whether invading was really done to protect the United States. Even if it was, I believe it was done on a much more general level, because we believe that controlling several key countries in the Middle East will allow us to more effectively combat terrorism.
Again I repeat, however, that the statements of a few Democrats do nothing to answer this question, but rather distort the issue by making it a question of party politics. There has been significant rebellion in govt. institutions and in society on the way intelligence was used and interpreted to come to a certain conclusion about Iraq's WMDs, from Republicans, Democrats and Independents. Recently, this sentiment was tapped in an attempt to take power from the reigning party, but that does not make it a Democratic issue.
Perhaps you should stop thinking as a Republican and start thinking as a person. Then you might be able to start to answer the question that was originally posed.
-Dan
Somebody did his homework.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
$80,000,000,000.00 well spent to find out that indeed, they did not have WMD.
The reasons people give and the reasons people do aren't necessarily the same things, you know. War was not the only option.
Whatever happened to the idea of putting a telescope on the moon?
Try not to let life get in the way of living.
The argument about hubble is that it'd cost as much to fix it as it would to replace it with an equivalent or better telescope. Given the option of de-orbiting Iraq and being able to build a new one for the price of the war, I think they'd be tempted. ;)
It is a interesting choice isn't it? Refurbish a fantastic scientific tool for a couple billion dollars ( which I think we can afford ) or save that money.
If we could use that couple billion dollars instead toward a year 2005 replacement for Hubble then let it fall and lets get a better one up there.
If we are just going to let the scope die and not replace it. I say we fix it instead.
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
For those wishing to avoid NYT's soul-eating registration, try:
Congress Debates Saving Hubble
For $1 billion to $2 billion why don't they build another telescope instead of fixing Hubble? Seems to make more sense to save your money and build a bigger better one than try to keep an old one alive.
Skylooker cost so high! PETALWING MUCH VEXED!
aaaaaaa aaaaaaa aaaaaaaaa aaaaa aaaaa a a aaaaaaaa aaaaaaa aaaa
The scientists that depend on and use this data in their research can obviously donate enough money to pay for the space mission to repair the Hubble.
While Hubble does have perfect seeing in space, it is really starting to suffer by being just not very big. Frontline research telescopes on Earth like Keck are far larger (thus more light gathering power), and, with adaptive optics, rival Hubble's resolution. Also, earthbound radio astronomers are doing high-resolution imagery with aperture synthesis that is of the same order of resolution as Hubble.
Bear in mind too that those were 1.5 billion 1980s dollars. Inflation will have changed that number by now.
...laura
JWST is intended to observe the infra-red spectrum. It won't be able to observe in visible light as well as Hubble can. A replacement telescope will cost much more than $2B, especially with NASA doing the lifting. If Hubble goes, we loss our best view into space, and given the condition of our space program JWST may never make it to space.
What the coward fails to recognize is the reason that Bush is accountable is that as the President he is in a unique position. He has more access to more intelligence than anyone else, he has the power to distribute that intelligence so as to alter the debate, and he has the power to alter the manner in which intelligence is gathered. Bush did not use his unique ability to gather intelligence to come up with an accurate picture.
You might take another look at the dates of the statements and when President Bush was first elected - or do you honestly mean to suggest that Bush is somehow 'accountable' for these Democrats coming to the same exact conclusions about Iraq and WMDs years before he became president?
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Just back the shuttle up to 'er, flip on th' tractor beam, an' haul 'er over to the ISS. Use some of that fancy Russian duct tape that keeps the station afloat an bolt it on the roof like an antenna at a trailer park.
All the Arab forces would have backed out. So what, they were not a significant part of the military force. Letting the camel jockeys stand bitching while we ignored them would have been a clear message. It would have told them their place in the world (Oil boys).
Think they would have cut off their source of hard currency? (No they NEED the oil revenue)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You damn litter-bug
Except for the fact that NASA has repeatedly stated if they can't afford to fix Hubble, they'll at least make sure it gets safely de-orbited.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
If they don't want it, surely someone does? Put in things into the sale contract, like it must be used for research or whatever, and give it a price.
If it's going to cost too much to repair, make it someone elses problem, and get money back on your project.
... and inspired. When did you last see a poster made from a Chandra or SOHO shot? Compare the numbers of lay people who even know about Chandra and SOHO to those who know of Hubble.
Hubble is more than a research tool. It has actually given something to non-scientists. If the public loses interest, funding of that type of space science can only dwindle.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Talking about universal health care is what got this discussion so far off-topic (glad to see my parent get modded Offtopic, but all the others got some high scores?!) I thought the real story is why it's so expensive to repair Hubble, not what the war is costing us. Go to politics section and rant about chem trails and Bush if you must! GOSH!
The real story is that Hubble was too good at what it did. It was too good and needed to be terminated. See, the illuminati didn't want anyone to see the alien invasion force maneuvering into position behind the rings of Antares. Reliable sources indicate that the human traitors will 'milk the cow' till the last moment before invasion. The traitors who hid the aliens existence from the public will be completely disappointed when they find out they are a section of the buffet. But this happens almost everyday according to Men In Black. And my reliable source was a three-shot margarita and un cerveza. So don't quote me, quote my beer.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Let's have a Slashdot-mediated mirror grinding event! With enough hands and effort we could easily make a giant telescope for only a few hundred pizzas. Then we only need to pay for the rocket; surely if we chipped in a buck or two, that would cover it.
Given a decade's improvement in technology, why not put up a new space-based optical telescope?
IIRC, the first Hubble had a flawed mirror that was corrected on a later repair mission in software.
A Hubble 2 could have better mirrors and more of them.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I guess the problem of america is that they have started to become a non-democratic democracy.
What I mean by this is that you still have most of the democratic structurs, but since you have two powerful partys which want to lead the country in a similar way, you find yourself in the voting cabin, and even if you trust the voting system, you have to choose between devil and hell. (do you say so in english? - in case not: you can choose the war of bush against 'terror' or the warof kerry against 'terror')
Meaning, if you are against that war, you can't choose from kerry or bush, since they are both supporting it. So you have Naider (or however he's called) as the 'only alternative' - he is (to my limited knowledge) against that war. If you look at statistics, you will find out that quite many people are against that war. But why didn't all of these choose Naider? Because he doesn't stand a chance. He didn't have that media presence the other kandidates have (f.e. he didn't participate in these duells of the two mentioned candidates), and since that's important in the USA...
are you able to read? I mean, have you read everything and tryed to interpret and understand it? If not, I would suspect that you don't understand what you have posted. Consequently, you are unable to understand the global terror the US faces (considering understanding the terror as possible) The difference between Bush and Kerry would have been the way the war is fought, and about the rethoric used. Both were pro the iraq war, but Kerry is at least NOT INCAPAPLE of reading (you know that bush is an dyslexic), which is at least something (if you have nothing else).
No, they did not reach the "exact conclusions" and they were not arguing for war. Dubya is they fool responsible for the $300 billion (so far) and tens of thousands of deaths. (Not to say he actually made those decisions. The actual decisions are handled by Rove and Cheney, but Dubya doesn't mind or care or even know what is going on--the actual decision makers know how to pull Dubya's strings. However, Dubya is still "responsible", at least technically speaking.)
With your typical intellectual dishonesty, now you're supposed to claim Saddam would have eventually killed them anyway.
However, I do thank you for posting with an actual name (in contrast to the noisy anonymous coward defending your positions elsewhere in this discussion). It let's me mark you a a fool^h^h^h^h foe so I'll be less likely to see your future posts. Not censorship. Your right to free speech does not imply any right to force anyone to listen to your blathersome lies.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.