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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...
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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.
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.
"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free." - P J O'Rourke (1947- )"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
...of the ISS. Is that money pit doing anything for science but falling apart?
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.
"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.
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I think, too, there's a bit of the planned obsolescence attitude. We're used to throwing stuff out instead of fixing it. When have you ever taken an old television set to be repaired? It's cheaper to buy a new one (which will be bigger than the old one, and have a universal remote - universal my ass - but that's another rant). I don't continue pasting my nylons together with clear nail polish - I get a run, I toss 'em and get a new pair. Why won't NASA invent the runless pantyhose? (What are those people with the goat-milk-spider-web creatures doing, anyway?)
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
"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?
"Argument by quotation is silly" -- Anonymous Coward (???? -- present)
what good has the space program done for mankind? Anything other than .... knowledge?
/. topics linked to every article, so every time someone posts a question asked and answered ad nausem, we can just point them to it.
*sigh* This question comes up every time space exploration comes up, and everytime it's answered. Really, there should be FAQ's for
Discounting scientific knowledge, we have, briefly and non-comprehensively:
1) Satellite monitoring, navigation and communications technology.
2) Mass produced integrated circuits.
3) Major contributions to the environmental movement.
4) Advanced management techniques.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
The competition for use of the HST is still fierce, and for good reason.
The problem is that it still offers capabilities that nothing else can replicate, or will for some considerable period of time.
Yes, there are other telescopes that can do better than HST for some tasks, but there are still many tasks for which the HST is the best there is. Even if we consider planned future telescopes, they are all optimized for different things. The Webb telescope, for example, is optomized for infrared observations.
Yes, we should be able to build someting with the capabilities of the Hubble much more cheaply now, but nobody actually has funding to do such a thing, and I suspect the chances of such a project being funded are worse that a repair (even if the repair is more expensive).
If your 15 year old car were the only car ever built with the features you wanted, and nobody was willing to build another one, you might approach a major repair differently.
-Hil
- 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.Uhm no...
With all deference to Burt Rutan and his accomplishments, he did in 2004 what NASA did in the 1950's and 1960's AND he used all the research findings that NASA discovered while doing it.
If NASA could have copied what others did, they could have done it cheaper too.
Burt Rutan had 40 years of areospace research to draw on. NASA had to do the reasearch and discover the stuff from scratch.
Don't compare apples and oranges.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
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