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... "

Comments

Peanuts

[fembots]

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.

Re:Peanuts

[TheFlyingGoat]

There's two things to respond to in your post:

1. $1-2 billion might not be a good investment for the Hubble. If that money is applied to the design of a replacement satellite, or possibly a replacement for the shuttles, then we might gain even more by NOT spending on the Hubble. It's a cost tradeoff issue, and is hardly a simple decision to make. It's a decision that can only be made when looking at the entire NASA budget (which Slashdot posts never do).

I'd personally like to see $1-2 billion go towards a replacement for the shuttles, since that would greatly reduce the maintenance costs for satellites down the line.

2. The anti-Bush rhetoric is getting old. There's many reason we should or shouldn't be in Iraq, but the fact remains that we ARE in Iraq. We should not leave anytime soon (most reasonable people can agree with that), since the entire thing would have been in vain. So, we're stuck with paying the $80 billion per year for the next few years.

At this point it does no good to complain about the extra money required for Iraq, since it's going there no matter what. It's far more important to determine how agencies will make better use of their reduced funding... like deciding if the Hubble should be repaired or if the money should be spent on something else.

$1 billion?

[Zardus]

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?

Re:$1 billion?

[MightyMartian]

Hubble has a rather bright design, being modular, it can be upgraded considerably. I would suspect designing and building an orbital telescope to equal Hubble would cost many billions of dollars.

The loss of Hubble, while somewhat offset by new technologies that increase the abilities of ground-based telescopes, would still be an enormous blow to astronomers and cosmologists. It has been an extraordinarily useful tool, and to my mind, letting die and then pushing it into the ocean in 2012 is about a horrible fate as I can imagine.

Unfortunately NASA is burdened with that collosal waste of cash, the International Space Station. Hubble does more scientific work in a month than the ISS is every likely to do. If anything should be pushed into a decaying orbit, it should be that big fat waste of cash.

Re:So true, so true.

[AtariAmarok]

"And don't even get me started on universal health care..."

"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free." - P J O'Rourke (1947- )"

What is truly vexing are the costs...

[Anonymous Coward]

...of the ISS. Is that money pit doing anything for science but falling apart?

New Telescope?

[TrevorB]

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.

Accounting?

[mosb1000]

"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?

Re:Let it go.

[hildaur]

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