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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.
Here
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)
"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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now that the unsuspecting people think that hubble is just floating garbage, it's true purpose can be utilized; a High powered Super Laser.
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.
"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?
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.
"Argument by quotation is silly" -- Anonymous Coward (???? -- present)
duh, just outsource it to india.
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
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.
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.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.
The wheels of the space shuttle would collapse upon touchdown from the weight of the Hubble.
Nope: NASA originally intended to recover the HST and stick it in the Smithsonian, as the parent suggested, see the second to last paragraph in this story, for example.
The retrieval mission was cancelled for various reasons, but collapsing wheels wasn't one of them.
It was never designed to land with cargo still in the hold.
The shuttle has landed with cargo still in the hold numerous times, albeit not anything that massed as much as the HST. Indeed, so called the shuttle's large 'downmass' capability was one of its big sells, and is still something unique to it.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
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
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?
The only Space Shuttle with a cargo bay large enough to hold Hubble was Columbia. No longer an option.
To use any of the other shuttles would require major, major structural modifications to them-- probably more expensive than just repairing it and leaving them there. And, as another poster pointed out, shuttles aren't designed to land with cargo, so more modification would be needed to bulk up the landing gear and drag chutes.
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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
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