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No Formal Risk Analysis of Hubble Rescue by NASA
Somegeek writes "
SpaceDaily.com is running a story that
NASA never performed a formal risk analysis of a shuttle mission to rescue the Hubble Space Telescope before they decided to cancel the mission on grounds of risk. The story quotes Fred Gregory, the current acting NASA administrator, as stating that previous NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe made the decision "based on what he perceived was the risk". This perceived risk is in performing a manned shuttle mission that is out of range of using the International Space Station as an emergency refuge. The Hubble's current batteries and gyroscopes will probably fail in a few years, leaving the dead telescope to crash back to earth around year 2020."
I guess it would be poetic justice if it fell down to Earth and landed on Fred Gregory.
...then as NASAs competence ramps down, may be private space entrepreneurs' ramp up.
Perhaps like an abandoned sailing ship the Hubble will be salvaged--and rescued--by private a private space craft.
Kinda OT but wouldn't the people who are paying millions of dollars to save the show Enterprise be better spent for the HST?
Got to make you wonder just how safe the shuttles are when the primary risk isn't repairing the Hubble telescope but being on a shuttle in the first place. Two blow up and now they hesitate to take them up unless it's in an orbit that crosses with the space station. After the Challenger I said I'd go up the next day on one because I trusted NASA. Now I'm not so sure. Sad because they used to have one of the best safety records in history given the massive risks involved in any space mission.
NASA really knew what they were doing. they spent quite a bit of money, but we did Apollo, we did Skylab, we did Hubble, and they managed to maintain public support. Then they just somehow fucked it up. I get the feeling it had something to do with the ISS, because that's around when the problems really began. The ISS is not a sustainable or viable presence in space. What we really need to look toward is 1) commercial development in space, which will lead to 2) a continued stay there for humanity. I usually don't like privatisation of government programs, but in this case, I think there may be companies that can construct and launch, for example, inflatable habitats as mentioned in previous slashdot articles, at a low cost. NASA hasn't even really seriously considered something like this, and now look at what we have. A space station that is important for scientific research, yes, but the actual value we're getting out of it for the money we spent is HIGHLY questionable.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
YOU ARE DENSE
The last eight years of NASA history have been a basic running thing of massive administrative incompetence and poor oversight at NASA resulting in consistent disaster and the only results being that since "NASA isn't working" we're cutting science out of NASA and putting more power in the hands of the administrators that failed to provide appropriate oversight in the first place.
People keep questioning whether NASA should continue, given the disaster it's been. Man, NASA's fine. It's people like Sean O'Keefe that have to go. Thank God he's retiring. Unfortunately I'm afraid of who his replacement will be, especially since his replacement seems to be coming in as part of a program to cut out what little science is left in NASA's programs in order to dump all the budget to a vague "let's go to mars!" plan that seems about as well-conceived and likely to turn out as planned as any of those five unsuccessful shuttle replacement programs NASA blew its budget on at the end of the 90s.
O'Keefe's decision was right on.
NASA has determinetd that ISS is a higher priority (as it should be -- there are international committments). There's more risk in servicing the Hubble than not -- and any additional risk makes finishing the ISS less likely.
Risk analysis complete.
When you are dealing with Red Tape, you cannot just say "We want a new telescope" because the answer is "What is wrong with your current telescope? It sees the universe just fine, right?"
So, you say your current telescope is old and you need a budget for something new and bigger and better, technology progresses, right?
What we can infer is that NASA has something else they want to put up that, if they "rescued" the Hubble, would cut into the budget for their new thing they want to put up.
Don't go throught the regular contractors because they want billions of dollars.
Contract small companies that are willing to build one for peanuts.
Find some other material other than glass to construct it from to save on weight. Maybe a thin ceramic that can be slightly bent with heat or electricity.
some facts:
# How big is it? This mirror measures 2.5 meters (98 inches) across and weighs 748 kilograms (1,650 pounds). The useable surface of the mirror in the Hubble was slightly smaller-about 2.4 meters (94 inches)-because the mirror mounting covered the outer edge.
# Why doesn't it look like a mirror? This mirror was never used, so it never received a reflective coating. The mirror in the Hubble was coated with a thin layer of aluminum and also overcoated with magnesium fluoride, so it could better reflect ultraviolet light.
# What is it made of? The mirror is made of Corning ultra-low expansion glass. The front and back surfaces are fused to a lattice core and to the inner and outer bands, creating a sturdy but lightweight structure.
It is the undeniable truth.
So many people are making so much fuss about the decision to let the Hubble die, when there are ALREADY better telescopes in operation, and MUCH better telescopes planned. If NASA has to go fix the old one, not only are they just delaying the inevitable, but they're also delaying other, more useful missions.
I hate to see something like Hubble just fall to Earth. There are EXPLORERS willing to risk their lives, and people will to risk their equipment. From what I understand NASA astronauts are WELL AWARE of the risks presented by doing such missions. What is sad to me is that we use spin-off and related knowledge and technologies from things like the Hubble launch, but that the actual results of it seem to just be icing. It's the process of doing it that seems more important than the "End Result". Strangely, you would think in-orbit manned repairs would really take priority (considering the amount of pricey objects up there: in life and in money). But I guess if you don't once, why would you bother to do it again? Outer space and inner space are two of the most important human agendas. To see them back-seated to political and financial concern are reflective of our state as a people.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
Now, I'm admitting I know little about this, so forgive my ignorance.
They say it will eventually fail and start to fall back to earth, could they wait for it to get closer then send out a rescue mission when it it close enough to the ISS, Or would the then gyroless Hubble be too much of a risk to attempt to grab from space?
I meant to say "But I guess if you DO IT once" not "don't once" will=willing (SHOULD HAVE PREVIEWED.. hehe)
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
The CAIB did a fairly large number of risk asessments for returning the Shuttle to flight. That covered just basic flight and the risks involved. The numbers for Hubble would be essentially those numbers.
I rather suspect that the risk analyis for Hubble would be something along the lines of "For non-strategic flights on Shuttle, we have to have a 99.5% chance of success". Since the baseline Shuttle analysis for the risks on return-to-flight are already outside that boundry, then it makes zero sense to spend money digging deeper.
Loose consensus at sci.space.tech is that O'Keefe's decision has virtually nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the extremely tight schedule necessary to complete ISS (International Space Station).
O'Keefe stated that he would abide by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) report. My understanding is that board did not insist that the Shuttle be able to seek refuge at ISS.
It's interesting that the article speaks of "risk" but doesn't explicitly use the term " safety risk" which is assumed. Indeed, the risks of any extra Shuttle flights go beyond the safety of the crew. Consider that the Shutle's only mission is ISS assembly after which the fleet will be retired -- and rightfully so. If a Shuttle were even to be reparably damaged with no injuries to the crew, the ISS program would be seriously threatened.
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
Let's face it, we have a President who believes in the literal truth of the bible, and that the world is four thousand some years old. He's hardly likely to want to find a scientific instrument (even if it is probably the most successful scientific instrument in history) that contradicts his worldview so spectacularly. And don't be too surprises when Hubble's orbital decay sends it hurtling straight for a mosque; two birds with one stone.
When he retired from NASA, did he go to work for SCO?
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
If NASA kept Hubble, they would have to make cuts on other missions. NASA needs to keep doing new things, when was the last time Hubble made it on the news (not including its cancelation)?
You could, its just that Hubble is so massive that it world take a ridiculous amount of fuel.
For instance to get Hubble to the same orbit as ISS you are looking at about 40 tonnes of fuel. To get to a gravity neutral point (say earth-moon LaGrangian) would take a lot more than that.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
It's really sad how far NASA has plummeted down the priority list since it wasn't being pushed to 'defeat' communism. The decline in NASA's quality and quantity of work are inevitable given how their budget seems to be the sacrificial lamb in Washington so often. I, for one, will continue to be interested in the heavens. As was said in my favorite commercial: "We've always watched the stars. If you look at the sky you can see the beginning of time."
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Didn't the formal review of space shuttle risks cover and recommend strongly against Hubble Rescue Missions?
Why do we need a second report detailing the shuttle risks involved in the Hubble Mission when we have a report about the risks of a shuttle mission within the hubble mission?
I don't know if this is what you are trying to say-- I can't quite tell. So please don't take this as an attack.
But just because public space development is good does not mean that NASA is bad, or that bad things happening to NASA are good.
I see a lot of people on slashdot, seemingly mostly libertarians, who seem to be cheering anything bad that happens to NASA on the theory this is somehow a victory for private space development. It isn't. This is not a zero sum game. NASA's loss is not private space development's gain. A gain for private space development is a gain for humanity's involvement in space; a loss for public space development is a loss for humanity's involvement in space, but nothing else.
The things NASA does in space don't supplant what private enterprise would be doing, they supplement it. NASA's goals in space are-- or should be-- to do the things that benefit humanity but which no clear profit model exists from. Meanwhile the advancements NASA creates in space can-- or should be-- models for private enterprise. NASA could and should do more to explicitly encourage private space development and explicitly see themselves as to some extent partners with private space enterprise (I don't know who owns the technology NASA uses in space, I assume the aerospace contractors who built everything do, but I think that technology should be publicly documented and the patents available to the public for use by private operators, since after all the public paid for it) but even as it is private space development can and will benefit from NASA and its presence, and vice versa. Private space development and NASA aren't enemies, this isn't football.
Meanwhile even in the areas where the actions of NASA and private space operators overlap, private space operators simply aren't ready to replace NASA even if they should. Private space development shows great promise but it is truly at an infant stage.
Aside from the above, I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying; you may well be right about salvaging or reclaiming Hubble. looks like Hubble will be entering the atmosphere sometime between 2010 and 2032. They're not there now, but it seems likely private space enterprise may get to the point where they can rescue it before it is lost forever even if NASA isn't interested...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I'm both amused and frustrated everytime this topic comes up. All good things must come to an end and so must Hubble.
The good news is that its follow on mission (JWST) is in the works and although there may be an interruption and the methods may be different, the "exploration" will continue.
But when I hear constant harping on a subject like a 15 year old satellite, I have to ask myself why. And like everything - follow the money.
Hubble is unlike any other unmanned, free-flyer that I'm aware of in that it supports a vast array of salaries and positions. Servicing missions support costs more than just the shuttle and hardware, but they also support an entirely separate set of paychecks. So there will always be opposition and those parties may have valid points to make.
But NASA HQ, spending tax payers money, must chose when enough is enough. And ending old programs to fund new ones can lead to better and cheaper science.
No one likes to see their job evaporate with time, but before letting your heart strings be tugged by conspiracy theories about big, bad NASA administration, just make sure that you're not being played by political rhetoric issues by those who would otherwise have to find new work.
I don't think emotion really has anything to do with it. I'd look at it like this.
Can we continue to get valuable scientific use out of the Hubble?
Then we should!
The next generation of space telescopes will be totally sufficient to replace Hubble utterly. But they aren't ready yet. In the meantime let's make the most of what we have. Doing otherwise is simply taking the scientific benefit we could have received and throwing it away.
But just because public space development is good does not mean that NASA is bad, or that bad things happening to NASA are good.
Should have been
But just because private space development is good does not mean that NASA is bad, or that bad things happening to NASA are good.
I hope it was still clear what I meant there.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Thank you, Mr.Spock.
Clearly, if we were all good logical beings, things would be much better. But we're not, so they ain't.
So I say fuck it (and them). (and you)
It's more important to kill a bunch of stupid third world people than to finance Social Security let alone further science.
Basically, there are two sides to this story. First of all, any kind of talk about risks is complete bullshit. The risks are no greater than in all previous Shuttle missions, and flying within docking distance of ISS is not a magical solution that somehow makes the risks becaom significantly smaller. It's just that NASA became so politicized, that they routinely use purely political tricks, and this talk of risk is exactly that. They are just repeating their routine after the Challenger accident: back then it turned out that the Shuttle's lack of emergency escape system proved to be a bad idea. So, their solution was to invent a bogus, unuseable escape system to make everybody shut up. The only thing this system is good for, is torturing the crue very creatively for PR purposes. And now they came up with the "if it breaks, we'll dock at ISS" solution. A complete garbage. On the other hand, NASA is right in one thing: Hubble IS NOT WORTH REVIVING YET AGAIN. It's better to let it die gracefully and replace it with a new and better telescope. A Shuttle mision to repair Hubble is, at this point, a complete waste of resources and a tremendous hinderence to the NGST program. In short - NASA became a purely political organization, one that is incapable of telling people the hard truth, and consistenyly choosing to replace it with sweet lies. And this certainly didn't happen just yesterday. :(
Dude, start taking your meds. That tirade doesn't make any sense. You could accuse Bush of not caring whether or not the telescope lives, but you're gonna have to come up with some kind of source to make that allegation. As for the militarization stuff, that's not happening at NASA.
The reality is fixing the Hubble will be damn expensive, and there's some question as to what is the most reasonable allocation of funding. As much as I think the NASA is full of boondoggles, I'm not sure the amount of useful science in the Hubble is worth the cost of fixing it.
If I were in charge I'd send the shuttle up for its final mission to fix Hubble then scrap the shuttle and the ISS. Then I'd take the money they were soaking up and use it for robotic missions.
You know what your real answer is. "No, You'd rather have NO OPTICAL telescope in LEO." The bottom line is more than USD 1 billion would have to be spent to put up a new telescope with the same capability as HST. Since there is no new telescope in the budget pipeline or Hubble rescue, it means the universe from Earth goes back to atmospheric blinders once the Hubble slips out of orbit. What kind of retarded thinking would let you think the Hubble going dead would be a good thing?!?!
If the answer to a question is blindingly obvious, you don't need to study it.
If it's pretty obvious, it still may not be worthwhile to do a full-scale study. You just have to be "sure enough" so that the odds of being wrong times the cost of being wrong is low compared to the certain costs of doing a full study.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I remember reading an earlier story here about the estimated cost to send humans to mars in the 70-90 billion dollar range. Bush during re-election pledged about a 3 billion dollar increase and a new long term mission.
Obviously funding to fix hubble had to be cut to pay for the shoe string budgeted mars exploration.
The safety hazard is really a coverup.
http://saveie6.com/
dude, try reading the farking news. Here's a couple of links for you. my rant makes perfect sense, to anyone who actually knows wtf is going on, which obviously doesn't include you or the "humorous" mismoderator. my karma rating is well deserved, even if my posts tend to displease some. here's a couple of quote for you, too:
The White House has eliminated funding for a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope from its 2006 budget request and directed NASA to focus solely on deorbiting the popular spacecraft at the end of its life, according to government and industry sources.
The paper reports that NASA has binned its plans to send a robot to service the telescope so that it can focus its resources on Bush's Martian ambitions.
the argument that it is "too expensive" to salvage the hubble so bush can spend more on mars missions is laughable, and that's ignoring the billions he's flushing down the toilet in his oil war. the usefulness is hubble is indisputable if you ask the experts involved. and if you think nasa isn't going to be involved in the launching of the up-coming military space missions, you're living in fantasy land.
lastly, here's a link to google news. learn to use it.
So why be so precious about one more dangerous mission? If it fails, there won't even be television cameras allowed into Dover AFB to witness the coffins coming home.
Of the fourteen points that Dr. Lawrence Britt uses to define fascism, this is pretty well summed up by numbers 4 and 11.
I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone about the Hubble Origins Probe, a proposal to replace Hubble with a cheaper and better (and, dare I say, faster) craft:
An international team led by Johns Hopkins University astronomers have proposed an alternative to sending a robotic or manned repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe, reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and $1 billion to build and launch, approximately the same cost as a robotic service mission.
Here's the official web site, with slideshows and posters explaining the planned scientific instruments:
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/hop/
In my opinion the original Hubble is mostly valuable for sentimental/historical reasons. From a pure cost/benefit analysis, replacing it seems the best solution in pretty much every possible way.
Clearly the entire scienctific aspect of NASA has been cut to the bone in preference to militarisation. Hubble just doesn't fit within the parameters of the new NASA, the NASA of space based weapons, spysats and orbiting nuclear platforms. Let's not forget that the orginal mission parameters of the Space Shuttle were from the military. Whatever scientific mission NASA still has will be funded on a garage-lab best effort basis. The ISS will be allowed to die on its own as well.
O'keefe made a snap decision. Ok, no problem. After all he has years and years of work doing engineering assesments. Oh wait. He is an accountant and a politician. IOW, he has NO SKILL SETS that are required for making intelligent choices on this unless there was something else driving this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The political fallout from a disaster during a Hubble repair mission is something NASA can't absorb. No risk analysis can act as a buffer between NASA and a disillusioned public and a Congress full of people looking for reasons to gut NASA.
O'Keefe's decision was a political decision made for political reasons. Choosing not to fly the Shuttle's most dangerous mission was the right decision in the aftermath of Columbia. Not a popular decision, but the right decision.
Risk analysis is an engineering tool, but leading NASA is not an engineering task.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The Aerospace Corporation (a govt thinktank) did an extensive, and full blown engineering study on all the various options for rescuing the Hubble.
;-)
Whoever wrote that there was no study has not made ANY qualified effort to vet the report.
vr...
mdw
parent suggested waiting until hubble falls enough to be relatively close to ISS's orbit. (by relatively i mean close enough to transfer to ISS orbit and dock with ISS in the event of trouble)
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I don't think this is possible even if they were at the same level orbit.
Hubble's inclination is about as low as you can get (launching from kennedy that is), about 28.5 degrees. ISS's orbit was optimized for revinue (passing over as many countries as possible so as to get funding) and is about 51.6 degrees.
http://www.spacetelescope.org/about/general/orbit
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast01dec_
The delta-V required for an inclination change is much greater than that required for a transfer (from high low orbit).
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I choose hubble. Regardless of how outdated or expensive, if there's significant downtime before the "new" telescope goes up, and the mission to reboost hubble is feasible, then why not keep it up there?
But a friend of mine (and a robotics engineer) made a good point: Hubble sure kicks ass, but we've got bigger and better technology now. Maybe we can spend all the "Hubble Rescue" money on something even more impressive, which would yield even better imagery than our good ol' HST.
Sure, I'll be very sad when (not if, apparently) NASA de-orbits the instrument, but as long as we can get something better up there beforehand, we're not going to be losing all that much, except the memories. (Well, that, and all the shared time astronomers could be logging on the HST in the future.)
Though it would be kind of cool to bring the HST back to Earth in a shuttle hold, and analyze the surfaces and instruments. Then we could put the sucker in the Air and Space museum, which would be totally awsome.
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
to the highest bidder. They get a little money (what's it really worth) and don't have to worry about it.
NASA failed to be bureaucratic!?
Did they suddenly switch to an achievement based payroll?
Direct away from face when opening.
This guy in Space Daily a year and a half ago wrote an interesting article that proposed the idea of using an ESA hosted launch of a Soyuz (or two) to service Hubble. I have no idea if its feasible, but I wonder if anyone in NASA is considering ideas like this.
We apologize for the preceding message. All those responsible have been sacked.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
The Shuttle's most dangerous mission was Centaur, which would have put a fully fueled liquied booster in the payload bay - at a few tons over the rated capacity of the launch vehicle. It was cancelled in the wake of the Challenger accident, and I heard none of the engineers wishing it hadn't been...
"...not an engineering task".
Actually, we refer to some forms of management as "electropolitical engineering".
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
damned good thing he's headed out of there. now, if the new guy has some cojones and puts the hubble mission back on the schedule, we're getting somewhere.....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This perceived risk is in performing a manned shuttle mission that is out of range of using the International Space Station as an emergency refuge.
Um, okay, but if this concern is so important, how did we get the Hubble in orbit in the first place, fifteen years ago and well before the ISS existed?
to figure it out? Due to Bush's Mars hallucination, there is no money for anything but going to the Red Planet! Even JIMO (Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter) is being funded only because it allows the U.S. to develop spacegoing nuclear power sources in contravention to treaties (done by NASA - OK; done by DoD - not OK): Nothing will be funded except what furthers a long-term financial bleed to the aerospace majors. That's sure how it looks from Ames.
...if they can send a robot mission to attach some rockets to it, to make it *come down*, seems like they could just re-aim it for a higher orbit and park the thing so it stays up longer, and eventually space flight will be cheaper/easier and etc and it can be rebuilt and reused. I mean what's the diff? so they got to use a scosh more powerful rocket propulsion dealie, again, so what? still cheap enough to do most likely. It's not like there are thousands of advanced space telescopes to go around for all the researchers who would like to use one. It's built, launched, up there,paid for, still at least half way working and cost a bundle already, seems sorta nutso to just trash it on purpose when they can park it until such a time as they can get to it.
I could debate each of your points individually, but that would take more time than you appear to have put into understanding the story.
On your comments about no need for formal risk assessment;
Basically, I don't believe that having a scientific risk assessment done would be all that foolish when deciding between various possibly multi-billion dollar options. It is becoming more and more clear that O'Keefe made the wrong judgement; of the groups that have since looked at the issue, now including the National Academy of Sciences, all have voiced favor for sending the Shuttle to rescue Hubble.
On your comments about the docking system, what were you thinking? The docking system is for between shuttles, an option to allow a rescue mission, to allow safe transfer between shuttles, so astronauts wouldn't have to try and attempt a tether transfer. The same with the supply depot concept, that was to have supplies on location ready to enable a crew to wait for rescue if the need should arise, not to enable a month long Hubble repair mission. None of the previous repair missions required such a duration, why would you think that this one would?
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
You wrote:
There are lots of projects: lunar mining, asteroid detection/diversion/mining, serious propulsion experiments...terraforming experiments on Mars...
Let's face it, we can easily see where we need to go next, spending another $10,000,000,000 on a new (or even 20 year old) eyepiece ain't neccesary.
I'll ask. How do you find the asteroid worth mining without the 10 billion dollar eyepiece? It's easy enough to throw out slogans. But lets get real. The reality is that there is absolutely no economic benefit to living, working, or retrieving materials from space.
None. If it made economic sense to drill for oil on Titan, believe me, Exxon Mobile would be there.
That is post xeno stage.
So what we do have is funded research bodies, such as NASA and also ESA, that explore different things in space. Sometimes we send probes to other planets, sometimes we put people in space. Sometimes we try out new ideas in aeronautics. Sometimes we look at asteroids or comets. It's not a commercial thing.
If you want McSpace, you have to invent the SpaceMac.
This is my sig.
Actually if you remember Bush kicked off his campaing with a new mission for Nasa on mars exploration and congress introduced bills making Nasa do this.
They are now servely cash stripped and its impossible with a mere 8 billion dollar budget to put man on mars. The figure could be ten times that.
But yes this killed Hubble since it would make it expensive and distract for Nasa's new mission.
Nasa does risk assesments for everything. Its odd nasa would make such a quick decision if it were not political.
http://saveie6.com/
The previous post which had a +4 I can see would be appropriate if it were a mere rant, but facts show the whitehouse had a role.
There was a story on slashdot a year ago about this subject. No rish analysis even attempted for a paranoid department like Nasa shows its true intentions were never saving it.
I just wonder how they will de-orbit it? This is a very large and potentially dangerous object.
http://saveie6.com/
and put it into JWST.. much better telescope. This project really should get some press rather than the old and dieing Hubble.
t ill_l ge.jpg
Large image (350K) at:
http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/SiteGraphics/JWST_s
I was thinking the story was about the title: "Backing a bad HUBBLE decision". shuttle-to-shuttle docking has no impact on Hubble repair mission, because Hubble isn't a space shuttle.
Since no one has ever done a "rescue mission" of one manned space craft using another manned space craft (with the possible exception of a few of the trips up to Mir), designing everything needed to make it work, and to make sure it would work under most plausible failure modes would take far longer than Hubble can wait.
If one shuttle has one thousand things that can go wrong, then two shuttles have 1000 * 1000 = One Million things that can go wrong. Combinations thereof can be fatal, even if each taken separately is not. This is nontrivial to analyze.
Personally, I don't think it has anything to do with Hubble - I think it was cut so that US can get out of the space shuttle era as quickly as possible. They'd probably abandon the station also if they didn't have international commitments.
As for the long repair mission, I was addressing a point made in the article - that a supply depot alongside the shuttle could somehow help rescue the shuttle.
The risk assessment may have been simply a review of all of the criticality one issues that have been waivered in order to do the job. The list is pretty long.
That's a personal guess with no insight into what actually went into the decision, and does not reflect the position of my employer.
Yes, I work at NASA, for a contractor.
The article is trying to spin an unpopular decision as being not just unpopular, but somehow flawed. That may be - but planners up and down the ladder had to remanifest more space flights and payloads then the entire US manned space program even attempted for its first 20 years, and they had to do it in a very, very short time in order to meet top level expectations and public pressure. This on top of actually investigating the Columbia accident and redesigning the ground process, the flight hardware, software and procedures, and Chuthulu knows what else in under about a year. And, other than actual launches, everything else keeps going until the decisions are made - Crew Avionics Upgrade, Pad refitting, main engine work, etc.
The decision basis, my wild guess here, wasn't "is it safe", but "can even the effort to analyze it be justified, considering how muddy the water is now?"
Doing too many things in a dangerous project is a risk in itself, even if the goals' risks are mitigated.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
You hit the nail right on the head. Nice to see that there are people with a bit of common sense left and not only ultra naive "libertarians" (how old are those anyway - 14?) and hateful "conservatives".
The ISS's orbit has a high inclination so the Russians can get to it from Baikonur. I think it's about a 25% difference between ISS and Hubble, which is a more Florida-friendly orbit.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Is Hubble Now legally space Junk?
If so, can someone take it, or fix it and use it for free?
Like finding that old sofa that was great in a cheap dorm room, if one of the new xPrize contestants, or another country decided to salvage the Hubble Telescope, would it be legal for them to take it since NASA has given up on it?
I can see the eBay listing now:
1 Hubble Telescope - AS IS. Slightly pitted surface, needs a few repairs. Tested and Working at last attempt. You pay shipping....
This was clearly a judgment call, not due to a formal analysis. NASA doesn't want to repair the Hubble, for various political and technical reasons.
And why should they do a formal analysis? The whole point of making Hubble human-serviceable was probably to serve as another ustification for the shuttle program. The rational, low-risk decision would have been to start planning on sending up an entire replacement telescope years ago, for less money and less risk than the service missions.
So, why start now with formal cost/risk/benefit analyses? No manned mission would survive that kind of analysis at this point: at this point, it's pretty much always cheaper and less risky to achieve whatever scientific or technological objective we have with unmanned missions.
Except that the other telescopes do not cover the same frequency. Yes, Shri Kulkarni (I believe he was the one) developed some impressive adaptive optics for the Keck Telescopes, but people still need Hubble because it's in space instead of under the earth's absorptive atmosphere. Similarly, Spitzer and other planned telescopes are not replacements because they operate at different frequencies. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the only option is to service Hubble, though I think it would be a good PR move as no new telescope will be as famous, since we could decide to send up a newer and better one, but we would need to get our @$$ in some serious gear to get it up soon.
Mod me -1 Redundant, but some people just don't get it the first time and so I'm trying to explain it differently (that's why we have dupes, remember).
Hubble can see in wavelengths that don't make it to the ground.
For ground based telescopes to equal Hubble, you'll need to either remove the atmosphere, or fix Hubble (or replace it).
With $10,000,000 eyepiece here on good old terra firma. Thats how most asteroid detection is done these days anyway.
The reality is that there is absolutely no economic benefit to living, working, or retrieving materials from space.
We don't know that. And the reason we don't know that is that NASA has been circle-jerking for 30 years.
If you want McSpace, you have to invent the SpaceMac.
Precisely. We need the SpaceMac, but we're spending our time/wealth on $10B disposable cameras.
I didn't mean to imply space exploration was easy. But its hard to put another Hubble up so we can snap more pretty pictures, and its hard to put a propulsion testbed up so we can start getting places faster, and its hard to put lunar mining operations in place. They're all difficult; I'm just suggesting we try to getter a better bang for our bucks.
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
You're quite correct that we need the scientific instruments, but I agree in part with the other poster - we need to be working on applying this knowledge even as we collect it. We'll learn more that way, and get more done. If we're serious about developing space, we need to actually do something about it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This doesn't surprise me at all. What surprises me is that people continue to remain oblivious to the obvious and in denial of the damning. O'Keefe's decisions do not represent NASA, they represent the Bush administration. People seem to assume that because he was a NASA administrator then his decisions reflect those of NASA, well NO, he's a politician who joined the Bush administration on its very first day and whose niche is spinning budgets wherever he was dispatched to serve their political objectives. Does it surprise me that he made a decision without a formal study of the technical and scientific issues? No more so than the policies of the Bush administration on climate change that continue to ignore and defy all scientific and technical consensus, or for that matter, on embryonic stem cell research, the economy, or other issues. This is an administration that's driven by dogma and electoral politics. This is an administration whose core electorates and campaigners include evengelical creationists who continue to believe that God created man and woman 6000 years ago and that creation as told in Genesis ought to be reintroduced to science curriculae and taught to school children. This is an administration headed by a president who asserted that "On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth", which is an even more explicit assertion than the creationist campaigners' own "evolution is a theory, not a fact" stickers that they want on schools' science books. Anyone who cares enough about science to study its history and how its epistemological method came to be what it is today will be clear in knolwedge and mind that for many centuries from Copernicus through Kepler and Galileo and to Haley and Newton the the history of science was none other than the history of astronomy; the history of the struggle between the scientists who directly observed the heavens with their eyes and telescopes and the clergy who derived their authority from the scriptures that they claimed came from those very same heavens. Telescopes were the defning instrument of science that eventually led to societal secularism through Descartes and Bacon and Hubble is simply a fancy version of Galileo's own instrument that continues to inform us on how we came to exist by eyeing the birth of the universe that's evident in its distant depths and giving further credence to secular teachings, and many of Hubble's findings have found their way into university and school curriculae already. Anyone who believes that money for the Hubble servicing mission can not be found by an administration that provides tens and tens of billions in "faith-based initiatives" that amount to nothing more than handouts to their core campaigners and that deliberaly runs a budget deficit of hundreds and billions that will lead to nothing less than the cold-blooded collapse of the humanist institutions of social security and welfare programs is out of his mind. This is kleptocratic administration that seeks to reverse centuries of humanist progress and return us to our "original foundation" of being under the mercy of a criminal clergy and under the dominion of a militant marcantile. I suspect what I have written above may invite the diatribe of a kukluxitious clan whose ideas of political conduct derives from their tribalist tradition in spectator sports and who approach reasoned debates with the mentality of a dogfight, but I couldn't care less about responding to them, for it is all futile to reason with dogs, and they'll eventually get what they deserve in their trashtastic future from a political elite who couldn't care less about them beyond the expolitation of their mass stupidities.
And that has nothing to do with the war. No war =/= hubble funding.
Ok, first off, having laser correction on ground based telescopes is still not as good as a spaced based telescope because the atmosphere still filters out many wavelengths of light and there's not a damn thing you can do about that.
And, it's not a simple matter of detecting asteroids, you have to do mineral assays of them before you can determine if they are worth mining. To do that, you need to either go to the asteroid, or you need at least good spectroscopy, and even Hubble is not high res enough for the former.
Then we can work out particulars.
How much asteroid material are we bringing back? Let's assume that we have a space shuttle II that can hold 100 tons of cargo in its hold and land it safely on earth. Let's assume we get lucky and get an asteroid that, by weight, is 50% iron, 20% nickel, 30% platinum group.
So let's figure out the potential profits of our asteroid. Iron ore I think is roughly $50 a ton, but since we'd be brining back nearly perfect iron, steel like prices of $500/ton might be achievable. So for our first 50 tons of cargo, we've made maybe $25,000.
Nickel now is $10,000 a ton. Our next 20 tons of cargo makes us $200,000, bringing us up to $225,000. Not too bad.
The platinum group metals, though, is where we make bank. If you figure 30 tons x $400/oz x 32000oz/ton, or about 384 million dollars.
Now, we could figure for our spaceship to -only- bring back 100 tons of pg elements from the asteroid. Then we'd be talking about 1.28 billion dollars a flight.
But to do that, we have to solve that little problem of developing a spacecraft that can fly out to an asteroid, mine 100 tons of it, then, bring that back to the earth and land it. Assuming each ship makes one flight per year, and an investment return of 10%, we'd roughly double our investment in 7 years or pay the ship off in 3.5. So our vehicle cost can be up to 3.5 billion dollars. A lot of dough? But that doesn't include development money.
This is my sig.
don't read very well, do you? wtf do you think makes the budget choices at the white house? the "other places" are the comparatively pointless mars and dangerous militarization of orbital space missions, which are both bush pet projects. no war would equal billions more a month for other purposes, like scientifically useful space missions. i'm tired of wasting my time on you, so futher responses from you will be ignored. and as Mr. Malda apparently doesn't really care about mismoderation, i probably won't be bothering to respond to comments on mismoderated posts at all, since nobody will see them. fark off. and that goes double for the biased mismoderators, wtf you are.
OK, first of all, the white house doesn't make budget choices. They gin up a budget request, but all the decisions get made by congress. That's in the document. In fact, congress can completely ignore the president in budgetary matters, provided they're willing to override a veto. I real life that doesn't happen, but the truth is GWB can't do squat on his own.
the "other places" are the comparatively pointless mars and dangerous militarization of orbital space missions, which are both bush pet projects.
This displays a stunning lack of understanding of how things really work. NASA's budget has nothing to do with the military budget or even what NASA does. The whole reason NASA isn't a fraction of its current size is it creates jobs in key congressional districts, and since the manned space program generates the most publicity that's what gets fully funded. Politics and NASA are absolutely inseperable. I'm sure we could all find a more efficient way to spend that money, but the reality is the taxpayers are less interested in the kind of basic science you get from hubble and more in tune with Buck Rogers and Captain Kirk. It was once said of Carl Sagan (I wish I could find the attribution) "every time he convinces someone we don't need manned spaceflight where robots will suffice we lose an advocate for the space program." NASA has taken that to heart.
The mars missions were campaign fluff that will never get funded at all, never mind fully. Anytime a politician promises a program that'll be funded after he leaves office you can pretty much assume it's not serious.
no war would equal billions more a month for other purposes, like scientifically useful space missions.
Not really. They're borrowing money for the war, so the real impact of not having a war is taxes would be a little lower in ten years or so. The idea that the overall budget is a fixed size and funding one program means cutting another is naive to say the least. The only way to get "scientifically useful space missions" funded is to get the public interested in them.
i'm tired of wasting my time on you, so futher responses from you will be ignored. and as Mr. Malda apparently doesn't really care about mismoderation, i probably won't be bothering to respond to comments on mismoderated posts at all, since nobody will see them. fark off. and that goes double for the biased mismoderators, wtf you are.
In other words, "I can't make a cogent argument or back up anything I say, so I'm going to ignore you when you pick apart my incoherent ramblings." That about right? And are you really so foolish as to think Rob Malda reads every post and weighs it carefully to decide if the moderation is correct?
Also, you still never provided a link for all that "militarization of space" poppycock. The reality is space has been militarized from day one in the form of spy satellites. As far as I know, there aren't any plans to put actual weapons in space, and I'd appreciate a link from anyone who has other information. My search for space weapons came up with this link, which describes programs which are either white-paper pipe dreams or technology demonstrators. The ground-based ASAT programs have been around for decades.
Sure, but as I point out in my response to another poster, none of that is funded to the level you would need to fix Hubble.
They are now servely cash stripped and its impossible with a mere 8 billion dollar budget to put man on mars. The figure could be ten times that.
But yes this killed Hubble since it would make it expensive and distract for Nasa's new mission.
I doubt it. I don't think Hubble or the mars mission will be funded. The real money for Mars is supposed to be spent after Bush leaves office, so I can virtually gaurentee you it'll never happen. I think the whole thing is kind of a dodge to defund everything but ISS and the Space Shuttle, since doing otherwise would cause a reallocation in jobs across congressional districts.
Nasa does risk assesments for everything. Its odd nasa would make such a quick decision if it were not political.
But that's the point. Politics is the major component of every decision at (or about) NASA. Did you ever wonder why the space shuttle has windows?
I don't understand, is it just incompetence or is there a global anti-space conspiracy... Russian government and the space agency did exactly the same with Mir. No transparency, few solid arguments, no impartial studies. Just an arbitrary final decision - "Dump it into the ocean". A useful tool destroyed for no apparent reason at all.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The Hubble's current batteries and gyroscopes will probably fail in a few years, leaving the dead telescope to crash back to earth around year 2020.
And will appear on eBay shortly thereafter.Enjoy an e-piphany
I think The Aerospace Corporation did an extensive study which NASA used. Here is a link. http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/space/293 6913
I think saying that the NASA did this without any evidence is pretty much like the press. My sensation has been that when it suits them to ignore evidence, they do, and when they have something juicy that sells they are more like Great White sharks.
Cheers.
mdw ;-)