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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."
http://www.airsafe.com/events/space/astrofat.htm/M anagement/shuttleContractorsUnderScrutiny.html/
i a.htm/
For starters but with regard to the 27 January 1967 entry. That accident was due to poor work on that unit.
http://www.iasa.com.au/folders/Safety_Issues/Risk
http://www.floridatoday.com/columbia/113003columb
That was within 2 mins of googling. My bad for thinking it was common knowledge
Jonathanjk.com
My work requires both high spatial resolution and spectral resolution from the UV through NIR (esp. in UV and blue wavelengths); the HST was undoubtedly most suitable for achieving my objectives. However, it no longer carries the working spectroscopic instrument and hence the HST is no longer a viable asset for my need.
Today, it is probably more cost-effective to go back to expendable space missions. It's not at all hard to build a 2-m class space telescope. It's not servicable, but for the cost of servicing, we can build another telescope with a similar specification. So if one breaks, we can launch another.
The only retarded thinking I have is that I don't want to feed the STScI to create the monopoly in the space-based astronomy. The HST is costing a lot more than other missions (x2 FTE is what I heard, compared to other major missions) for little return in terms of the telescope operation and calibration. This is the institution that produces very crappy software to handle the HST data (I've written my own code to process and done my own calibration to improve its science return...why was the STScI not doing that?). They allocate their budgest lucratively toward the support for scientists (not operator or calibration staffs) while other missions suffer from severe budget cuts and RIF'ing their science staffs.
You obviously have no clue what you are talking about, there are many wavelengths that can't be covered from the ground and that are not properly covered by and other space telescope, specially in the UV.
Hubble has some other great advantages over any ground telescope: a much darker background, and possibility of _much_ longer observation times, for certain things this is not important, but for other tasks this is _fundamental_.
When you request some time at Hubble you already have to explain _why_ that task can't be done in any other way, so Hubble is already being used only for things that can't practically be done with anything else.
And JWST wont help with this, because as anyone with a clue knows, it's designed to _complement_ Hubble, not to replace it, and their capabilities do not overlap.
Currently there are not even plans to build anything that could replace what Hubble provides.
And for those that say that Hubble is old, thanks to the previous Shuttle missions to it, many of it's instruments have been replaced with much better and improved versions keeping it at the front of the state of the art.
(Actually the cancelled servicing mission was going to install some really cool and powerful bits that costed various hundreds of millions of $ and now are just gathering dust)
So stop the FUD already and inform yourself.
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson